How much does an AEO agency in Hong Kong cost?
Ours is published rather than quoted on request: a one-off onboarding fee of HK$3,800, then either HK$4,800 a month for Watch (monthly 5-engine audit, 20 hand-re-tested queries, 3 competitor baselines, a written report) or HK$12,800 a month for Grow (everything in Watch, plus 50 queries, two pieces of AEO content a month, Schema implementation, citation outreach and a 45-minute strategy call). Across the wider Hong Kong market, AI search optimisation is usually sold as a monthly retainer rather than a project fee, and most firms will not publish a number at all — which makes comparison hard and is a reason we publish ours. Treat any quote that is dramatically cheaper with the five criteria on this page: at the low end, what is usually being sold is a traditional SEO retainer with an AEO cover page.
How long until results?
Honestly: months, and the first thing to move is not the thing you care about most. Technical foundations — crawlability, entity consistency, schema, llms.txt — can be fixed in weeks and show up in a score quickly. In one published client project the total score went from 46 to 67 in 76 days on an identical rubric. But in that same project the AI citation rate across 22 queries was 0/22 before and 0/22 after, because citation depends on things code cannot reach: a Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, third-party links and editorial coverage, plus whenever each engine decides to re-crawl you. Models with live grounding, such as Perplexity, reflect changes fastest; models answering from training data are slowest of all. Anyone promising results in weeks is describing the easy half only.
What is the difference between an AEO agency and an SEO agency?
An SEO agency optimises for a results page: rankings, clicks, organic sessions. An AEO agency — answer engine optimisation, also called AI search optimisation — optimises for the answer itself: whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity name your business when a buyer asks who is good at something, how accurately they describe you, and whether they cite you as a source. The work overlaps at the technical layer (crawlability, structured data, clean entity data are good for both), and diverges at the reporting layer. That divergence is the fastest way to tell the two apart: if the monthly report shows keyword positions and traffic, you bought SEO. If it shows the share of a fixed query set where your brand was mentioned or cited, and the raw engine replies, you bought AEO. A second, checkable tell is pricing: of the 8 Hong Kong agencies selling AEO or GEO that we reviewed in September 2026, 7 published no prices at all — only one listed starting fees. Ask for the query set and the price before you ask about the framework.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice, yes — they are competing labels for the same discipline. AEO stands for answer engine optimisation and GEO for generative engine optimisation; you will also see LLMO (large language model optimisation) and simply "AI search optimisation". No standards body owns any of them, and the deliverables behind them are the same: make your entity data consistent, make the site crawlable by AI user agents, publish answer-first content and structured data, and measure what the engines actually say. We use AEO as the primary term with GEO as an alias, which is partly a Hong Kong problem: in an English search here, the bare acronym "AEO" mostly returns the customs Authorized Economic Operator scheme, so the phrase is nearly always worth disambiguating. If a prospective agency insists its GEO framework is fundamentally different from AEO, ask criterion 03 — which files do you change — and see if the answer differs.
Is this the same AEO as the customs Authorized Economic Operator scheme?
No, and the collision is worth knowing about because it affects your own searching. Authorized Economic Operator is a Hong Kong Customs and Excise trade-facilitation programme for certified supply-chain operators, and it dominates the English search results here for the bare acronym — government and certification-body pages fill the first screen, and marketing results appear well below. The AEO on this page is answer engine optimisation, a digital marketing discipline with no connection to customs compliance whatsoever. Practical consequence: when researching providers, search "answer engine optimisation Hong Kong", "AI search optimisation Hong Kong" or "GEO agency Hong Kong" rather than "AEO Hong Kong", or you will spend your afternoon reading about certified importers.
Do I need an English website to work with you?
No — and for most of our clients an English site is not the priority. Our measurement is built around Cantonese probe prompts and a Hong Kong market frame, because that is how buyers here actually ask an assistant for a recommendation. A Traditional Chinese site is a perfectly good subject for the work; what matters is whether AI crawlers can read it, whether your entity data is consistent, and whether the content answers questions directly. An English version becomes worth adding when you sell across the region or to overseas buyers, in which case the correct pattern is a proper bilingual setup with reciprocal hreflang, not a machine-translated mirror. We can advise on that as part of the technical work, but nobody should rebuild their site in English as a precondition for measuring their AI visibility.
Is the report in English?
No. Both the free diagnostic report and the monthly client report are written in Traditional Chinese, and the probe prompts are generated in Cantonese. There is currently no English report and no locale switch, and we would rather state that here than have you discover it after waiting 1–2 minutes for a check to finish. The parts that travel across languages regardless are the numeric scores and their five sub-scores, the raw AI replies, the competitor names and the generated Schema.org JSON-LD — which, for a technical reader, is most of the actionable content. If you need an English-language reporting layer, say so when you get in touch: it is a reasonable request and we will tell you honestly whether and when we can do it, rather than promising it and improvising later.
Can you guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my business?
No, and you should treat any agency that says yes as disqualified. What an engine outputs is controlled by the model provider, its training data, its retrieval layer and its re-crawl schedule — none of which any agency can direct. What can be committed to is the work and the measurement: a dated baseline, a fixed query set re-tested by hand each month, file-level technical fixes you can verify yourself with curl or view-source, and a written report showing movement in both directions. Our own published record includes a client project where the technical score rose 21 points while the AI citation rate stayed at 0 out of 22 queries, and our own site moving only 41 to 43 across 165 days. Those are the numbers an honest guarantee-free engagement produces, and they are on this site because they are true.