AI Rankly vs AEO agencies
Comparing AI Rankly and AEO agencies?
An agency sells you people. We sell the instrumentation. The thing worth knowing before you choose is that a lot of agencies license that instrumentation from someone like us and put their logo on it. Three of the eleven we researched say so outright, and the platforms themselves publish directories of the agencies that run on them, with paid subscription as the entry requirement. If what you need is content, digital PR and someone to ship the fixes, hire the agency, and this page will not pretend otherwise. If you are paying a retainer mainly to receive a monthly visibility report, you are renting a $349 dashboard at $3,500 a month.
- $349 a month against a $3,000 to $8,000 retainer, median $3,500.
- You do not have to switch. Hold the licence yourself and keep the agency for the work.
- Daily tracking. No agency we researched publishes daily tracking at any price.
- 5 answer engines
- 300 prompts, re-run daily
- 10 competitors tracked
- Unlimited team seats
7-day free trial. Cancel any month.
Trusted by teams tracking 100% of their AI answer share
The same job. The question is who does which part.
Sorted by whether it comes with the subscription, or needs a retainer and a person. We lose this count, and the reason we lose it is the honest argument for hiring an agency.
AI RanklyProfessional · $349/mo6 of 11
included at this price
- Daily tracking, every prompt, every engine
- 300 tracked prompts
- Cancel any month
- A price you can read before you talk to anyone
- Unlimited team seats
- Citation and share-of-voice tracking
- Content written and published for you
- Digital PR and earned media placement
- Fixes implemented on your site
- A prompt set built from customer interviews
- A named strategist accountable to you
7 of 11
included at this price
- Daily tracking, every prompt, every engine
- 300 tracked prompts
- Cancel any month
- A price you can read before you talk to anyone
- Unlimited team seats
- Citation and share-of-voice tracking
- Content written and published for you
- Digital PR and earned media placement
- Fixes implemented on your site
- A prompt set built from customer interviews
- A named strategist accountable to you
A $349 subscription against a typical retainer
| Feature | AI RanklyProfessional · $349/mo | AEO agenciesTypical retainer · $3,000–$8,000/mo |
|---|---|---|
| What the money buys each month | ||
| Price per month | $349 | $3,000–$8,000 |
| Tracked prompts at that price | 300 | 50 |
| How often the prompts re-run | Daily | Monthly |
| Minimum term | None | 3–12 months |
| Team seats | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Price published before a sales call | ||
| Who actually does the work | ||
| Content written, edited and published for you | ||
| Digital PR and earned media placement | ||
| Fixes implemented on your site | ||
| Prompt set built from customer interviews | ||
| Corrections to your G2, LinkedIn and Wikipedia entries | ||
| A named person accountable for the outcome | ||
| The dashboard underneath the retainer | ||
| Who builds the measurement | We do | Usually licensed |
| Agencies listed in the platforms' own directories | n/a | 40+ |
| What the platform costs the agency per client | You pay it directly | $27–$399 |
| Typical markup on a resold dashboard | None | 30–50% |
| You can see whose software it is | ||
| You keep the account if you leave | ||
| If you keep your agency | ||
| Who holds the subscription | You do | Usually the agency |
| You keep the data when the engagement ends | ||
| You see the raw answers, not a summary of them | ||
| Markup on the measurement | None | 30 to 50% |
| Your agency can work inside your account | ||
| Where an agency is worth the money | ||
| You have no one to do the work | ||
| You need volume: 20–60 articles a month | ||
| You need media relationships you don't have | ||
| You need someone to defend the budget to a board | ||
| You want the measurement, not the retainer | ||
| You want to see the data before you commit | ||
Every figure on this page was read from an agency's own pricing or services page, never from a directory or a "best GEO agencies" listicle. Two agencies still ranked on those lists turned out to be a parked domain and a redirect. We profiled eleven agencies across the US, UK and Europe, from a one-person consultancy to a 750-staff firm, plus 17 more providers that publish recurring prices. Read on August 31, 2026. Our pricing is public in full.
Measure it, then actually move it
Track
Every buyer question, re-run daily
Add the questions your buyers actually ask. We run them through every engine on your plan, every day, and capture the full answer text, not just whether you were named.
Cover
Five engines on the plan you buy
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, all included on Professional rather than parcelled out as add-ons or held back for a contract.
Benchmark
See exactly who gets recommended instead
Share of voice against the competitors you name, per prompt and per engine, so you can tell the difference between losing everywhere and losing one question that matters.
Act
Fixes drafted, not just findings filed
The supervised agent turns each gap into reviewable work: the page edit, the schema, the citation to chase. You approve it; you don't write it from scratch, and it isn't metered in credits.
You are probably paying a retainer for a subscription
Start with what an agency is genuinely for. Someone has to write twenty articles a month, interview your head of engineering to get them right, pitch the editor who owns the roundup you are missing from, correct your category on G2, open the pull request that fixes your schema, and sit in the quarterly meeting where the budget is defended. None of that is instrumentation, all of it moves AI visibility, and no subscription does any of it. If that is the gap, hire an agency. It is the right purchase and we would rather you made it.
Now the part the category does not advertise. We researched eleven agencies, from a one-person consultancy in Hertfordshire to a 750-person firm in Pennsylvania, and read their own pages rather than any directory. Three name the platform their AI-visibility reporting runs on. Two more admit only to using "AI search monitoring tools". You do not have to take their word for it either way, because the platforms publish the list: one names eighteen partner agencies and requires "the use of Profound as a customer" to be listed at all, another names thirteen and opens its directory only to "agencies who are Peec AI customers".
