SEO and marketing decision
AEO Engine
A technical user can build a narrower, self-hosted AEO pipeline (audit → generate → publish → track) but cannot cheaply reproduce the agency's human outreach, news/PR distribution, and scale of backlink placements that drive their guarantee.
Visit website↗$1,597/mo
$19,164/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off120 h to build
$400/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Run an audit to find AI visibility gaps, generate answer-ready content with an LLM, publish content+schema to the client's CMS, track AI citations and visibility across LLMs, and produce weekly performance reports.
What it still won’t have
- Human-managed outreach, negotiated placements and press distributions
- Large-scale link-building relationships and authority placements the agency promises
- White-glove account management and assigned strategists/agents
- The 90-day traffic-growth guarantee and ongoing operational workforce
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Trusted by 50+ brands
- Execution quality
You get everything a top-tier SEO firm provides - assigned specialists, Slack-based support, strategic reviews, and accountability - plus the advanced automation, structured data management, and AI trust signals that make your business visi
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build an MVP AEO platform using: Python (FastAPI) backend, Postgres, Redis for job queue, Next.js frontend, and OpenAI-compatible LLM API for content generation. Core features in scope: 1) site crawler and GA4/GSC ingestion endpoints; 2) a content-generation pipeline that produces answer-ready articles and JSON-LD schema; 3) CMS publishing integrations (WordPress REST API and generic headless CMS webhook) to push pages and schema; 4) scheduled AI-visibility checker that queries Perplexity/Gemini/ChatGPT endpoints or scrapes result pages and extracts citation snippets; 5) a weekly reporting endpoint and simple dashboard aggregating GA4/GSC metrics plus AI citations; 6) job retry, rate-limit handling, logging, and unit/integration tests for crawling, generation, publishing, and visibility checks. Out of scope: building a press-distribution network, managed human outreach squad, and guaranteed SLA-backed traffic uplift. Include error handling, monitoring alerts, pagination and backoff for APIs, and automated tests for the publish and visibility-check workflows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- 2 cited sources+1
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAEO Engine — official product
- official pricingAEO Engine Pricing — Growth plan
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
