Insights
What does AEO cost in the UK?
By Oliver Woodhead · 15 October 2026
There is no standard price for Answer Engine Optimisation in the UK, and any firm quoting one before looking at your website is guessing. This article, from Momentum Inspire, a commercial growth consultancy for ambitious UK businesses, explains what actually drives the cost of AEO work, what you are buying when you pay for it, how to compare two quotes that look nothing alike, and what should make you walk away. We scope every engagement on a call rather than publishing a rate, and the reasons for that are set out below.
Why is there no standard price for AEO?
Because the phrase describes work that can differ by an order of magnitude between two businesses. One firm needs a technical pass and better headings on eleven pages. Another needs its entire content library restructured, an authorship model built from nothing, and six months of publishing before anything shifts.
Both are honestly described as AEO. Quoting a single figure that covers both would mean overcharging the first or underserving the second, which is why serious providers scope the work before pricing it, and why a number published on a website tells you very little.
What actually drives the cost?
Five things, and you can assess most of them about your own business before speaking to anyone.
- The state of the site you are starting from. A site that already loads quickly, can be crawled and has a clear structure needs a fraction of the work of one that cannot be read properly by a machine at all.
- How much content already exists, and how good it is. Restructuring forty existing pages so they answer questions directly is different work from writing forty new ones, and usually cheaper.
- How competitive and how clearly defined your category is. A business whose service is easy for a machine to categorise needs less identity work than one whose positioning is genuinely ambiguous.
- Whether you need the work done for you or alongside you. Some businesses have a marketing person who can carry the publishing rhythm once the method is set. That materially changes what is being bought.
- How long you intend to sustain it. AEO rewards consistency, so a three-month engagement and an ongoing one are not the same product at a different length.
What are you actually paying for?
It helps to separate the work into three layers, because quotes that look wildly different often cover different layers without saying so.
The technical layer opens the door: letting AI crawlers in, publishing a sitemap and an llms.txt file, making content readable without JavaScript. It is the smallest part of the cost and the easiest to verify.
The content layer makes pages quotable: definition-first openings, question-led headings answered directly, real lists and tables rather than marketing prose. This is usually the largest part, because it is ongoing rather than a one-off fix.
The trust layer gives engines a reason to cite you: structured data naming the legal entity, named authors with real profiles, and claims that trace to a source. It is cheap in effort and disproportionately valuable, and it is the layer most often skipped.
How do you compare two quotes fairly?
Ask both providers the same four questions and the differences usually explain themselves.
- What exactly will be different about my website in ninety days, described in things I could check myself?
- Which of the three layers above does this cover, and which does it leave to us?
- What are you measuring, and will you show me the same measurement before you start and afterwards?
- What happens if the work does not move anything, and what would you expect to see first if it were working?
What should make you walk away?
A guaranteed placement in a named AI engine, on a named date, for a named question. Nobody controls that, and the guarantee is theatre rather than confidence.
A quote arriving before anybody has looked at your website is the other clear signal. So is a proposal built around a single file or a schema switch, which sells a technical detail as though it were the whole discipline. If a provider cannot explain what they will change in language you can check, that is usually because the answer would not survive checking.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does this article not give a price?
- Because a figure that covered every case would be misleading in almost all of them, and because we scope each engagement on a call before agreeing terms. What we can say plainly is what drives the cost, which is set out above, and that every engagement begins with a signed service agreement so there are no surprises.
- Is AEO cheaper than SEO?
- Not reliably, and comparing them that way is misleading. They reward different things, and the honest comparison is between what each is likely to return for your particular business rather than between their headline costs.
- Can a small business do this itself?
- Some of it, yes. The principles are public and we publish our full methodology rather than keeping it behind a call. What an external team adds is the technical implementation, editorial discipline across every page, and monthly measurement of how engines actually answer. Several of our clients do the basics in-house and bring us in for the rest.
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