How to choose an AEO agency comes down to a different set of evaluation criteria when nobody on your side can write a page or chase a listing. The usual advice ranks price, case studies and engines covered. With no in-house SEO or content team, the first criterion is whether the provider does the work itself, because an answer engine optimization provider that drafts and recommends leaves the publishing to a person you do not have. Of ten services we scored from their own websites on October 5, 2026, six say they ship the changes; four of those let you stop after one round; two of those four print a price. That narrows the list before any sales call.
How to choose an AEO agency: the evaluation criteria, in the order a team of none should apply them
The five criteria are the ones we used to score the ten services in the best AEO services for seed-stage B2B startups; every one can be checked on the vendor's own site in about ten minutes. What changes without a team is the order.
| Order | Criterion | Full point when the vendor's own site says... | Why it moves up without a team |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | They ship the changes | ...it writes and publishes the pages and works on the third-party sources, rather than recommending them | A monitoring tool or an advisory retainer produces a to-do list for a marketer; with no marketer the list sits there |
| 2 | You can stop after one round | ...month to month, a single project or a pilot, with no three-month minimum | A team that cannot judge the work itself needs a dated re-test before it commits further |
| 3 | A price on the page | ...a price or a starting price, not a budget dropdown on a contact form | Without a team you also have nobody to run the vendor comparison; a printed price does it for you |
| 4 | The method is shown | ...how many times each question runs and on which engines, or a sample report | One ask per question is a coin flip; you need to know what you will be shown |
| 5 | Results you can check | ...a client's before and after together with the questions it was measured on, and no promised position | Rarely available at any price in this category today, so it decides little |
Half points go to a vendor that drafts but leaves writing or publishing to your team, as Humans with AI does, to month-to-month that requires a paid project first, as Optimist's does, and to engines named without the number of runs. A promised ranking sets the fifth criterion to zero.
What the ten vendors' own pages say on the first three
From each vendor's pricing, service and terms pages as read on October 5, 2026. The scores are the ones in the post linked above; our own row is scored by the same rules and left out of the ranking there.
| Service | Ships the changes | Stop after one round | Price on the page | Says it is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discovered Labs | 1 | 1 | 1 (from €7,995 a month, month to month) | Series A and later B2B SaaS |
| RevenueZen | 1 | 1 | 1 ($3,000 a month is monitoring and a report; the full program starts at $10,000) | B2B tech, startups included |
| GTM 8020 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Pre-seed to Series A |
| Demand Curve | 1 | 1 | 0 | Seed to scale |
| Omniscient Digital | 1 | 0 (plans in quarters) | 1 (from $10,000 a month) | B2B with product-market fit |
| Avenue Z | 1 | 0 | 0 | Growth companies, fintech, B2B software |
| Humans with AI | 0.5 (its agents draft, your marketer publishes) | 1 | 1 (from $149 a month) | Small teams; one marketer |
| GrowPad | 0.5 (some writing, coaches your team) | 0.5 | 1 (from $2,000 a month) | Seed to Series B SaaS |
| Optimist | 0.5 ("We don't take the keyboard") | 0.5 | 1 ($7,500 roadmap, then from $3,000 a month) | Series A to IPO |
| ClawWorld (us) | 1 | 1 | 1 ($690 a month; a two-month pilot of $1,380 first) | Seed-stage B2B startups |
Read column by column, not by total. Four services score a full point on both of the first two criteria: Discovered Labs, RevenueZen, GTM 8020 and Demand Curve. Two of those print a price, and one of the two, RevenueZen, prints a price whose lowest tier is monitoring and a written report, so the number to budget is the $10,000 tier. Discovered Labs says in its own words who it is for, "the fastest-growing Series A+ SaaS companies," and its diagnostic alone is €4,370.
What two AI engines said when we asked them this
We put the question to Claude and to GPT-6 Sol on September 28 and again on October 12, five fresh sessions each, web search on. Claude named at least one provider in 4 of 5 answers in September, most often Profound, a monitoring tool, and in 2 of 5 in October, having searched the web in 2 of its 5 answers the first time and 0 of 5 the second. GPT-6 Sol named nobody in all 10. On October 20, asked once, Claude searched and named one agency; GPT-6 Sol searched and named none. An engine that answers a "how to choose" question from memory, with a tool as the example, is the reason this post exists.
The engines' answer to the neighbouring question is worth more. Asked on September 28 whether a small team should buy a monitoring tool like Profound or Peec or a managed service, Claude said the tool in 5 of 5 answers and GPT-6 Sol said the service in 5 of 5. The split followed what each engine read: Claude mostly third-party review and pricing posts, GPT-6 Sol mostly the vendors' own pages, one of which says its team executes its recommendations. Both are partly right, and the deciding fact is the one in your own org chart: a tool is the right buy if someone will act on it weekly, and you are reading this because nobody will.
One more thing Claude said, in 9 of its 10 answers to the best-agencies question that day, in one of them in these words: "Almost every 'best AEO agency' list you'll find is published by an AEO agency, and it ranks itself at or near the top." Our check agreed: of eight agencies we read, seven publish their own list and six of those put themselves first. Treat any list, including ours, as a set of claims to verify on the vendor's site.
The verdict for a team with nobody to publish
If the budget is above about €8,000 a month and the company is Series A or later, Discovered Labs is the row that scores full on all of the first three criteria and says it is built for you. If the budget is $2,000 to $4,000, the services that print a price at that level, GrowPad and Optimist's advisory tier, each score half on shipping the changes, which means a person on your side still publishes; without that person, the money buys a plan. Below $2,000 two rows are left: a $149 platform that scores half because your marketer publishes what it drafts, and our own, which you should discount for the reason in the next paragraph. The honest alternative at that budget is one contractor for a few hours a week plus a $95 to $149 tool, and that contractor is the in-house person you said you lack.
Our row is scored by criteria we wrote, and two of them, a printed price and a way out after one round, reward exactly how we sell. The criterion we are weakest on is the fifth: we have no client before-and-after to publish, and on category questions our own site's number is still zero, 0 of 200 answers on October 12, which is on our Lab page in full. In 50 baseline reports on seed-stage B2B companies in September, the company was named in 81 of 1,679 answers and 18 of the 50 never once, so a zero at the start is the normal starting point for the companies this post is for, not a verdict on any vendor.
Five questions for the first call
- How many times is each question asked per engine per round? We ask five; if the answer is once, every number is a coin flip.
- Which brands do you measure that you do no work for, in the same runs? Profound and Peec are ours; their drift is what a real change is read against.
- Can I download the judged answers, one row per answer, with the engine, the date and what was cited?
- Where is the list of what you changed on and off my site, with the page and the date?
- What did your last report say when nothing moved? A vendor who has never reported a flat round has either never had one or never said so.
How we checked
Vendor scores and prices: each vendor's own pricing, service, terms and case pages, rendered in a browser on October 5, 2026, nothing from third-party roundups. Engine answers: our rounds of September 28 and October 12, 20 buyer questions with five samples each on Claude Opus 5 with web search and GPT-6 Sol through Codex with web search, and the daily readout of October 20 with one sample each. The 50-company figures are the free baseline reports of September 2026, recounted on October 4 from each report's own verdicts. If anything here about your company is wrong, write to hello@claw-world.app and we will correct it with a dated note.
Disclosure
ClawWorld is an AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) service for B2B startups based in New York, and it competes with every service in the table. None was contacted about this post or paid to appear in it.