How Do You Choose an AEO Consulting Partner?
A practical checklist for evaluating AEO consulting offers: what's in scope, how to compare vendors, and the mistakes to avoid.
As more people ask ChatGPT or Gemini before they open a search engine, "does our brand show up in AI answers?" has become a real business question. That has created a young market for AEO consulting — and because there is no standard yet, proposals are hard to compare. Here is a practical way to evaluate them. SAENRU also offers AEO/GEO consulting, and we describe our own setup openly at the end.
What does AEO consulting actually deliver?
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) aims to raise the chance that AI answer engines cite or recommend your brand. The success metric is whether your name appears inside the answer, not where you rank on a results page. That changes the deliverables: less keyword planning, more structured information assets.
A typical scope includes:
- Measured diagnostics — actually querying today's models about your brand and category
- Structured data (JSON-LD) covering your business facts, services, pricing and FAQs
- Files aimed at AI crawlers, such as llms.txt
- Rendering checks — text that only appears via JavaScript may never be collected
- First-party sources (documents, FAQs, case pages) plus a refresh cadence
What criteria separate a solid partner from a weak one?
The key is whether measure → build → re-measure is designed as one loop. A diagnosis with no implementation, or implementation with no measurement, leaves you unable to tell whether anything improved. Work through these in order.
- Is it measurement-based? Ask whether they actually query ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and whether they share the question list.
- Do deliverables land in your repository? Structured data and scripts that live only in a vendor account disappear when the contract ends.
- Is their own site a working example? Plenty of AEO sellers have no structured data on their own homepage.
- Is pricing unbundled? Separate diagnosis, build and retainer lets you validate cheaply before committing.
- Do they acknowledge volatility? Model updates shift answers. A partner who talks about re-measurement intervals is more credible than one promising permanent visibility.
What mistakes do buyers make most often?
The most common one is treating AEO as a one-time build. The second is starting without an agreed metric. The third is outsourcing everything when there is no source material inside the company yet.
- No metric: Agree on something countable, like "brand mentions across 20 representative category questions."
- No raw material: If pricing, service scope and coverage area are not stated on your site, there is nothing for an AI to quote.
- Falling for guarantees: Promises of a top slot in AI answers cannot be verified.
- No engineering involvement: A marketing team without deploy access usually stalls midway.
How is SAENRU's AEO consulting structured?
We applied the same criteria to ourselves. We start with a measured diagnostic report across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude at KRW 190,000, delivered in five business days, and that fee is fully credited if you go on to a build contract. The idea is that you should see where you stand for a small amount before deciding anything.
- Diagnostic report: KRW 190,000 · 5 business days
- Build package: from KRW 3,600,000
- Monthly operations: from KRW 1,470,000 per month, centred on re-measurement and updates
- All prices exclude VAT
The SAENRU site itself is an AEO reference build — raw HTML with embedded JSON-LD and llms.txt. You can see the details on our AEO/GEO consulting page, and if you are rebuilding a site or web app at the same time, SAENRU Studio may be the better fit.
Whoever you choose, start by turning your current state into numbers with an inexpensive diagnosis. Without those numbers, you cannot tell a good proposal from a good improvement.