# [AEO services: what should exist when it is finished](https://rebilder.com/solutions/aeo-services)

> What an answer engine optimization engagement should leave behind, which deliverables are one-time, and the ones you can produce yourself free.

- **Updated:** 2026-08-17

Judge AEO services by what physically exists at the end. If the deliverable list is a slide deck and a score, you bought a report; if it includes a change to what your server sends, you bought the work.



## What you get

- The deliverable list an AEO engagement should produce
- Which artefacts keep working after the engagement ends
- What you can produce yourself with free tooling
- How to check each deliverable actually landed

## 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 |

> **The one that quietly is not yours** If the serving change lives on a vendor’s proxy rather than in your own middleware, it stops the day the contract does, and so does every number that depended on it. Ask where the code runs before you ask what it costs.

## 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](/spec/ars) so the number is checkable rather than proprietary.
- **The bot-rule decision.** An hour reading `robots.txt` and 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.

Verify the serving change yourself

```bash
curl -s -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://example.com/page | head -20
curl -s https://example.com/page | wc -c
```

## What 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.

## What this does not do

- We do not provide AEO services. We make the software the technical half runs on, and this page recommends no provider.
- It cannot make an assistant mention you. Assistants are not deterministic and no vendor controls their output, so a guaranteed citation is not a thing anyone can sell.
- It does not change what Google sees. Content negotiation returns the same substance in another format, and search crawlers keep receiving canonical HTML.
- We do not rank or review AEO providers. Nothing about a named third party is published without that domain owner’s verified opt-in.

## What do AEO services include?

Usually a baseline audit, a bot and CDN rule review, a serving-layer change, structured data corrections, page restructuring and ongoing reporting. Four of those are one-time and covered by free tooling.

## How do I verify AEO work was actually done?

Request one of your pages with `Accept: text/markdown` and look at what comes back, then re-run the readability scan and compare against the baseline. Both checks are free and neither needs the vendor.

## Should the serving change live on my infrastructure?

Yes, wherever possible. Middleware you own keeps working after the engagement ends; a vendor-hosted rewrite layer stops when the contract does, and takes your results with it.

## Can AEO services guarantee AI mentions?

No. Assistants are not deterministic and no vendor controls their output, so a guaranteed mention is not deliverable at any price by anyone.

## Related

- [Answer engine optimization: the method](https://rebilder.com/learn/answer-engine-optimization)
- [What is AEO?](https://rebilder.com/solutions/what-is-aeo)
- [AEO tool](https://rebilder.com/solutions/aeo-tool)
- [AI SEO services](https://rebilder.com/solutions/ai-seo-services)
- [The published readability spec](https://rebilder.com/spec/ars)