Answer engine optimization (AEO) is priced one of two ways. Hourly or flat retainers bill for effort, commonly a few thousand dollars a month regardless of whether your brand gets cited. Outcome-leaning engagements start with a fixed-scope audit, then a retainer tied to citation work. FORKOFF's entry point is a $1,500 sandbox audit that maps where ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews currently cite your category and where you are missing, followed by a retainer by application with a 90-day minimum. The reason scope-first beats pure hourly in AEO is incentive alignment: citation-engineering is judged by whether answer engines actually quote you, so the work should be priced against that outcome, not against hours logged.
Traditional SEO is often priced on a deliverables checklist: so many pages, so many links, so many hours. AEO is judged differently, because the unit of success is a citation inside an AI-generated answer, not a ranking position on a page of ten blue links. That makes effort-based billing a poor fit: you can log many hours and still not get quoted. A scope-first model, a fixed audit followed by an outcome-tied retainer, prices the work against the thing the buyer actually wants, which is to be the source an answer engine repeats when their customer asks.
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