Answer Engine Optimisation — making sure ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI actually find and cite your website — has become a real industry almost overnight. And like every young industry, it has developed a top shelf fast: specialist AEO and GEO agencies whose retainers typically run $2,000 to $10,000 per month for mid-market clients, and $15,000 to $25,000 or more for enterprise. One-off strategy projects in this space can run from $5,000 to $50,000.
Those agencies are not scams. For the clients they serve, they are often worth every dollar. But they were built for a specific kind of customer — one with a marketing department, a content team, and a budget line that can absorb five figures a month without blinking.
Limen was built for everyone else.
The honest question isn't "which is better?" It's the same question the agencies would ask you in a sales call: what do you actually need?
What a high-end AEO agency does well
- Done-for-you execution. They don't just tell you what to fix — their team implements it, writes the content, and manages the process.
- Digital PR and authority building. Earning mentions in the publications and databases AI engines draw from is genuine, laborious work — and it's largely relationship work a tool can't do.
- Scale. Hundreds or thousands of pages, multiple brands, multiple markets, ongoing content production.
- Strategy for competitive categories. If you're one of fifty funded companies fighting to be the name AI cites for the same query, hand-to-hand strategy matters.
- Someone to call. A retainer buys accountability — meetings, reports, a human who answers.
What Limen does well
- The same fundamentals, without the translation layer. Structured data, clear factual openings, question-and-answer content, trust and authorship signals, machine readability — the checklist an agency works through is not a secret. Limen scans your site against it and shows you exactly where you stand.
- Plain language, by design. Every finding is explained in words a busy owner understands. No dashboard to decode, no jargon to survive, no account manager needed to interpret the report.
- Fixes you can actually apply. Not "improve your entity salience" — actual steps, and where code is the answer, actual paste-in code.
- A price a small business can carry. $35 a month, or $28 a month billed yearly. Cancel any time.
- Rescans that show progress. Fix something, scan again, watch the score move. Your improvement is measured, not asserted.
- Janus. A guide who knows your scan and answers your questions about it — in plain words, whenever you ask.
The uncomfortable truth about what a retainer buys
Here is what most of a high-end AEO engagement consists of, once you strip away the deck: an audit of your site against known AEO fundamentals, a prioritised list of fixes, implementation of those fixes, and ongoing monitoring to see whether AI engines are picking you up.
For a large site, each of those steps is genuinely heavy. Auditing three thousand pages, coordinating fixes across a CMS team, producing content at volume, running digital PR campaigns — that's real labour, and the retainer pays for it.
But for a small business site — ten, twenty, forty pages — the audit takes a tool minutes, the fix list is manageable by one motivated person, and the implementation is mostly pasting code and rewriting a handful of passages. The expensive part of the agency model isn't the knowledge. It's the delivery apparatus: the meetings, the reporting cycle, the team. A small site doesn't need the apparatus. It needs the knowledge.
That's the gap Limen exists in. Not a cheaper agency — a different delivery model for the same fundamentals.
Side by side
- Typical cost. Agency: $2,000–$10,000+ a month, often with a minimum term. Limen: $35 a month, or $28 a month billed yearly.
- Who it's built for. Agency: companies with marketing departments and enterprise budgets. Limen: small business owners and sole traders — no technical background needed.
- What you get. Agency: strategy, implementation, content production, PR, reporting. Limen: a full scan of your site, plain-language findings, concrete fixes, paste-in code, rescans, a PDF report.
- How findings reach you. Agency: through account managers, decks, and scheduled calls. Limen: directly, in plain words, the moment the scan finishes.
- Who does the fixing. Agency: their team. Limen: you — with exact instructions, and code ready to paste.
- Commitment. Agency: contracts, often quarterly or annual. Limen: monthly, cancel any time.
- Questions answered by. Agency: your account manager, on their schedule. Limen: Janus, on yours.
Choose an agency if…
- Your site runs to hundreds or thousands of pages and nobody in-house can own the work.
- You need ongoing content production and digital PR at volume — the parts of AEO that are genuinely labour, not knowledge.
- You compete in a crowded, well-funded category where bespoke strategy is the differentiator.
- The retainer is a rounding error in your marketing budget, and what you're really buying is someone else's accountability.
Choose Limen if…
- You're a small business owner, a sole trader, or a small team — and $2,000 a month is not a rounding error, it's the rent.
- You want to understand your own AI visibility, not outsource the understanding.
- Your site is a size one motivated person can improve — which is most small business sites.
- You'd rather spend an afternoon applying real fixes than a quarter sitting in status meetings.
- You want proof of progress: fix, rescan, watch the score move.
Our perspective
We built Limen because we think the knowledge behind AI visibility shouldn't be locked behind a retainer. The fundamentals of being found and cited by AI engines are learnable, checkable, and — for a normal-sized website — fixable by the person who owns it. What was missing wasn't the knowledge. It was a tool that delivers it in plain language, at a plain price, to the people the agencies were never going to call back.
If you run a company with a marketing department and a seven-figure budget, hire the agency. Genuinely. That's what they're for.
If you run everything else — the shop, the practice, the studio, the trade — start with a scan. It's free, and it will tell you the truth about how AI sees your site.
Agency pricing figures reflect published AEO/GEO retainer and project ranges as of mid-2026. No specific agency is referenced.