How Much Does an AEO Audit Cost for a B2B Website?

A fixed-fee AEO audit for a B2B website costs $1,000 to $5,500, with Etched publishing $5,500 for a two-week engagement across four AI engines and AxiomAI's guide putting a professional one-time audit at $1,000 to $3,000. Above that band, Optimist charges $7,500 for a one-time strategy and roadmap a client can take in-house, the highest published price in this set for a deliverable that ends at recommendations. Underneath it, free automated baselines from Lean Labs and HubSpot score a domain in about a minute for nothing. Above $7,500, the published packages include implementation.

Paying $12,000 for what turns out to be a 20-prompt automated report costs a B2B marketing team a quarter and the budget line it would have spent fixing the site. Prompt count, engine coverage, competitor depth, and whether anyone ships the fixes explain more of the spread than the words "AEO audit" do, which is how the same label covers a $99 GeoAudit Lab package and a $15,000 monthly enterprise program. No neutral survey of AEO audit fees exists the way it does for conventional SEO, so every band below is based on published price cards.

What does an AEO audit include?

An AEO audit measures how often a brand appears, gets cited, and gets described accurately across a fixed prompt set on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, then names the sources the models cite instead. Etched's published scope runs four engines and roughly 15 to 20 buyer prompts, reporting citation rate, share of voice, sentiment, competitor gaps, and a 90-day roadmap, delivered in about two weeks.

The technical half checks whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot can reach the site, whether Organization and FAQ schema validate, and whether a firewall rule is quietly blocking AI crawlers. iPullRank's AI Search Audit adds passage-level relevance scoring, entity coverage, chunkability, and synthetic query testing through its Qforia tool, delivered as a slide deck with linked data worksheets. Recommendations arrive scored by benefit, ease, and implementation readiness.

An audit stops at a report and a findings call. Schema work, grounding pages, llms.txt files, and content production get priced separately as implementation, which is where the sharpest price jumps in this market happen. Google's own documentation says llms.txt is unnecessary for its generative search features and that no special AI schema is required, so a roadmap built mainly on those files is thinner than its page count suggests.

Buyers fund this work because AI answers now sit between them and their market. Pew analyzed 68,879 Google searches run by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found click-through to a standard link dropping to 8% when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one, while only 1% of those visits produced a click on the summary's own citation. G2's survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers found 51% now start research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google.

What does an AEO audit cost by engagement shape?

A 60-second automated scan and a two-week analyst engagement both get sold as AEO audits, although the time and analysis involved put them in different price bands. The published numbers below separate those engagement types.

Free baselines: $0, plus $29 to $499 a month for monitoring

Lean Labs runs the most documented free baseline in this set. Its AEO Baseline scanner scores a domain 0 to 100 across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in about 60 seconds, returning per-engine scores, an on-site quality score, buyer-question coverage, and a competitor battlecard, and the page carries a formal $0 offer schema alongside nine sample reports a visitor can read before running their own. HubSpot's AI Search Grader does something comparable across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini in under two minutes with no account required.

For ongoing tracking, HubSpot prices its AEO product at $50 a month for 25 prompts across three engines, Otterly.ai runs $29 to $489 a month across four engines, and Profound spans $99 to $399 before its custom enterprise tier. TechRadar's review of the category put entry monitoring at roughly $49 to $99 a month with enterprise platforms above $2,000.

Nothing in this band includes a human analyst. A free scan on a short prompt sample tells a B2B team whether it has a visibility problem worth funding, and it will not identify which of 200 solution pages is unreadable to a model or which competitor owns the citation their sales team keeps losing to. Built for a marketing lead who needs evidence before requesting budget, the free tier covers triage and stops there.

Fixed-fee agency audits and roadmaps: $1,000 to $7,500

Etched publishes the clearest fixed number in the category at $5,500 for a one-time GEO audit, delivered in about two weeks across four engines and 15 to 20 buyer prompts, with the full fee credited toward a first retainer invoice when the client starts within 30 days. Its retainers begin at $7,500 a month, so the audit fee gives buyers a way to try the relationship before committing to monthly work.

Optimist sells the highest-priced diagnostic among the named agencies here, $7,500 for a one-time strategy and roadmap covering AI visibility across five models, a topic universe, and a 90-minute walkthrough. What Optimist gets right is saying out loud that a client can take the roadmap in-house or hand it to a different agency, which is the test of whether a diagnostic is a product or a qualification call. Its own published market read puts fixed-scope projects at $5,000 to $50,000 with retainers at $3,000 to $15,000 a month.

GeoAudit Lab publishes $99 and $249 one-time audits, where the $249 package benchmarks three competitors and the $99 package benchmarks none. AxiomAI's guide describes a professional $1,000 to $3,000 audit as a four-engine prompt baseline plus crawl and entity diagnosis and a prioritized roadmap, which is the floor at which a prompt set written in real buyer language becomes affordable. For a B2B site running 50 to 500 URLs against five engines, the $99 tier answers a smaller question than the buyer asked.

Audits bundled into implementation: $7,000 to $15,000

Lean Labs publishes no paid audit-only price at all, which makes it the clearest example in this set of a free diagnostic feeding a fixed-price build, a shape that suits startup and mid-market B2B teams that want to see a score before they spend. Its On-site AEO Launchpad starts at $12,000 and ships on-page schema, llms.txt, and robots.txt files, an Answer Hub, a grounding page, and a baseline LLM visibility read, so the number covers an implementation package rather than an audit fee. Off-site AEO Authority starts at $5,000 a month, the combined on- and off-site program at $7,000 a month, and multi-campaign work at $12,000 a month, which is a fixed number a finance team can approve without a scoping call.

