What AEO costs in Australia
The short answer
In Australia, mid-market answer engine optimisation retainers run roughly $3,000 to $8,000 a month, one-off AI visibility audits $1,500 to $5,000, and enterprise programmes $10,000 to $25,000 or more a month. Entry-level monitoring-only packages start around $1,000 to $2,500. The single most useful thing to know before buying: the citation-monitoring component that most retainers present as a core deliverable is a software subscription costing $95 to $500 a month retail, which you can buy directly.
- Mid-market retainer: $3,000–$8,000/month. Enterprise: $10,000–$25,000+.
- One-off audit: $1,500–$5,000.
- Monitoring platforms retail at $95–$500/month — Peec from ~$95, Profound $99–$399, Scrunch $250–$500.
- Schema markup is a common headline deliverable and has no measured independent effect on citations.
The bands
| Engagement | Typical Australian price |
|---|---|
| Entry monitoring and basic optimisation | $1,000 – $2,500 / month |
| Mid-market retainer | $3,000 – $8,000 / month |
| Enterprise programme | $10,000 – $25,000+ / month |
| One-off AI visibility audit | $1,500 – $5,000 |
A mid-market retainer typically includes schema implementation and maintenance, four to six optimised content pieces a month, citation tracking across two to four platforms, and a monthly reporting call.
What each line item is actually worth
Citation monitoring — worth $95 to $500 a month, because that is what it costs. Peec starts around $95 a month for 50 prompts across three of six models with unlimited seats. Profound runs $99 for a ChatGPT-only starter tier and $399 for three engines, with agency pricing effectively from $498. Scrunch starts at $250 a month on annual billing. These are retail prices you can pay directly. An agency passing them through at cost and charging for interpretation is being straight with you; one bundling a $95 subscription into a $5,000 retainer as a headline deliverable is not.
Schema markup — worth very little as an AI visibility service. Ahrefs tested 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema and measured citation changes of −4.6%, +2.4% and +2.2% across AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT. All statistically indistinguishable from zero. It is cheap to implement and worth having for other reasons. It is not worth a premium.
Earned placement work — this is where the money should go. Earned media outperforms brand-owned content by roughly 325% for citation rates. It is also the most labour-intensive item, which is why cheaper retainers quietly exclude it. If a proposal does not specify how many third-party placements are targeted per month, the retainer is probably a content-and-dashboard package.
Entity and review-profile work — high effect, low cost, frequently omitted. Deep entity linking measured +34% citations overall and +52% on Gemini and Bing. An active review profile took brands from 1% of answers to 75.3%. Neither is expensive. Both are routinely absent from scopes because they are not very visible on a report.
Questions worth asking any provider
- What exactly is the prompt set, and will you give me the file?
- How many third-party placements a month are in scope?
- What does the monitoring software cost you, and what am I paying for it?
- Show me a month where the numbers went down and how you reported it.
- What would make you tell me to stop paying you?
The fifth one is the most informative. A provider with no answer to it has not thought about when their service stops being worth buying, which means they will never tell you.
A note on what nobody can sell you
No provider can guarantee a mention, a position or a ranking in an AI answer. The systems are non-deterministic — the same prompt asked twice returns different sources — and the providers change retrieval without notice. ChatGPT cut Reddit citations by at least 73% in a single month in August 2026. Any guarantee offered in this category is a guarantee about something the seller does not control.
Questions people actually ask
Why is there such a wide range?
Mostly the amount of earned-media work included. A $3,000 retainer is usually measurement plus on-site content changes. A $8,000 one includes active outreach for third-party placements, which is labour-intensive and is also the part the evidence says actually moves citations. Ask specifically how many placements a month are in scope.
Should I pay for a monthly retainer or a one-off audit first?
An audit first, almost always. It costs a fraction of a year's retainer, tells you whether there is meaningful AI answer volume in your category at all, and produces a citation map you can hand to any provider. If a vendor will not sell you an audit without committing to a retainer, that tells you what the audit is for.
Is AEO worth it for a small Australian business?
It depends entirely on whether your buyers ask assistants before they buy. AI referrals are still only about 1–6% of website traffic, though they convert four to five times better than organic search and are growing around 975% year on year. For a high-consideration B2B purchase the maths often works at current prices. For low-value transactional e-commerce it frequently does not yet.
What should I refuse to pay for?
A proprietary visibility score you cannot audit, a guarantee of placement in any AI answer, and monitoring software marked up several times over retail. None of the three are defensible.