The short answer
GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are the practices of making a brand the answer AI assistants give when a buyer asks a category question. For a B2B technology marketing budget in 2026, that line replaces part of what search and demand-gen spend used to do, because discovery now starts in a chat window.
Why is there a budget line at all?
Because the buyer moved. 51% of B2B software buyers now start research with an AI chatbot, up from 29% a year earlier (G2, 2026). Among mid-market B2B SaaS CMOs, 84% use AI tools to discover vendors, up from 24% the year before (Wynter, January 2026). Buyers who arrive through AI search convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic traffic (Semrush, March 2026).
A marketing leader who owns a CAC number can't ignore a channel that converts at that rate. So the line appears, usually under one of three names: GEO, AEO, or simply "AI visibility."
What does the line usually buy?
Most teams fund one of three kinds of help. Each does something useful, and each tends to cover one part of the problem.
- A monitoring tool. Self-serve tiers run from about $100 to $500 per month (published 2026 pricing for Peec AI, Profound, Scrunch and Otterly). These tools show where and how often assistants mention you. Deciding what to change usually falls to someone in-house, so the value depends on whether that person has the hours.
- A GEO agency or a content retainer. Mid-market B2B agency retainers run $7,500 to $25,000 per month (New Perspective 2026; Jay Mount Consulting 2026). The strength is usually output: pages, posts, schema markup. Engagements vary in how much they test the message underneath, so it's worth asking how that gets decided.
- A positioning project. Productized sprints start around $15,000 and workshop-led engagements are reported at $50,000 to $100,000 or more (Genesys Growth 2026; April Dunford, reported). You come away with a sharp message. Execution and ongoing measurement are often scoped as separate work.
What is the question to ask before funding it?
One question: how will we know if the message is landing?
AI assistants repeat the story they can pin down. If your website, your founder, your sales deck and your ads each say something slightly different, an assistant has nothing consistent to retrieve. More monitoring or more content won't fix that on its own. So when you compare options, look for one that covers the whole loop: the one message the brand should own, execution against it, and a weekly measure of whether buyers and AI assistants remember it.
That loop is how A-square works, and Memory Score is the measure behind it. It's a 0-100 score built from four signals of 25 points each, shown next to CAC every week. The full definition is on the Memory Score page, and the comparison page sets the options side by side with sourced price ranges.
What should the line be measured on?
Impressions say little here. Three things move when the message is right, and all three are countable: acquisition cost, Memory Score movement on a fixed prompt set, and pipeline traced back to the work. Agree the thresholds before the work starts, against a baseline locked before anyone touches anything. Whichever partner you pick, how they handle that conversation tells you a lot about how they'll measure the work later.
