AEO versus agent experience: what to budget for
In short
AEO tracks whether AI answers mention and cite your brand. Agent experience is whether a customer's agent can find, read, act on, pay and trust your site. Budget them as separate lines with separate owners. AEO tools such as Scrunch start at 250 US dollars a month billed annually; most agent experience fixes are web team time.
Two different questions
| Criterion | AEO | Agent experience |
|---|---|---|
| The question | Do AI answers mention and cite us? | Can a customer's agent find, read, act on, pay and trust our site? |
| What is measured | Mentions and citations over time, by prompt. | Whether an agent finished the task, and which checks failed. |
| Typical tool | A tracking platform that re-runs prompts. | A scanner, an agent journey and your own task test. |
| Who owns it | Marketing or content. | Digital, ecommerce and the web team. |
| What failure looks like | A competitor is named and you are not. | The agent reaches your site and cannot finish. |
| Where the money goes | A subscription. | Web team time, plus a product project for any interface. |
The two share a cause but not a fix. Being cited depends on being readable; finishing a task depends on readable pages, standard forms and bot rules that let the agent in. See what to measure for tracking both as separate lines.
Which vendor is which
Vendors in this space sell different things under similar words. Ask each one which question its tool answers.
- 5 Nov 2026
Ora's home page on 5 Nov 2026 showed 145,922 sites scanned, an average score of 44 and 7 percent at B or above (vendor-published figures).
- 1 Jul 2026
All Cloudflare customers, including the Free plan, can block or allow Search, Agent and Training traffic separately since 1 July 2026.
- Read 4 Nov 2026
Scrunch's pricing page, read 4 Nov 2026, lists Starter at 250 US dollars a month billed annually (300 month to month) with 350 custom prompts, and Growth at 417 (500) with 700 custom prompts.
- Read 4 Nov 2026
Scrunch's pricing page describes AXP as a way to generate an AI-friendly version of a site but does not say which plans include it.
- Read 4 Nov 2026
Scrunch's home page markets Agent Pages to deliver an optimized experience to AI agents, and an Agent Traffic feature.
The vendors page scores Ora, Scrunch, Cloudflare and an agency on the same five questions.
What to budget for
- Fix the blockers. Answers hidden in JavaScript and 403 errors returned to agents are the two changes that stopped an agent in Ora's experiment.
- Track mentions if share of voice in AI answers matters to your sales. Price the tool against that question only.
- Fund an agent interface for one named task if a customer's agent finishing it is worth more than the project costs.
- 8 Oct 2026
Ora's lab found (8 Oct 2026) that agents clearly recommended agent-ready businesses in 20 percent of answers against 11 percent otherwise, matched on brand fame and citations elsewhere.
Sources
- Ora home page (ora.ai), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Cloudflare changelog: New options to manage AI traffic (1 Jul 2026) (developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-07-01-ai-traffic-options), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Scrunch pricing (scrunch.com/pricing), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Scrunch home page (scrunch.com), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026) (ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
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