How much does AEO cost?

Between US$29 and more than US$1,000 a month, depending on how many questions you monitor and across how many models. That range comes from the public pricing of seven platforms, verified one by one on September 2, 2026.

The number above is useless for budgeting, so here is the actual breakdown.

What you are actually paying for

You are not paying for "a tool." You are paying for model answers: every question you monitor gets run against every model, every day. That is where the cost is.

Three questions across five models, run daily, is 450 answers a month. One hundred questions across five models is 15,000. That is why plans look so different from vendor to vendor: one counts prompts, another counts credits, and on the platforms we reviewed one credit equals one model answer.

The math to do before you compare any prices:

questions × models × runs per month = monthly answers

A US$99 plan with 50 prompts on a single engine gives you 50 answers. A US$399 plan with 100 prompts across three engines gives you 300. The second costs four times more and delivers six times more.

The market, by tier

Peec AI does not publish pricing; you have to request a quote. The full table, with engines, languages and free trials, is in the comparison tool.

Buying from Latin America: currency, tax and local invoicing

Six of the seven platforms charge in US dollars on an international card. If you are buying from Chile — or from most of Latin America — that means three costs that never appear on the pricing page:

• The exchange rate on the day of the charge, which in practice turns a US$247 plan into a different local amount every month.
• Digital services VAT, which foreign platforms registered in Chile add on top, and which you cannot always claim as a tax credit through the same process as a local invoice.
• The card's cross-border transaction fee.

SearchBrand bills in Chilean pesos with VAT and a local invoice. It is the only one of the seven that does so today, and it is the reason the question "are there AI brand monitoring tools that bill in Chilean pesos?" shows up in our own monitoring set.

For a mid-sized Chilean company that wants to cover its category — 100 questions monitored daily across five models, which is 15,000 model answers a month — our Growth tier lands around US$500 a month plus VAT, invoiced in pesos. That is the point where the diagnosis stops being a sample and starts being a measurement of the whole category. On top of that you have to budget the content work, which is where the money really goes.

Agency or platform

The question is framed wrong, and it is worth saying so: the platform measures, the agency executes. Almost nobody needs only one of the two.

Platform only works if you have your own content team and what you are missing is the diagnosis: which questions leave you out, which competitor content wins the answer, what moved this week.

Agency only works if all you care about is the deliverable — articles, listings, schema — and you accept measuring the result with whatever tool the agency uses. The obvious risk: whoever executes also reports.

Both is what ends up happening in most of the cases we have seen. The platform produces the number and the agency moves the number.

One cost nobody quotes: the technical work that comes first. On our own site, 22 of 30 detected content opportunities were not missing content at all — they were content that existed and was not indexed. No content agency is going to fix an accordion that unmounts the FAQ answers before the crawler reads them. That has to be done by whoever touches the code.

How to work out whether it pays off

There is no clean formula, because an AI mention does not generate a click you can attribute. What you can do is this:

1. Set the metric before you pay. Appearance rate on questions that do not name your brand. That number, today, written down.
2. Estimate what one recommendation is worth. If your average deal is US$3,000 and you close 1 in 10 qualified leads, each lead is worth US$300. The question is how many leads a month justify the spend: on a US$500 plan, two.
3. Measure the right proxy. Direct traffic and referrals from AI domains in GA4 move before anything else does. It is not the final metric, but it moves first.
4. Give it 90 days. Technical indexing changes show up in days; mentions take weeks. A contract judged after one month is judged on noise.

And the case where it does not pay off: if nobody asks about your category. If across 100 plausible questions in your market nobody ever reaches a vendor recommendation, no tool is going to invent the demand. You can find that out before you pay, and you should insist they show you.

The 8 questions to ask a vendor

1. How many model answers does the plan include per month? Not prompts: answers.
2. Which models, and which ones are paid add-ons?
3. How often is each question run? A single run is not a data point: the answer changes between runs.
4. Does it measure questions that do not name my brand, and does it show me that number separately from the aggregate?
5. In which language and for which market? Translating a question is not understanding the category.
6. Does it give me the list of sources the model cited, with URLs?
7. Do you invoice locally, in which currency, and with tax included?
8. What happens to my history if I leave? The value of these platforms is in the time series.

If the answer to the fourth is a single visibility percentage, ask them to break it down. The average across brand questions and category questions hides the only thing that matters. In our own September 2, 2026 measurement, questions that name SearchBrand return a mention in 98% of runs, and questions that do not name it, in 1.3%. A number that averages those two halves describes neither.

What people ask before signing

Keep reading

• AEO tools comparison with verified pricing
• Answer engine optimization: what it is and how it is measured
• SearchBrand plans and pricing