Option one: an agency retainer
Agencies sell hours. Good ones will do real work on content and citations, but AI answers shift weekly, and retainers rarely include continuous monitoring across all four assistants. If you evaluate agencies, our guide to choosing an answer engine optimization agency covers the questions to ask.
Option two: a monitoring tool plus your team
Monitoring platforms report where you stand and leave execution to you. That works if you have a content team with spare capacity. Most mid market teams do not, which is why reports pile up unactioned. See where monitoring-first tools stop.
Option three: a platform that executes
Aethon is software, not an agency, and it covers the full service loop: it maps the life moments people bring to AI in your category, tracks who gets recommended and why, publishes the fixes as content, schema, citations, and coverage, and measures whether recommendations changed. Pricing is published, starting at $199 per month, on the pricing page. Start with the free to see your baseline before you buy anything from anyone.
What a complete service scope looks like
Whoever you buy from, the deliverable list should cover the whole loop, and gaps in the list predict gaps in results. Discovery: a mapped basket of your category's buyer moments, not a keyword export. Baseline: how all four major assistants answer those moments today, with the sources behind each recommendation. Execution: rewritten answer pages, FAQ and organization schema, fact alignment across your site and directories, and a citation plan for the third party surfaces assistants trust in your category. Measurement: monthly re-runs against the frozen baseline with movement attributed to specific fixes. And reporting a business owner can read: share of moments won, trending, next to pipeline. Ask every provider to map their proposal to those five lines; the ones who cannot are selling activity, not outcomes.
Red flags when buying AEO and GEO services
The category is young, which attracts both genuine builders and rebranded retainer shops, so screen hard. Walk away from guarantees of specific rankings inside AI answers, nobody controls the models, as we explain in does good GEO mean I show up every time. Be wary of deliverables measured in blog posts per month rather than moments won; volume is the oldest disguise for absence of strategy. Treat secret proprietary methods as a no, the input layer is public knowledge and honest vendors explain it freely, ours is documented across this site. And insist on published or at least written pricing before a discovery call; quote-only pricing in a young category is how buyers overpay by multiples. If you want the do-it-yourself yardstick to compare any proposal against, start with how to start doing AEO and GEO: a good provider should beat that plan clearly, not just perform it slowly.
A sample 90 day services timeline, week by week
Hold any proposal against this reference cadence. Weeks one and two: moment mapping, competitor baseline across the four assistants, and the frozen question basket delivered as a document you own. Weeks three through six: the on-page wave, answer rewrites on priority pages, schema, fact alignment, shipped and logged. Weeks seven through ten: the citation wave, outreach and community groundwork on the surfaces assistants read for your category, slower by nature, started early enough to land inside the engagement. Weeks eleven and twelve: full re-measure against the baseline, movement attributed fix by fix, and a next-quarter plan priced before renewal pressure begins. A provider who cannot show you last quarter's version of this timeline for another client is selling their first draft; a provider who resists the frozen basket is reserving the right to move the goalposts.
