An AEO retainer is a monthly fee for continuous work that gets your firm cited and recommended in AI answers. The three guides I compared describe six parts: a baseline, citation tracking, content, technical fixes, off-site authority work and a monthly review.

Two of the guides are UK-based, and I have set them against my own retainer. All of them sell the service, so read their figures as indicative, not as independent market research.

The six things the guides describe

A baseline audit

Month one records where your firm appears in AI answers today, for a fixed list of prompts. Every later report is measured against it, so a retainer without a baseline cannot show whether it worked.

Some agencies bill the audit separately. MarGen and Burns both report one-off setup fees of £1,500-£5,000 on top of the monthly fee.

Citation tracking and reporting

The agency runs the same prompts every month across named AI platforms and compares you with competitors. Stackmatix says a good report gives citation counts by platform and shows which prompts triggered each one. "Improved visibility" with no numbers is a weak report.

Content

Content volume is the clearest difference between tiers. The agency writes new pages and updates old ones so a language model can quote them: the answer comes first and an FAQ closes the page.

Check whether the fee covers the writing or only briefs. Burns warns that some agencies quote a low retainer, then add £500-£2,000 a month for the content the work depends on.

Technical and schema work

Schema is the structured data that labels a page's author and its FAQs for machines. A retainer should maintain it and confirm that AI crawlers can read your pages. It should also check heading structure and internal links.

Stackmatix advises asking which pages were changed each month. A vague claim of "ongoing optimisation" tells you nothing.

Off-site authority

What other sites say about you feeds what AI models say about you. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found that branded web mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.66 to 0.71, while link metrics such as the number of backlinks showed very weak correlations.

The work covers expert quotes, placements in industry press, community platforms such as Reddit and entity work such as a Wikipedia or Wikidata entry. MarGen includes third-party editorial placement from its £4,500-£8,500 tier and says the cheaper tiers do not.

A monthly review

A call or written summary of what moved and what to do next month. Stackmatix expects a monthly call at its starter tier and weekly calls at enterprise level.

What the price changes

MarGen's UK tiers show the pattern. At £1,500-£2,500 a month, it lists two or three content assets and basic tracking limited to Google's featured snippets and AI Overviews. At £4,500-£8,500, it lists eight to twelve assets a month, third-party placement, a named strategist and tracking on every main platform. Its top tier runs from £8,500 to £18,000 and above.

Burns, an independent UK consultant, puts solo-consultant retainers at £750-£1,500 and mid-market programmes at £2,500-£6,000, with enterprise work from £8,000. He lists what moves the price: how many competitors you track, how many platforms and priority prompts you cover, whether the agency writes the content or only briefs it, and how often it reports.

The two sets of figures overlap in the middle. Both authors sell at those prices, so use them to sense-check a quote, not to set a budget.

What my retainer includes

I sell one too, so here is mine on the same terms. My retainer includes:

  • Two articles a week, shifting to a mix of new pieces and updates to older ones once the priority list is covered.
  • Priority prompts first, with broader queries after.
  • Internal links built across the site, so a model can trace your expertise through several pages.
  • A Wikipedia and Wikidata submission where the firm qualifies. Wikipedia sets its own notability standards, so I cannot guarantee inclusion.
  • Content written ready for your PR agency to place, if you have one.
  • A monthly citation-tracking review that resets prompt targets as your positioning changes.

The weekly rhythm exists because a citation's median half-life is about four and a half weeks for content that exists in one place. Updating old pieces keeps earlier gains from fading.

It is built for firms past the "does this even work for us" question, whether that answer came from a sprint with me or with anyone else.

Questions to ask before you sign

  • Which prompts and platforms will you track, and can I see the list?
  • Does the fee cover writing the content, or only briefs?
  • Are setup fees and tool subscriptions inside the monthly price?
  • Which pages did you change last month?
  • Can I see a sample report with the client name removed?

A few common follow-up questions

Is the setup fee separate from the retainer?

Often. MarGen reports £1,500-£5,000 for the initial audit and entity foundation work, and Burns reports the same range for onboarding. Ask for the total first-year cost, not only the monthly figure.

Do retainers include the cost of tracking tools?

Not always. Burns lists AI citation trackers at £29-£999 a month and warns against paying for several at once. Ask whether the agency's tool cost sits inside the fee.

Should I start with a retainer?

Not as a first step, in my view. A time-boxed sprint shows whether AI search moves for your firm before you commit to monthly fees.