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?
Our own answers to all five are on our pricing page and the audit page, so you can apply them to us first.
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 are growing around 975% year on year, and the best evidence has them converting at roughly the same rate as organic search. 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.