AEO Engine shows where AI-search budgets are going

A service around a new discovery surface

AEO Engine sells work intended to improve how often a company is cited in systems such as ChatGPT, Google’s AI experiences and Perplexity. The offer resembles a managed retainer: the customer pays for research, content and ongoing execution rather than buying a self-serve measurement tool alone.

Its published monthly plans are priced at $1,597 for Growth, $2,997 for Scale and from $10,000 for Enterprise. Those prices place the offer closer to a specialist agency relationship than a low-cost SaaS subscription.

What 51 subscriptions can support

TrustMRR reported 51 subscriptions and $130,017 in monthly recurring revenue, synchronised on 3 October 2026. Dividing those figures gives roughly $2,550 per subscription. That is an indicative average, not a disclosed customer-level price, and it can be affected by plan mix, discounts and the way Stripe subscriptions are counted.

The result matters because it shows buyers assigning real budget to visibility inside AI-generated answers. It does not prove that every intervention produces a citation or that the category will develop exactly like search-engine optimisation. The measurement methods and platforms are still changing.

Software can be the delivery system

AI businesses do not have to sell a dashboard. A narrow service can use software internally while the customer buys accountability, judgement and completed work. High contract values can fund human review during a period when the rules of the channel are unsettled.

The durable question is whether the service can connect its activity to useful business outcomes. Citation counts may be an intermediate signal. Qualified discovery, accurate representation and commercial results are harder measures, but they are what make the retainer defensible.