AEO agencies sell expertise and hours. AEO platforms sell tracking. Most growing brands need both the measurement and the work. Here is how to decide, what to ask, and what it should cost.
Buy a platform if you have people to do the work; hire an agency if you need the work done and can afford retainers; choose a hybrid if you need both on a small budget. An AEO agency (also called a GEO agency) sells strategy and execution hours: content, digital PR, community work, and technical fixes. An AEO platform sells measurement: prompt tracking, share of voice, and citation data.
The trap is buying only one half. A platform without hands produces reports nobody acts on. An agency without measurement produces activity you cannot prove.
Most platforms stop short of publishing and outreach. See the AI visibility tools guide.
Ethan Smith, CEO of the growth agency Graphite, walked through AEO in depth on Lenny's Podcast. Two of his points go straight to the hire-vs-buy decision. On tools:
My general suggestion is pick the one that, pick the cheapest one that does what you need. Just like keyword tracking, you can only, you know, there’s not a premium version of keyword tracking. You rank number three or you don’t.
On people:
So, who’s your team? Probably your team is your SEO team or your SEO agency or your SEO consultant. Probably hopefully they can do this stuff. And then, however, what I think is hard to hire for is the off-site stuff.
He also argues that very expensive tools for what are essentially commodity tracking tasks are unusual in marketing. Note that Graphite is an agency that also builds answer tracking, so he sees both sides of this decision.
| AEO agency | AEO platform | Hybrid (Dooza) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tracking | Via a third-party tool | Core product | Included |
| Strategy | Yes | Data only | Prompt set, citation map, prioritized backlog |
| Content production | Yes, by the hour | No or drafts only | Ranky drafts and publishes with approval |
| Off-site mentions | Yes, often the strongest part | No | Finds threads and targets; suggests replies for approval |
| Technical fixes | Yes | Recommendations | Schema, crawler access, llms.txt |
| Typical cost | Monthly retainer | Subscription | Refundable pilot (see /pricing) |
| Speed to first change | Weeks (onboarding) | Days (data only) | Days |
Compare cost per shipped deliverable, not cost per month: how many answer pages, fixes, and earned mentions do you get for the money?
Be wary of anyone who guarantees rankings in ChatGPT. Answer engines change; the honest promise is a process and a measured trend.
Dooza is an AI-native company that builds AI products and services for small businesses. For AI search, Ranky does the work. Ranky tracks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI Overviews answer the prompts your buyers ask, maps which sources those answers cite, and then does the fixes: it drafts and publishes answer-ready pages, fixes schema, and flags the third-party threads worth joining, all behind your approval. Every Dooza product starts with a refundable pilot — 100% refund within 14 days.
The hybrid gives you the platform half (prompt tracking, citation map, reports) and the execution half (answer pages, schema, community targets), with approvals so nothing ships without you. Read more on our generative engine optimization page, or compare with enterprise platforms in the best Profound alternative.
Book a free pilot call. We will show your baseline and a 30-day plan, and every pilot is refundable within 14 days.
An AEO agency is a marketing agency that improves how often AI answer engines mention and cite a brand, through content, digital PR, community work, technical fixes, and reporting.
There is no practical difference. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) describe the same work; agencies use whichever term their market searches for.
Buy a tool if you already have people to act on the data. Hire an agency if you need execution and can afford a retainer. A hybrid platform like Dooza combines tracking and execution for smaller budgets.
Retainers vary widely by scope. Compare quotes by deliverables per month, such as answer pages published, fixes shipped, and mentions earned, rather than by hours.
No. AI answers vary and engines change often. A credible provider commits to a process, a fixed prompt set, and measured trends, not guaranteed placements.
Automate your business with AI employees that work 24/7. Start with a refundable pilot: 100% refund within 14 days.
AI visibility tools show how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews talk about your brand. This guide explains the metrics, how to run a free manual audit first, and how to pick a platform that turns the numbers into fixes.
Answer engine optimization is how you get mentioned and cited when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI a question. Here is how it works, what to do first, and how to measure it.
Start with a refundable pilot — 100% refund within 14 days. A Dooza engineer scopes it with you on a free 30-minute call. Pricing depends on the product; see pricing.
Refundable pilot · 100% refund within 14 days · No contracts