Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of getting a business named when someone asks an AI assistant a question, rather than getting a link ranked on a page of results. It is a real discipline with real deliverables, and it is also the easiest thing in the world to fake, because almost nobody checks.
This guide is written by an agency that sells AEO, so read it with that in mind. What follows is the checklist we would want a prospect to use on us.
The short version: a credible AEO provider will show you, on the first call, what ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews say about your category right now. If they cannot do that in two minutes, they are selling you ordinary SEO with a new label.
What an AEO company should actually deliver
Strip away the language and there are five things that move the needle for a local service business. Any proposal that is missing more than one of these is incomplete.
- A baseline visibility audit. A recorded set of prompts run against the major assistants before any work starts, showing who gets named in your category today. Without a baseline, nobody can prove the work did anything.
- Structured data. Schema.org markup that tells a machine what your business is, where it operates, what it sells and what it costs. This is the single most mechanical, most skippable, and most skipped item on the list.
- Entity clean-up. Your name, address and phone number rendered identically everywhere a model might look. Inconsistency here makes you ambiguous, and an ambiguous entity does not get recommended.
- Google Business Profile work. The local record that feeds both Google's own surfaces and, indirectly, the models trained on them.
- Question-led content. Pages written to match how people actually phrase questions out loud, with the answer in the first sentence rather than the fourth paragraph.
What it should cost in Sydney
Sydney pricing for this work in 2026 falls into three rough bands.
| Band | Typical price | What you tend to get |
|---|---|---|
| Add-on | $300–$800/month on top of SEO | Usually schema markup and nothing else. Often genuinely useful, rarely enough on its own. |
| Build + performance | $1,500–$3,500 once, then performance based | The full answer layer built properly, then an ongoing arrangement tied to results. This is the band AEOM8 works in; we quote the build case by case rather than publishing a list price. |
| Agency retainer | $4,000–$10,000+/month | Appropriate for multi-location brands. Overkill for a single-site trade or clinic. |
A single-location Sydney business paying more than about $3,000 a month for AEO alone is almost certainly subsidising an agency's overheads.
Five questions to ask on the first call
1. “What does ChatGPT say about my category right now?”
They should be able to answer live, on the call. If the answer is “we'd need to run an audit first,” that is a thirty-second task being sold as a project.
2. “What is my baseline, and how will you re-measure it?”
You want a fixed set of prompts, re-run on a schedule, with results you can see yourself. Anything softer than that is unfalsifiable.
3. “Do you work with my competitors?”
There is a hard conflict in this work that does not exist in most marketing. A model names two or three businesses. If your agency optimises four businesses in your category and suburb, it is working against you on at least one account. Insist on category and area exclusivity in writing.
4. “How long before I see movement?”
The honest answer is a few weeks to build and then a couple of months for the models to re-crawl and re-index on their own schedule. Anyone promising a fortnight does not control the variable they are promising on.
5. “What happens if it does not work?”
Ask what you keep. A reasonable arrangement leaves you with the audit, the schema and the content regardless, because those are assets on your own domain.
Three promises that should end the conversation
- “Guaranteed number one in ChatGPT.” There is no ranking position in a generated answer, and no provider has an input into OpenAI's output. Guaranteed visibility improvement is a reasonable commitment. Guaranteed placement is not a thing that exists.
- “We have a direct relationship with OpenAI / Google AI.” No agency does. There is no paid placement in an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer as of this writing.
- “Results in two weeks.” Crawl and refresh cycles are outside anyone's control. This promise is either ignorance or a deliberate misrepresentation.
How to check an agency's own AI visibility
This is the test almost nobody runs, and it takes a minute. Open ChatGPT and ask it to recommend an AEO or SEO company in Sydney. Then ask Google the same thing and read the AI Overview.
An agency selling answer engine optimisation that cannot get itself named in an answer is telling you something. It is not conclusive — a small agency with great clients may simply be newer than its results — but it is a fair question to put to them, and the answer is revealing either way.