Answer Engine OptimisationAnswer Engine Optimization (AEO): Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so an AI or search engine can lift a clear, direct answer from it and show it to the person asking. Read the full entry in the glossary.Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content so an AI or search engine can lift a clear, direct answer from it and show it to the person asking.Read full entry — making sure ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI actually find and citeCitation: When an answer engine names the source of what it just told someone — a business, a site, a particular set of words — instead of leaving the answer unattributed. The AI-era version of being recommended by name. Read the full entry in the glossary.CitationWhen an answer engine names the source of what it just told someone — a business, a site, a particular set of words — instead of leaving the answer unattributed. The AI-era version of being recommended by name.Read full entry your website — has become a real industry almost overnight. And like every young industry, it has developed a top shelf fast: specialist AEO and GEOGenerative Engine Optimization (GEO): Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping your content so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers cite, quote, or recommend your business when they respond. Read the full entry in the glossary.Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping your content so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers cite, quote, or recommend your business when they respond.Read full entry 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 dataStructured Data: Information on a page written in an agreed format for machines rather than people — the same facts as your visible text, labelled so a system can read them without guessing. Read the full entry in the glossary.Structured DataInformation on a page written in an agreed format for machines rather than people — the same facts as your visible text, labelled so a system can read them without guessing.Read full entry, clear factual openings, question-and-answer contentAnswer-Shaped Content: Writing that leads with the answer to a real question instead of arriving at it — the single change that most often decides whether a machine can quote you. Read the full entry in the glossary.Answer-Shaped ContentWriting that leads with the answer to a real question instead of arriving at it — the single change that most often decides whether a machine can quote you.Read full entry, trust and authorship signals, machine readabilityMachine Readability: Whether the meaning of a page survives being read by software — the plainest test of whether an AI can understand what is actually on it. Read the full entry in the glossary.Machine ReadabilityWhether the meaning of a page survives being read by software — the plainest test of whether an AI can understand what is actually on it.Read full entry — 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 salienceEntity: A specific thing a machine can recognise and hold facts about — your business as a distinct identity, rather than a string of words that happens to appear on a page. Read the full entry in the glossary.EntityA specific thing a machine can recognise and hold facts about — your business as a distinct identity, rather than a string of words that happens to appear on a page.Read full entry" — 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 visibilityAI Visibility: AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants name your business when someone asks them a question you could have answered. Read the full entry in the glossary.AI VisibilityAI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants name your business when someone asks them a question you could have answered.Read full entry, 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.