AEO Across 10 Client Domains: Which Delivery Model Keeps the Margin?

You sold AEO to your tenth client. The dashboard is the cheapest line item on the invoice, but it may be the most expensive way to deliver what you sold. If you run an agency with 10 client domains and a small team already handling SEO and reporting, your contenders are a monitoring tool plus your staff, a resold white-label agency, and a flat-rate execution platform like groas.

I used to run the tool-plus-staff model. The subscription looked harmless; the writing, technical fixes and publishing ate the margin. My pick for this 10-domain agency is flat-rate execution, provided the $299 per-account price covers the work you would otherwise pay people or a partner to do. A dashboard measures the obligation. It does not discharge it.

The contenders: who actually does the work?

Model A: monitoring tool plus your staff. You buy something like Otterly, Peec, Profound or Scrunch to track prompts and citations. Then your team writes content, fixes technical issues and publishes it. Entry prices look modest: Otterly Lite is $29/month for 15 prompts, Peec Essential is $245/month, and Profound Agency Growth starts at $99/month plus $399/month per client workspace. Those prices buy software, not your team’s time.

Model B: resell a white-label agency. A partner does the work, you keep your name on the client relationship and charge a spread. Published white-label SEO wholesale pricing runs from $300 to $5,000+ per client per month, with standard packages commonly listed at $500 to $1,500. That is a pricing reference, not a promise that an AEO package includes every fix you need. Get the deliverables in writing.

Model C: flat-rate execution. With groas, you pay a flat $299 a month per client account, per service, for content, technical fixes, citations and weekly Google and AI visibility tracking, reported under your brand, with a minimum of 5 accounts. Because the price is public, you can compare it directly against the work it replaces. That distinction, who actually ships the fix, is also the point of AI Visibility Tools vs. Agencies vs. Done-for-You.

Axis 1: a citation report is not a published fix

Most AEO tools tell you whether a client was cited. The agency still has to turn that observation into a page, a technical change or a citation worth earning. Profound’s diagnostics identify issues, but the fix is left to the client’s CMS. Scrunch has an Agent Experience Platform that serves restructured pages to AI bots at the CDN edge; that capability is Enterprise-only, while Core covers audits rather than edge delivery. These are different products doing different jobs. Neither makes a monitoring subscription an entire delivery team.

I learned this by selling the outcome, then discovering the tool sold me a measurement of the outcome. When share of voice falls across 10 clients, the dashboard can flag the drop. Someone still has to decide what to change, write or revise pages, handle technical blocks and publish through 10 CMS setups. The alert is fast. The work is not.

A white-label partner takes more of that work off your desk, though you inherit its scope and queue. Flat-rate execution is the stronger fit when you want the reporting and the changes shipped without building another production team. If the product stops at a score, you bought a to-do list generator. Price it as one.

Axis 2: prompt caps turn a cheap plan into a different purchase

Agency AEO math is decided by prompt caps, engines and client workspaces, not just seats. Ten clients tracking 40 prompts each need capacity for 400 prompts. One published comparison prices that workload at Geoptie Enterprise $399/month, Peec Scale $795/month, Semrush $990/month and Profound $4,089/month. That is a wide spread before your team acts on a single finding.

The plans do not package that capacity the same way. Profound lists $399/month per client workspace for 100 prompts across three engines, on top of its Agency Growth base price. Scrunch Core lists $250/month for 125 prompts; Agency Core lists $500/month for 250 prompts across three brands. Otterly Premium lists 400 prompts at $489/month. A total prompt allowance is not automatically a 10-client plan. Check how the vendor counts brands, workspaces and engines before you put its price into a proposal.

One client may want ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews covered. Base plans do not all include that mix; some put engines behind add-ons or higher tiers. A plan that works for five clients can become a top-tier or custom conversation at 10 or 15. White-label partners have package boundaries too, even when the prompt limit is hidden behind a deliverables list.

Budget for 40 prompts per client across the engines your clients expect, then check all 10 domains against the actual plan. Otherwise you are budgeting for the demo, not the service.

Axis 3: setup and publishing are where the hours hide

The demo rarely shows the setup call. AEO work can require a log source, a Vercel or Cloudflare connection or a fuller DNS change, plus GA4 authentication and IP filtering to keep internal traffic out of the data. Tool-only plans leave that implementation to the agency or its developers. Multiply the access requests by 10 hosts, 10 sets of permissions and 10 clients who believe someone else has the Cloudflare login. I once spent three weeks waiting for one client to find theirs. That was one domain.

