AEO and SEO: one bill or two?
The honest answer is that they overlap heavily, and the size of the overlap is the whole commercial question. This page is about telling the genuinely new work from the work you already pay for.
Where they are the same work
Consistent business details across the web. Clear pages that answer the question they claim to answer. A complete and accurate Google Business Profile. Reviews in volume and in detail. Mentions on third-party sites that already have standing. Every one of those feeds both ordinary search results and the answers these engines generate, and every one of them sits in a normal search retainer already.
One agency on our board states this outright and declines to sell four services for it. That position is defensible and rare, and it is the position to hold a proposal against.
Where the work genuinely differs
- Crawler permissions
- Search crawlers and AI crawlers are separate user agents with separate controls. Your robots.txt may permit one and block the other, and nothing in conventional search work would catch it.
- Where the answer sits
- Search rewards a page that is comprehensively about a topic. Answer engines lift passages, so a self-contained paragraph matters in a way it did not before.
- What you are measuring
- Position is stable and checkable. An engine answer is non-deterministic, so the unit changes from a rank to a rate across many runs. That is a different reporting apparatus, and it is real work.
- Identity resolution
- Search tolerates ambiguity about which business you are. A system assembling an answer from several sources discards what it cannot reconcile, so inconsistency now costs inclusion rather than a little confidence.
How to read a proposal
Put the two scopes side by side and strike out every line that appears in both. What remains is what you are actually buying. If nothing remains, you have one service with two names on it, and that is worth saying out loud before you sign rather than six months in.
A worked version: a contractor is quoted $2,400 for search and $1,800 for answer-engine work. Striking out the overlap leaves crawler configuration, a prompt set with monthly runs, and content restructuring for extractability. That is genuine work and it is not $1,800 a month of it. The conversation that follows is a reasonable one to have.
The framing to refuse
That search is dead. It is not, the same signals feed both, and a company telling you otherwise is describing a market condition that would conveniently require a second retainer. The agency on our board that says this most plainly also says that if your service pages are thin and you have eleven reviews, AI search is not your problem. That is the more useful sentence.