Is an AEO agency worth the cost? (India, D2C and marketplace brands)

Short answer: it is worth paying for when three things are true. Your buyers ask ChatGPT who to hire or what to buy. The agency shows you logged-out ChatGPT answers every week, not a score from a tool. And the fee sits inside work you already pay for, so you are not buying a second retainer for a channel that sends a handful of visitors.

Check 1: do your buyers ask ChatGPT before they buy?

AEO (answer engine optimization) is getting named inside AI answers such as ChatGPT. GEO and AI SEO mean the same work under other names. It pays when a buyer types a question like "marketing agencies in India that work on revenue share" and picks from the answer.

We can say this from our own site. In one week, people clicked through to us from a ChatGPT answer 82 times, most of them from our comparison of performance marketing agencies. That is a hiring question, and ChatGPT answers it with a shortlist. A definition question, such as "what is ACoS", it answers itself and sends nobody.

So test your own category first. Ask ChatGPT, logged out, the five questions your best customers asked before they bought. If it answers with brand names, AEO has something to work on. If it answers with an explanation and no names, there is nothing to win yet.

Check 2: an AEO agency should show you answers, not a dashboard score

Most agency pages promise "AI share of voice". Reddit buyers call this out, and they are right to ask what the number means. A score from a third-party tool depends on the prompts that tool chose.

Ask for this instead: a fixed list of questions, run logged out in a fresh chat every week, with a note of where you were named, in what position, and which of your pages it quoted. It is dull and it cannot be gamed.

We run exactly this on ourselves every week. The answer from that data is humbling: Google rank and being named are decided separately. Our Flipkart comparison post sat on Google's first page for "best flipkart marketing agency in india", and the same day ChatGPT left us off its answer to that question. An agency that reports only Google rank is measuring the wrong thing.

Check 3: ChatGPT's crawler reads HTML only, so ask what it sees on your site

OpenAI's crawler fetches the raw HTML and does not run JavaScript. We saw this in our own server logs. A site that builds its text with JavaScript looks empty to it. We found one competitor with 53 agency pages where about five had text the crawler could read.

Before paying anyone for AEO, ask them to show you your own server log lines for OpenAI's crawler and the pages it fetched. If they cannot, they are guessing.

What AEO costs in India

Published prices are thin, and the ones agencies do show usually sit inside a wider SEO plan, so a like-for-like comparison is hard. Ask any agency whether AEO is a separate line or part of the plan, and what the monthly figure covers.

With us, AEO is not a separate product. It is part of the monthly retainer or revenue share: a fixed fee from ₹25,000 plus GST a month (half our usual rate) with 5% to 10% of marketplace revenue, set per brand, or a package of up to ₹50,000 a month for brands doing ₹5 to 9 lakh a month on marketplaces. Additional services cost extra. The AEO work covers the crawler check, rewriting the pages ChatGPT should quote, new pages for the questions buyers ask, and the weekly logged-out check.

Questions to ask any AEO agency before you sign

1. Which questions will you track for us, and can I see the list?
2. Are the checks run logged out, in a fresh chat, every week?
3. Can you show OpenAI's crawler in my server log?
4. Which pages will you rewrite, and which will you leave alone because they already get cited?
5. What do you do if my Google rank and my ChatGPT answer disagree?
6. Is this a separate retainer, and what am I not getting if I only buy this?
7. How will I see the results each week?

Related: AI SEO services for Indian brands, how to rank on ChatGPT.