What does answer-engine optimisation cost? The honest answer, and the better question.

You asked a fair question, so here is a straight answer before the reframe. In 2026, a mid-sized B2B business paying a specialist to be found and cited inside AI answers is typically looking at €2,500 to €6,000 a month for a serious programme. Below that, around the €1,500 mark, you are usually buying a traditional SEO service with the letters AEO printed on the invoice: a handful of blog posts a month, a few headings adjusted, and a dashboard. Above it, €10,000 and up buys original research, editorial outreach, and full-time monitoring across every engine. A one-off audit, rather than a monthly retainer, runs anywhere from a few thousand euros upward, depending on how large and how tangled the site is.

Those are real ranges. Now the part that matters more than any of them.

The price is not the decision

The question "what does AEO cost" assumes you have already decided you need AEO. Most businesses have not decided that. They have noticed something — fewer enquiries, a competitor named in a meeting, a quiet sense that buyers arrive already half-decided — and reached for a service to buy. That is spending before deciding, and it is the most expensive habit in marketing. The number on the quote is the easy part. Whether the work behind it is the right work for your situation is the part nobody priced.

What actually moves the number

Three things move the price, and only one of them is the rate. The first is how large and how tangled your site is: a twenty-page service site needs a fraction of the structuring a five-hundred-page catalogue does. The second is how many engines you want to be present in — appearing in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers are four separate jobs, not one, and the monitoring scales with each.

The third, and the one nobody quotes you on, is how much authority you are starting from. If trusted sources already mention you, citation work compounds quickly. If they do not, you are not buying optimisation; you are buying a reputation you have not yet built — and that is slower and dearer than any amount of schema markup. Two businesses can receive the same proposal and get wildly different value from it, purely because one started with a name the engines already trusted and the other did not.

Where the money is actually wasted

The waste is rarely in the rate. It is in paying for the wrong layer. A great deal of what gets sold as AEO is simply content volume — more posts, more pages, more words — measured by traffic that never connects to a buyer. AI engines do not cite volume. They cite sources that are specific, structured, and trusted.

So you can pay €5,000 a month for twelve months, produce a larger pile of forgettable content, and arrive at the end of the year with no more citations than you started with — while the report still looks busy the entire time. Activity that looks professional and produces nothing cumulative is the most expensive line in any budget, precisely because it never shows up as a loss. It shows up as spend, as output, as a dashboard trending in the right direction. It just never shows up as being chosen.

What the first euro should buy

Not a retainer. A diagnosis. Before you commit to anything monthly, you want three plain answers. Are you discoverable in AI answers at all today? If not, is the cause technical, or is it authority, or is it that nobody has yet decided what you should be known for? And is this even where your buyers are forming their shortlist, or are you about to optimise for a room they are not standing in?

Those answers cost a fraction of a single month's retainer to establish, and they determine whether the next €60,000 a year produces citations or expensive noise. You can run a crude version yourself this afternoon: open ChatGPT and Perplexity, ask the question your best prospect would ask before hiring a business like yours, and see whether you appear. If you do not, you have your answer — and a fair sense of how urgent it has become.