The deliverables worth asking for
Everything below is checkable by you after the fact, which is the point. A deliverable you cannot verify without the vendor is not a deliverable.
| Deliverable | How to verify it landed | Yours after they leave? |
|---|---|---|
| A baseline score per template | Re-run the scan yourself and compare | Yes, it is a number you hold |
| A written bot and CDN rule decision | Read the config | Yes |
| Content negotiation in your stack | One curl with an Accept header | Yes, if it is your middleware |
| Structured data that matches the prose | Diff the two on any page | Yes |
| Fact-position changes per template | Character offset of the first fact | Yes |
| A miss log and a ranked backlog | It should be a list you can sort | Only if the log is on your server |
| A monthly report | Ask which log it reads | No, it ends with the retainer |
What you can produce yourself, free
Four of the seven rows above are free to produce with public tooling, which changes what the engagement should be worth rather than whether it is worth having.
- The baseline. The scan needs no account, and the spec is published so the number is checkable rather than proprietary.
- The bot-rule decision. An hour reading
robots.txtand your CDN rules and asking whether you would write each line today. - Content negotiation. Two lines of middleware. Free, unmetered, self-hostable, with no plan concept at the edge.
- The miss log. It comes from your own server once the gateway is running, which is also what makes it survive any vendor change.
curl -s -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://example.com/page | head -20
curl -s https://example.com/page | wc -cWhat is genuinely worth paying for
Two things, and neither is the technical setup. The first is judgement about your templates: knowing which facts a buyer in your category actually asks for, and restructuring pages around them. The second is writing, because answering real questions well is a skill and most teams do not have spare capacity for it.
Everything else in an AEO proposal is either a config change or a report. Both are fine to buy if you are short of time. Neither should be the bulk of a recurring retainer.