The good ones are upfront about it, and put it better than we would. One agency describes its own arrangement as "Profound is the measurement instrument; our work is reading the scan and delivering the treatment plan." Another tells clients plainly: "We partner with Scrunch for AI Search visibility tracking. You'll get tool access and capabilities, plus a trained team of analysts, minus the procurement headache." That is an honest offer, and for many buyers it is the right one. It is also, in both cases, a subscription with a service wrapped around it.
The vendors are franker still about the economics. One sells "discounted licences that let you offer AthenaHQ plus your agency's managed services, all for the same price a brand would typically pay for AthenaHQ alone", under the heading "More margin for you." Another tells partners to "buy at agency rates, bill at your own price", noting most mark up 30 to 50%. A third sells reports with "zero trace of a third-party tool". Not every agency works this way, and the most technical of them build their own tooling. But enough do that the question is worth asking out loud.
Which leaves a simple question to ask any agency you are considering, and it is a fair one: which of these am I paying you for? If the answer is the writing, the pitching and the shipping, that is worth a retainer. If the answer is mostly the reporting, the reporting is $349 a month and you can watch it update every day instead of reading it every thirty.
And you do not have to choose. The cheapest useful thing you can do is hold the subscription yourself and keep the agency for the work only people can do. You stop paying a markup on a tool, you see the raw answers rather than a monthly summary of them, and the account stays yours when the engagement ends. Agencies are generally fine with this, and some invite it: one told us plainly, "We run measurement on Profound, the platform many of our clients already use. If you already have Profound, we make it work harder." Bring your own instrument and the agency does more of what you hired it for.
Buy AI Rankly if what you are missing is the measurement, whether or not you keep your agency. Hire an agency if you need the content written, the publishers pitched and the fixes shipped, because a subscription does none of that. The two are not alternatives, and treating them as one is how people end up paying retainer rates for a dashboard.
Six months, three teams, numbers they signed off
E-commerce+244%
AI-referred sessions in six months
$5,600 in sales attributed to AI search.
E-commerce+193%
AI-referred sessions in six months
$32,462 in sales attributed to AI search, from zero.
B2B SaaS+900%
AI-referred sessions in six months
50 customers acquired from AI search, from zero.
Before you decide
Both, or either, depending on what is missing. If you have nobody to write content, pitch publishers and ship changes to your site, buy the agency, a subscription will not do that work and we are not going to claim it does. If you have a team and what you are missing is the measurement, buy the software directly. The expensive mistake is paying a retainer mainly to receive a monthly visibility report, because that report is usually generated by a tool that costs a fraction of the retainer.
Many do, and the honest ones say so in their own words. One describes the split as "Profound is the measurement instrument; our work is reading the scan and delivering the treatment plan." Another: "We partner with Scrunch for AI Search visibility tracking. You'll get tool access and capabilities, plus a trained team of analysts, minus the procurement headache." You can also check without asking: four platforms publish directories of partner agencies where paid subscription is the condition of entry, one requiring "the use of Profound as a customer", another open only to "agencies who are Peec AI customers". That is more than forty agencies documented by the vendors themselves. To be fair to the field, this is not universal, and some of the most technical agencies build their own tooling instead. The point is only that it is a fair question to ask before you sign.
A working retainer runs $3,000 to $8,000 a month, and the median of every published price we found is $3,500. Entry programmes start around $1,500, and the highest published tier we saw is $15,000. Above that, nothing is published anywhere, because enterprise is quoted privately, so treat any figure you see for it as someone's guess. One-off audits and sprints run $3,000–$7,500. Watch for two things a retainer often excludes: the media budget for placements, which one agency lists separately at $1,000–$3,000 a month, and the software licence.
Partly, yes, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. AI answers vary between runs, so a single day's movement on a single prompt is not a signal, whether a tool reports it or an agency does. What more frequent measurement buys you is a longer series and a consistent method: the same prompts, the same engines, scored the same way every day, with the underlying answers kept so you can audit any number back to the response that produced it. We would rather sell you that than a claim about statistical significance that neither we nor anyone else in this category can support.
Not completely, and neither can an agency. ChatGPT passes a referrer only some of the time, and analyses of large session samples find the majority of its traffic landing in analytics as direct. We connect what we can (GA4 and Search Console, AI-referred sessions and the landing pages they hit) and we show the gaps rather than modelling over them. Be sceptical of anyone in this category, us included, who offers a clean attribution story.
Yes, and it is usually the better move. Hold the subscription in your own name, invite your agency in as users, and keep paying them for the writing, the outreach and the implementation. Seats are unlimited on every plan, so adding them costs nothing. You stop paying a markup on the tool, you see the raw answers instead of a monthly summary, and if the engagement ends the account and its history stay with you. Some agencies actively prefer this, because it means they spend the retainer on work rather than on licences.
Four questions, and they are all fair. Which platform does our AI visibility reporting run on, and what does it cost you? Do we hold that licence, or do you? How often are our prompts actually re-run, as opposed to how often we get a report? And what would the retainer cost if we brought our own measurement? A good agency will answer all four straight away. Several we researched publish the answers on their own websites without being asked.
Yes, seven days on the plan you're considering, running its real engines against your own brand rather than a demo account. The prompts and competitors you set up during the trial carry straight over if you stay.
See where you actually stand
Find out how the engines answer about your brand today. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, on your own brand and your own engines, not a demo account.