AEO tool, agency, or in-house?
A tool tells you what the answers say. An agency changes what they say. The real question is not which is better — it is whether anyone on your side will act on the data, because a tracker nobody reads is the most expensive of the three.
About the figures on this page. Every price that is not ours comes from what Perplexity itself reported when we ran our own audit on 19 September 2026, and we are reporting those figures rather than verifying them. We have not signed up to any of these vendors to check. Treat them as the market’s reported shape, not as quotes, and check the vendor’s own pricing page before you rely on one.
The evidence that they are genuinely different purchases
We asked Perplexity two questions in the same run, a minute apart. One asked for tools. One asked who provides AEO as a service. The two answers named completely different sets of companies, with zero overlap. Below is who each answer actually named, taken from the stored record of 19 September 2026 rather than from any list of ours.
| Question asked | Who the answer named |
|---|---|
| “Best AEO tools for tracking brand visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity” | Measurement products — Peec AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound, and HubSpot’s AEO Grader as a free starting point. The same four in both runs. |
| “What is answer engine optimization and who provides it as a service?” | Agencies and platforms — run A named SEO.com, Searchbloom, Elsner Technologies, Conductor, and Azoma for ecommerce. Run B named four of those five, dropping Elsner Technologies and adding Marcel Digital. |
Not one company name appeared on both lists, in either run. That is not a quirk of phrasing; it reflects a real split. Nobody is seriously competing to be both the measuring instrument and the hands that do the work, which means you are almost certainly buying two things, or one thing and doing the other yourself.
The honest qualifier. The separation is clean at the level of
company names and not quite clean underneath. One domain was cited for both
questions in both runs: blog.hubspot.com. HubSpot is the single
organisation in our data with a foot in each camp, which is worth knowing before you
read the zero overlap as a law rather than as a strong tendency in one run of eight
questions.
What each one actually is
| Option | What you get, and the reported monthly cost | Best for — and where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| A tool | A dashboard of what AI answers say about you. Roughly $29 to $295 for self-serve in run A of our audit; enterprise platforms far higher. | Teams with a writer and an opinion. Fails when nobody acts on the dashboard. |
| An agency | People who change the pages and the sources. Roughly $1,000 to $2,500 for a small programme, $2,000 to $8,000 mid-market. | Teams with budget and no capacity. Fails when you cannot tell whether the retainer changed anything. |
| In-house | Your own time, plus whatever you measure with. $0 in cash, one to three days a month in time. | Small teams under about 20 pages. Fails when the days never get taken. |
The question that actually decides it
Not “what is my budget”. It is: when the report says you are absent from question four, who writes the page?
- Somebody on your team, this month, reliably. Buy a tool. The cheapest one that covers the engines you care about. You do not need a service.
- Nobody, honestly. Buy a service, or buy nothing. A tracker in this situation is a subscription to being told bad news you will not act on, and it is the commonest way money is wasted in this category.
- Somebody, but they need telling what to write. That is the middle, and it is where a subscription that includes both measurement and content fixes — ours included — is the right shape.
When in-house is the right answer, which is more often than vendors admit
If your site is under roughly twenty pages, you do not have a measurement problem. You have a content problem, and you already know it. Measuring an empty site tells you what you could have guessed, and every pound spent on a dashboard is a pound not spent on the page that would have been cited.
The free method takes an afternoon: list ten questions a buyer asks before they know you, put each one to an assistant by hand, write down who gets named and which sources get cited, and write the page for the worst one. That is the whole of it, and it is set out step by step on AEO for a small business on a budget.
Where we fit, and where we do not
We are a subscription that does both: measurement on Perplexity plus the content fixes each month, from $99. That shape is right for the middle case above and wrong for the two either side of it. Specifically, do not buy from us if:
- You only want data and you have someone in-house to act on it. A self-serve tracker costs less than our entry plan.
- You need ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot numbers this month. Only Perplexity is keyed for us. Our ChatGPT and Claude adapters are built but not yet keyed, Gemini is not built, and AI Overviews and Copilot have no API at all and are reviewed by hand for Scale clients. Buy a tracker that already has what you need.
- You need a dozen markets and languages now. An enterprise platform covers that breadth and we do not.
- Your site is under twenty pages. Spend the money on writing.
Five questions to ask whichever you choose
- Which engines do you actually query, with an API key, today? Make them name them. This is where the category is least honest, and it is why we print our own answer on every page.
- What happens to a failed API call in your metrics? If a timeout is recorded as “not mentioned”, the score is fiction.
- Can I see the raw answers and citations, not just a score? If not, you cannot check anything they tell you.
- Does the question set stay fixed month to month? Change the questions and the trend means nothing.
- For an agency: what will you actually ship in month one? Pages, or a strategy document? Ask for the deliverable by name.
Ask all of them for evidence, too — what is actually proven in this category is very little, and a vendor who says otherwise should be able to show you the study. The longer version of these questions, and what a real month of service looks like, is on who provides AEO as a service. What drives the price spread is on how much AEO costs per month.
Common questions
Should I buy an AEO tool or hire an agency?
Decide it on one question: when the report says you are absent, who writes the page? If somebody on your team will do it reliably, buy the cheapest tool that covers the engines you care about. If nobody will, buy a service or buy nothing, because a tracker nobody acts on is the most expensive option of the three. If somebody will write but needs telling what, a subscription that includes both is the right shape.
Do AEO tools and AEO agencies overlap?
Barely. When we asked Perplexity for the best AEO tools and, separately, who provides AEO as a service, the two answers named completely different companies with zero overlap on 19 September 2026. Trackers were named for the tools question and agencies and platforms for the services question. You are usually buying two things, or one thing and doing the other yourself.
How much does an AEO agency cost compared with a tool?
On the figures Perplexity reported in run A of our 19 September 2026 audit, which we are relaying rather than verifying: self-serve trackers ran roughly $29 to $295 a month in run A, a small agency programme roughly $1,000 to $2,500, and mid-market engagements roughly $2,000 to $8,000. Our own subscription is $99, $299 or $799 and includes both measurement and monthly content work. Check any vendor's own pricing page before relying on these.
When should I do AEO in-house?
When your site is under about twenty pages, or when you have a writer with an opinion and an afternoon a month. At that size you do not have a measurement problem, you have a content problem you already know about, and money spent on a dashboard is money not spent on the page that would have been cited.
Get the data before you buy anything
Three of your buyers’ questions on Perplexity, free. If the answers already name you, you need neither a tool nor an agency this quarter.
3 questions on Perplexity, free. A domain checked in the last week is served from that stored run rather than asked again, and the daily free allowance resets at midnight UTC.