For agencies

Adding AEO as an agency service

Most of what is sold as AEO is work your team already does. Selling it as new invites a question you should be able to answer.

The short answer

For an agency, an honest AEO service has three genuinely new parts: prompt-set monitoring across assistants, rewriting pages for extraction rather than ranking, and managing third-party descriptions. The rest of a typical AEO deck is technical SEO and content under a new name.

What ranked on 23 September 2026: The agency listicles describe near-identical service lists. What the agency will report, the month-three question, appears in none.

Last reviewed 19 October 2026 · 3 sources

What is actually new work

Separating new from relabelled protects you when a client asks what the extra fee buys.

New: choosing questions, sampling engines, recording descriptions not rankings
New skill: editing a ranking page so its paragraphs survive quoting alone
Overlaps PR but targets sources models retrieve, not publications clients like
Existing practice: crawlability, structure, schema and internal linking
Content strategy, with the unit changed from page to passage

Claim and reality

Things that sound right and are not.

Flip a card for what is actually true.

Claim
Guaranteed AI citations.
Claim
Charging a separate retainer for a dashboard.
Claim
Reporting opens as the headline.

Where to start

In order. Tick as you go, or copy the list.

0 of 5 done

Write a one-page split of what is new and what is your existing service. Use it in sales.
Standardise the prompt-set method across clients so results compare.
Price diagnosis separately from execution.
Decide what you report and what you refuse to promise. Put both in the proposal.
Run it properly for two clients before it becomes a website service line.

Questions

Asked most.

Can we charge more for AEO than SEO?

For the genuinely new work, yes. For relabelled parts, a client who checks will notice.

What deliverable convinces clients?

A before-and-after of how assistants describe them on a fixed prompt set. A model describing their company wrong persuades more than any deck.

Do we need new tooling?

A monitoring tool saves time but is not essential. The scarce input is someone who can rewrite a page to answer cleanly.

Evidence, labelled

What is confirmed, what is reported, what is a hunch.

Each claim is labelled and sourced. Google rows speak only for Google.

Last reviewed 19 October 2026 · 3 sources

Confirmed: Stated in the platform's own documentation or measured in published data.
Not required: The platform says you do not need it. It may still be harmless.
Reported: Third-party study or vendor data. Method and conflicts noted.

No outside tool can see inside Google's AI systems.
Confirmed
Google says so and advises weighing third-party advice against its guidance. Say what your data is.
Google, AI optimization guide (opens in a new tab)
Per-page packages are low risk.
Not required
Google warns that pages made per query variation may breach its scaled content abuse policy.
Google, AI optimization guide (opens in a new tab) source 1Google, spam policies (opens in a new tab) source 2
A fixed position in AI answers is reportable.
Reported
Same list in the same order under 0.1% of runs in one study. Report appearance rate with the run count.
SparkToro study, via SEJ (opens in a new tab)

Sources, fetched 19 October 2026

01Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (opens in a new tab)Google Search Central · Updated 10 Jul 2026
02Spam policies for Google web search (opens in a new tab)Google Search Central · Updated 28 Aug 2026
03AI recommendations change with nearly every query (SparkToro and Gumshoe study) (opens in a new tab)Search Engine Journal · 30 Jan 2026

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