The publishing layer has the same problem. Staffed entity and knowledge-graph setup is listed at $500 to $2,000, with $200 to $500 per month for maintenance. Then somebody needs to get approved content into each CMS. If your team pastes articles into WordPress, Shopify and Webflow by hand, a monitoring tool has not automated delivery. It has given you a publishing queue.

A white-label agency can absorb production, but you still need to establish who gets access, who makes technical changes and who presses publish. For flat-rate execution, verify those same handoffs before onboarding rather than assuming every client’s setup is identical. My test is simple: if setup needs my developer and publishing needs my VA, I still own the delivery labor. The fuller handoff checklist is in Agency AEO: Managing Knowledge Graphs and Auto-Publishing to Client CMS.

Axis 4: white label means more than a logo on a PDF

A client-facing report is only useful if you can send it without rebuilding it on Sunday night. LLM Pulse describes several levels of white label: a partial version may retain a Powered-by footer, a full version removes vendor mentions behind a custom domain, and an embed puts a view inside your portal. Its Starter plan lists 50 prompts at 49 euros per month and Growth lists 150 at 99 euros. Agencies using it report charging an additional $500 to $2,000 per month per client for AEO. That is potential client revenue, not proof that the reporting tool delivers the work behind the retainer.

At another end of the reporting question, Profound does not include white label on Agency Growth and has no API. A screenshot is not your client portal. With a resold agency, check exactly whose name appears on the work and who answers when a client questions it.

groas reports under your branding; its strategist supports your team rather than taking over the client relationship, and its weekly report is ready to forward under your name. The test is whether you can send the report and stand behind the work without assembling either one yourself. Keep ownership of the relationship. Stop treating report formatting as a margin strategy.

The 10-domain bill: listed prices first, hidden work second

Start with the number a pricing page makes easy to compare. At 400 prompts across 10 clients, the listed monitoring examples run from $399 to $4,089 per month, depending on the vendor and its plan structure (Geoptie through Profound pricing). That range is for monitoring capacity, not completed AEO delivery. White-label SEO’s commonly listed wholesale range is $5,000 to $15,000 per month for 10 standard packages at $500 to $1,500 each (wholesale pricing). Flat-rate execution with groas is $299 a month per client account, per service, so 10 domains on one service come to $2,990 per month.

Here are the line items. Do not add the staff and article examples blindly if the same person writes those articles; they illustrate separate kinds of work, not a universal invoice.

The one-off column matters. Audits and entity setup do not recur at the same rate as publishing and maintenance, but they can take a large bite out of the first months of a retainer. The recurring column matters more over time: in the example above, four $200 articles per client total $8,000 each month before monitoring, maintenance or separate publishing labor. I used to tell clients the software was the investment. I was wrong. It was the receipt for the obligation.

Resale makes the labor easier to see because it arrives as a wholesale invoice. At $700 per client, 10 packages cost $7,000 per month before your account-management time. A 50% to 200% markup on a $700 package puts the client price at $1,050 to $2,100, not $1,400 to $2,100; the latter starts at a 100% markup. Ask what happens to minimums when a client pauses. For more on how easily a low entry price hides the rest of the service, see the AEO Pricing Page Teardown.

The flat-rate case is different: the per-account fee covers execution rather than buying you another list of tasks. It does not replace your client communication, ad spend or the strategy calls you choose to keep. Take the 10-domain total ($2,990 a month for one service), put it beside the partner’s scope and the labor your tool model requires, and judge the margin on delivery cost. The dashboard’s subscription is not the cost of serving the client.

The verdict for the agency with 10 domains

Model A is worth choosing if you already have content and technical staff with spare capacity and fewer than five AEO clients. Then the dashboard may be the sensible incremental purchase. Model B is the pick if you want a human delivery partner, can verify its AEO scope and already sell retainers large enough to cover wholesale plus your account calls. If you sell audits only, or a client insists every word go through its in-house writers, skip Model C and sell the narrower service honestly.

For the agency in this comparison, I pick Model C. Ten domains turn a cheap monitoring plan into 10 production schedules, while resale puts your margin at the mercy of package scope and minimums. Flat-rate execution puts the delivery work inside a flat per-account price you can check before you sell the retainer. I ran Model A. I priced the software and donated the labor.

The cheapest mistake is buying a $29 plan with 15 prompts and thinking you bought AEO delivery. The most expensive one is staffing the writing, fixing and publishing across 10 domains at hourly rates while charging a flat $800 retainer.