The way to read that structure is as a build quote. A buyer weighing Lean Labs at $12,000 against Optimist at $7,500 is weighing shipped files against a document, and Lean Labs' own cost guidance puts the market for an on-site foundation at $7,000 to $15,000 with managed programs at $3,000 to $10,000 a month. Lean Labs' published proof runs through its packages and reviews rather than a citation case study, with HubSpot's directory showing a 5.0 rating across 71 reviews and the AEO page promising measurable citation activity within 60 to 90 days.

RevenueZen by Eastern Standard scales audit depth with the retainer tier. Foundation at $3,000 a month includes six recurring audits, top-10 URL content auditing, and AI brand monitoring, Scale at $10,000 adds quarterly GEO and technical deep audits, and Total Market at $15,000 runs monthly AI visibility audits across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Its GEO Opportunity Audit page carries no price, so the diagnostic arrives with a program attached.

Enterprise GEO audits: custom, from $15,000 a month

iPullRank prices its AI Search Strategy from $15,000 a month and sells the AI Search Audit as an add-on inside it, publishing no standalone audit fee. Its Clutch profile lists a $50,000 minimum project, and the client roster reaches American Express, Nordstrom, and Adidas, which is the scale the pricing assumes.

Omniscient Digital publishes a $10,000 monthly floor for full-service engagements and no separate audit price, folding current-state, competitor, citation, and technical GEO analysis into the front of a program that then executes against it. A March 2026 Clutch reviewer reported domain rating moving from 52 to 60 and top-three keywords rising tenfold after technical audits, briefs, links, and AEO work.

First Page Sage publishes no dollar figure anywhere on its AEO services page and takes audit requests by quote, with a $10,000 minimum project listed on Clutch. Its widely quoted GEO cost breakdown from November 2025 puts monthly GEO programs at $2,000 to $3,000, $4,000 to $7,000, and $8,000 to $12,000 by tier, and the piece describes itself as a survey of other firms' charges.

What moves an AEO audit price up or down?

A five-page scan and a crawl of several hundred solution, localization, product, and subdomain pages require different amounts of analysis, and WebFX prices conventional SEO audits at $650 to $14,000 on roughly the same logic.

AxiomAI contrasts a roughly 20-question entry audit with a 60-question deeper one, and a prompt library written in buyer language costs more to build than one seeded with brand names. Engine coverage compounds that, because a ChatGPT-only measurement is cheaper and blind to Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

GeoAudit Lab's $249 tier benchmarks three competitors while its $99 tier benchmarks none, and Etched's $5,500 includes competitive gap analysis as standard. Multi-brand and multi-language coverage pushes providers into custom quotes regardless of site size.

The rest of the spread comes down to whether implementation is bundled. A roadmap-only audit ends at a document, while a $12,000 launch package ends with schema files deployed and pages live, so the two invoices answer different questions even when both of them say "AEO audit."

What do the named AEO providers publish?

Published audit pricing is rare in this category. Among the agencies most often shortlisted for B2B AEO work, Optimist is the only one with a fixed diagnostic price on its site and Lean Labs is the only one with a free baseline, while the rest either bundle the audit into a retainer or take it by quote. The table below states each provider's published position, including the four that publish no audit price at all.

What should a buyer ask before paying for an AEO audit?

Ask the provider to specify the prompt count and author and show how the wording reflects buyer language, because the gap between a 20-prompt and a 60-prompt audit accounts for most of the price spread inside the professional band.

Engine coverage is the second question, specifically whether Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are included alongside the chat interfaces. Ahrefs studied 3,000 sites and found 63% received at least one AI referral while AI chatbots produced only 0.17% of the average site's traffic, so a measurement scoped to chatbots alone reports on a narrow slice of the surface a B2B buyer touches.

Ask whether the fee credits toward implementation and whether the roadmap travels. Etched credits its full $5,500 against a first retainer invoice inside 30 days, and Optimist states plainly that a client can execute its roadmap internally or with someone else.

AI answers shift with prompt wording, model version, location, and date, which makes any single visibility score a directional sample and never a fixed ranking, so an audit worth its fee documents the exact prompts and run dates so the same test can be repeated in 90 days.

Where a B2B team should start on an AEO audit budget

Lean Labs' scanner and HubSpot's grader both assess visibility at $0 in under two minutes, which gives a team evidence for its budget decision before paying $5,500 for an audit.

Buy the fixed-fee audit when the free score comes back poor, and the fixes are not obvious. Etched at $5,500 and Optimist at $7,500 are the two published numbers in this set for a diagnostic that ends in a document a team can act on, and Optimist is the better choice when in-house or agency execution is already lined up. Etched suits a team that expects to hire the auditor to do the work afterward.

Skip the audit when the site is already known to be unreadable to models. A B2B company with no schema, blocked AI crawlers, and no grounding pages does not need $5,500 of confirmation, and Lean Labs' $12,000 Launchpad or a comparable build spends the same money on deployed files. That path is the wrong call for a team that wants an independent read before committing to a vendor, since the diagnosis and the build then come from the same shop.

Enterprise buyers with multiple markets, brands, or languages land with iPullRank at $15,000 a month or Omniscient Digital at $10,000 a month, where the audit arrives inside a program and never as a line item. First Page Sage and RevenueZen by Eastern Standard fit that pattern from different directions, one by quote and one by retainer tier. None of the four will name an audit price before a call, so a buyer who needs the number in advance should work from the published ones above.