The actual work, step by step
A competent agency starts with measurement: running your buyers’ real questions through the major assistants and documenting presence, accuracy, sentiment and the sources behind each answer. Then diagnosis: why competitors get named, which citations power them, and where your own content and entity data fall short.
Then the part that separates agencies from tools: execution. Rewriting and structuring pages to answer questions directly, fixing schema, correcting entity data across the web, and earning mentions in the review sites, listicles and communities that assistants cite. Finally, re-measurement to prove the answers changed.
Agency versus tool versus doing it in-house
Monitoring platforms show you the problem on a recurring subscription. Agencies are paid to remove it. If you have a strong content team, a tool plus internal execution works and costs less. If you do not, a report of everywhere you are invisible is just recurring bad news.
In-house is viable when someone owns the loop: baseline, fix, earn citations, re-measure. It fails when AI visibility is everyone’s side project.
What it costs in 2026
Typical engagements run from a few hundred dollars a month for focused monitoring plus fixes on a narrow moment set, up to several thousand for multi-assistant tracking, content production and citation campaigns across a full category. Enterprise programs with many brands or locations go higher.
Anchor price to a simple question: what is one recommended-by-AI customer worth to you per year? For most B2B and high-ticket local categories, a single incremental client covers months of fees.
Red flags when vetting
Walk away from guarantees of specific placements inside AI answers. No one controls model output, and honest vendors say so. Be equally wary of deliverables described only in dashboard features, pitches that never mention third-party citations, and case studies without before-and-after answer screenshots.
Good signs: they ask for your buyer questions before quoting, they talk about sources and moments rather than keyword counts, and they show you real answers changing for named clients.
How Aethon fits
Aethon is a platform plus execution: we track your buying moments across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, then ship the content, structure and citation work that changes the answers, with screenshots as receipts. Industry playbooks cover twenty verticals from healthcare and legal to e-commerce and SaaS.
The free audit is the honest starting point: your top questions, the four assistants, and exactly where you stand before anyone asks you to spend.
