Why paying two agencies for SEO and AEO may be unnecessary

My position: most home service companies that pay one agency for SEO and a second for AEO (answer engine optimization, the work of getting named in AI answers) are paying twice for part of the same job. The site, the schema, the service pages and the Google Business Profile are the same assets either way. Before you sign a second retainer, find the overlap and make one party own it.

Why does the same work end up on two invoices?

Because the engines themselves say the foundation is shared. Google's documentation states that the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, that there are no additional requirements to appear in them, and that no special optimizations are necessary. Google's own blog post on the subject is blunter: meeting the technical requirements covers you for search generally, including AI formats.

Microsoft takes the same line for Bing and Copilot. Its October 2025 guidance says crawlability, metadata, internal linking and backlinks remain essential. It also says those are just the starting point, and I will come back to that, because it is the honest case for AEO being more than SEO.

Put those statements next to two proposals and you can see the problem. An SEO agency sells the foundation. An AEO agency has to make sure the foundation is there before its own work can pay off, so it scopes the foundation too. Neither one is padding the bill. Each is quoting a complete job. You are the only person who sees both quotes.

The five lines that get billed twice

These are the places to look. None of them needs two owners.

Technical fixes. One site, one robots.txt file. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Checking that file is real work, and it takes minutes. It belongs to whoever already runs your crawl and indexing checks. An "AI readiness audit" and a "technical SEO audit" of the same site are largely the same audit.

Schema. Google says there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add for its AI features, and that structured data should match the visible text on the page. So "entity schema" on one proposal and "local business schema" on the other describe one block of code on one page. Two agencies editing it can undo each other.

Service and city pages. A furnace repair page that states what you fix, where you run service calls and how to book can rank and can be quoted. If the SEO agency writes two pages a month and the AEO agency writes two "answer-ready" pages a month, ask which pages. If the answer is the same list, you are buying one page twice.

Google Business Profile. Google's AI features page lists keeping your Business Profile information up to date among its best practices, and its local ranking help page says results rest on relevance, distance and prominence. Services, hours, service areas, photos and review replies are one profile. "Local entity optimization" is usually that profile under a different name.

Reporting. Google says traffic from AI features is included in the Search Console Performance report your SEO agency already reads. Bing Webmaster Tools added a free AI Performance report in February 2026 that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Two monthly reports built on the same two accounts is one report with two covers.

What is new, and worth paying for?

Two things, and they are narrower than a full retainer. The first is tracking: a fixed list of the questions a homeowner asks ("who fixes heat pumps in my town, open Saturday"), run on several AI engines every month, with a dated record of who was named and why. A classic rank tracker does not do this. The second is off-site work: what directories, review platforms, local press and trade roundups say about your company. That is Microsoft's "just the starting point" in practice. AI answers pull from pages you do not own, and getting those right is slow, one source at a time.

If an AEO proposal is mostly those two things, it is not duplicating your SEO retainer. If it is mostly the five lines above, it is.

A worked example: two proposals, side by side

For example, take a six-truck HVAC and plumbing shop in one market. Every figure below is made up for illustration. It is not a client and not a benchmark. The shop pays an SEO agency $2,500 a month and has a proposal from an AEO agency for $3,000 a month. Published prices put both in a normal range: The Search Sherpa lists a single-market HVAC SEO plan at $1,000 to $2,500 a month, WebFX puts small to midsized HVAC SEO at $1,500 to $5,000, and SEO.com lists its GEO plans from $3,000.

In this illustration, four of the seven lines on the AEO proposal touch a file, page or profile the SEO agency already works on. Suppose the owner asks the AEO agency how its hours split, and the answer is that about half of a normal month goes to those four lines. Then roughly $1,500 of the $3,000 would buy work the shop already pays for, every month, including the shoulder season when install tickets are thin.

The owner in this example has two clean moves. One: ask the AEO agency to re-quote for prompt tracking, third-party mentions and the AI part of reporting only, and name the SEO agency as owner of the rest. Two: ask the SEO agency what it would charge to add those three lines. Either way the overlap is billed once. What the new number comes to is unknown until someone quotes it. This example shows where to look, not what you will save.

But doesn't a specialist do AEO better than a generalist?

This is the strongest objection, and parts of it are right. The best case for keeping two agencies goes like this. Earning a mention in a local news piece or a trade roundup is a different craft from fixing title tags. Running the same questions through several AI engines and reading the answers takes tools and habits many SEO shops do not have yet. An SEO agency that adds "AI" to its plan names without changing the work has sold you nothing. And a second agency gives you an outside check on the first, which is hard to get when one team grades its own homework.

There is a second point in the objection's favor. The SEO agency may be the one bringing in the jobs. In a 2026 ACHR News study of 782 homeowners, 54% said they would look for HVAC contractor reviews on Google Business and 45% on contractor websites, against 37% through AI tools such as ChatGPT. Google and your own website are still where the largest shares of homeowners said they would look. Keeping you visible there is SEO work, and an agency doing it well has earned its retainer.

So here is where two agencies is the right setup:

• Your SEO agency is booking service calls, and it has told you it does not do AI visibility work or cannot show any on request.
• You need a specific skill, such as earned media, that neither your team nor your SEO agency has.
• Your SEO is done in-house and you only need outside help with tracking and off-site work.
• You want a one-time independent audit of what AI engines say about you.
• You are mid-contract and it is cheaper to wait than to break it.

That list is close to the one eSEOspace, an agency that sells SEO and AI work together, publishes itself: it says you need a second provider only when your current agency cannot show you the work on request.

My answer to the objection is that none of it justifies paying for the foundation twice. A specialist's value is in the two new lines. Hire the specialist for those, and write down that the SEO agency owns the site, the schema, the pages and the profile. The claim that one vendor costs less is not proven either. 310 Creative, which sells AEO, writes that bundling both under one vendor often reduces total cost, but no independent body has measured it. Treat it as a seller's view and check it against your own two quotes.

How do you spot the overlap in your own proposals?

Print both scopes and go line by line with a pen.

• Next to each line, write the asset it touches: website file, page, schema, Google Business Profile, a report, or a site you do not own.
• Circle every asset that appears on both sheets.
• For each circle, ask both agencies the same question: "What will you change here that the other agency will not?"
• Ask each agency for hours or deliverable counts per line, not a category list.
• Pick one owner per circled asset and ask the other agency to re-quote without it.

We sell both services, so weigh this accordingly. ElytraCo offers traditional SEO alongside AI visibility, and businesses on an AEO program may qualify for preferred SEO pricing. We review what you pay your current SEO provider and show how both can run under one strategy, potentially for less. The comparison covers equivalent services and is subject to qualification. Our published price range is on our AEO pricing page, and the market ranges for each service are on our AEO vs SEO cost page.

How to check where you stand

Before you compare anyone's proposal, find out whether you have a problem. Tonight, ask ChatGPT and Google the question your customer would ask: the problem, your town, and "who should I call." Do it for your three most valuable job types and write down who is named. Our post on why an HVAC company does not show up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews lists the usual causes. Then pull your SEO agency's last three reports and see whether any of them mention AI answers at all.

If you are named and your CSRs are busy, you may not need a second retainer of any kind. If you are not, bring the list to your SEO agency first. And if you want an outside read, our free AI visibility audit runs your real service questions across the major AI engines and shows who gets named instead of you. More on how we work with contractors is on our home services page.

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