What should an AI visibility agency actually deliver each month?

An AI visibility agency (also sold as AEO or GEO) works to get your business named and described accurately in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features. Each month it should deliver four things you can check: a fixed list of buyer questions tested on named engines, the raw answers, the pages and outside sources it worked on, and a report tying the two together.

This post is for the owner or marketing lead comparing vendors, or wondering what a current retainer is producing. It uses what agencies publish on their own plan pages, read on 14 November 2026, to show what each price tier lists. For how the work differs from search optimization, see AEO vs SEO: what changes when search becomes an answer.

What should every monthly report contain, at any price?

Five items. None of them depends on budget, and a vendor that cannot produce them is reporting activity, not visibility.

• The question set and the engines. The exact prompts tested and which engines they ran on. NoGood, an agency that sells this work, lists "vague reporting that never names a specific platform" as a red flag.
• Raw answers. The text of what each engine said, so you can see who was named and how you were described. The same NoGood guide says you should see the actual before-and-after, not a curated summary.
• Share of answers, not rank. The portion of tested answers that named you, per engine. Answers change on every run, which is why our guide to measuring AI share of voice treats a single position as unreliable.
• Work shipped. URLs of pages written or refreshed, schema added, and directory, review or press sources worked that month.
• Crawler access. Confirmation that the engines' search crawlers can read your site. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to register.

One item deserves a question when it shows up. Google Search Central says AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is included in Search Console's Performance report within the "Web" search type. Search Console does not give those clicks their own line, so if a report shows an AI Overview click figure, ask how it was produced.

What do agencies publish for each price tier?

Quantities rise in a fairly consistent pattern: more prompts, more pages, more off-site work and more frequent contact. The table groups published plans and tier guides by price. Each cell is from the named agency's own page. RevenueZen and DerivateX publish plans that cover SEO and AI search together, so their page counts include search work.

Sources for the table: RevenueZen's pricing page (plans at $3,000, $5,000, $7,000 and $10,000), DerivateX's pricing page (plans at $5,000, $8,000 and $12,000, for B2B software companies), and tier descriptions from Stackmatix, The Digital Elevator and 310 Creative. These are asking prices and listed scopes from sellers, not audited delivery. Use them as a yardstick: if you pay a mid-tier price and receive the entry-tier row, ask why. For comparison, ElytraCo's AEO plans run from $2,500 to $10,000 or more a month, and enterprise programs are custom scoped (see AEO pricing).

What changes as the price goes up?

Three things change, and each is worth a direct question in a sales call.

• Who implements. At DerivateX's $5,000 plan, technical fixes arrive as step-by-step instructions for your team. At $8,000 the agency implements in your CMS where access is granted (DerivateX). A cheaper plan can cost more in your own staff time.
• Whether off-site work is in the fee. The same DerivateX page quotes a separate off-site citation budget of $1,000 to $3,000 a month depending on plan, spent only with the client's written sign-off (DerivateX). Other plans fold outreach into the retainer. Neither is wrong, but the totals are not comparable until you know which you are reading.
• How many engines and markets are sampled. Entry tiers watch one or two platforms. Mid-market tiers in Stackmatix's guide track five: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude.

For a multi-location brand, add a fourth: the level of reporting. A brand-level score hides which locations are missing from answers in their own markets. Ask whether the question set and the report are built per location or per market, and who on your side owns the fixes when a location trails.

Which red flags should end the conversation?

Guarantees, secrecy and reports with no AI data in them. Google and the agencies' own buyer guides agree on most of this list.

• Guaranteed rankings or citations. Google's guide to hiring an SEO says "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." NoGood, 310 Creative and The Digital Elevator each warn against guaranteed AI citations or placements.
• A secret method. Google says there are no additional requirements and no special optimizations necessary for AI Overviews or AI Mode (AI features documentation). Its hiring guide adds: be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what it intends to do, and check that any AEO or GEO advice is aligned with Google's official guidance.
• Reports with only traffic and rankings. 310 Creative lists reporting limited to organic traffic, impressions or keyword rankings as a warning sign, along with a refusal to name the engines in scope and no sample report.
• Tracking with nothing behind it. A monthly score and no list of work shipped. The Digital Elevator advises avoiding programs that only track.
• Changes you cannot see. Google suggests asking any SEO whether they will share all the changes they make to your site and the reasoning behind them. The same question applies here.

When does your SEO agency already cover this?

More often than AEO vendors admit. Google's hiring guide lists "Optimizing for generative AI" among the services an SEO may provide, and at least one large agency's published SEO plans include 100 to 250 targeted prompts, AI crawler access management and monthly AI visibility tracking (WebFX). Technical health, indexing and clear service pages are SEO work that Google's AI features depend on.

If your SEO agency's monthly report passes the checks below, keeping it and skipping a second vendor is a reasonable decision. A separate AI visibility program earns its fee when it adds what the SEO scope lacks: sampling across several engines, answer pages, and work on the third-party sources the engines cite.

How do you check a proposal or a monthly report?

Work through these steps with the document in front of you. They apply to a new proposal and to a vendor you already pay.

1. Ask for the question list. You should receive the exact prompts and the engines they run on. If the list is "proprietary," stop here.
2. Request raw answers for five questions. Then run the same five yourself in fresh sessions. The named businesses should broadly match what the report shows.
3. Count the work shipped. List the URLs of new pages, refreshed pages and outside sources worked last month. Compare the counts with the tier table above for the price you pay.
4. Check crawler access yourself. Open your robots.txt and confirm the engines' search crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot, are not blocked. Ask your web team whether a firewall rule blocks them.
5. Ask how each AI number was produced. Share of answers should come from repeated sampling. Any AI traffic figure needs a stated method, since Search Console reports AI features inside ordinary web search.
6. Find the implementer. For every recommendation, the document should say whether the agency or your team makes the change, and who approves published content.
7. Separate fee from pass-through costs. Identify software licenses, outreach or placement budgets and the contract term. Add them to the retainer before comparing vendors.
8. Strike the overlap. Lay the document next to your SEO invoice and mark anything billed on both, such as schema, technical fixes and core service pages.

How to check where you stand

Take last month's report from whoever handles your search or AI visibility and score it against the five items in the first section: question set and engines, raw answers, share of answers, work shipped, crawler access. Three or more missing means you are paying for a summary. If you have no report yet, write ten questions a buyer would ask before choosing a business like yours and run each one three times in ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode. That is your baseline.

If you would like a second read, our free AI visibility audit runs your buyer questions live across the engines and shows who is named and which sources are cited. You keep the baseline whether or not you change vendors. Multi-location programs are covered on our enterprise page.

Frequently asked questions