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FixAEO
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AEO ROI Calculator

See what Answer Engine Optimization is worth to your business. Move three sliders, get a transparent 12 / 24 / 36-month uplift forecast — with the math shown.

Your business

Tell us about your traffic

Use real numbers — the more honest your inputs, the more useful the output.

50,000

Total unique visitors per month across all channels.

2.0%

What % of visitors become paying customers / qualified leads.

$150

Avg revenue per customer — order value if e-commerce, ACV / LTV if SaaS.

AEO assumptions
12%

Extra visitors you'll capture once you rank inside AI answers, as a % of current traffic. Default 12% assumes AI search has 15-20% query share and you capture a fair share of cited queries.

1.5×

AI-cited visitors convert better — they arrive after an AI has pre-qualified your brand as the answer. 1.5× is the median across the studies we track.

Projected uplift

What AEO is worth to you

Cumulative AEO revenue over 24 months
$662,663
On top of your current $150,000/mo baseline. That's about 180 extra customers per month at steady state, from 6,000 new AI-sourced visitors.
AEO revenue, month by month
AEO uplift
$0$12k$24k$36k$48kM1M5M9M13M17M21M24
Year 1
$221k
Year 2
$442k
Year 3
—
How we calculate

AEO traffic = visitors × AI traffic lift %.
AEO conversions = AEO traffic × (conversion rate × AI lift multiplier).
AEO revenue/mo = AEO conversions × customer value.
Month-by-month grows via an S-curve from 0.4× → 1.6× of that steady state, because citations take time to compound.

Built to be defensible

Most ROI calculators are sales toys. This one is meant to survive a CFO conversation.

Industry-anchored math

Conversion lift, traffic share, and growth curve come from public data (Bain, Semrush, Ahrefs, Pew). The methodology is shown on the result card so you can sanity-check it.

S-curve, not hockey-stick

AEO compounds over 12-24 months. The chart reflects that — starts conservative, ramps as citations build. No false promises.

Tunable to your business

Three sliders cover your traffic, your conversion rate, your customer value. Two more let you stress-test the AEO assumptions. Every number is yours to override.

The model in plain English

Start with your baseline: visitors × conversion rate × customer value. That's what your site earns today.

AEO unlocks an additional stream of visitors — people who asked an AI assistant a buying-intent question and got pointed at your URL. We model that stream as a % of your current traffic, because in practice AI-cited traffic scales with the size of your existing audience and content surface area.

Those AI-sourced visitors convert better than generic organic — the AI has already pre-qualified your brand as the answer. We default to 1.5× the base conversion rate, which matches the median across published studies.

Finally, the curve. AEO doesn't move overnight. New schema has to be re-crawled. Citations have to compound. Competing brands shift. We model a logistic S-curve from 0.4× of steady state in month 1 to 1.6× by month 24. The total area under the curve is the cumulative uplift the calculator reports.

Frequently asked questions

The assumptions, the math, and the things to watch for.

Are these projections realistic?
They're directional estimates, not promises. The defaults are anchored to current industry data: AI search has roughly 15-20% query share as of 2026, AI-sourced visitors convert at about 1.5× the rate of generic organic visitors (because the AI has pre-qualified you as the answer), and citation share grows along an S-curve over 12-24 months as your structured data, llms.txt, and entity signals compound. Plug in your actuals and you'll get a reasonable midpoint.
Why is conversion 1.5× higher for AI traffic?
AI-cited visitors are bottom-of-funnel by construction. They asked an AI a buying-intent question, and the AI handed them your URL as the answer. That's a more qualified click than someone scrolling the SERP. Studies from Bain, Semrush, and Ahrefs all converge on roughly 1.4-1.7× conversion uplift for AI-cited landing pages over equivalent organic traffic.
What's the S-curve and why does it matter?
AEO doesn't move overnight. After you ship schema, llms.txt, and citation-building, AI crawlers need to re-fetch (weeks to months), models need to incorporate the new signals into their retrieval and (eventually) training, and competing brands shift around you. Empirically the lift starts at ~0.4× of steady state in the first quarter and reaches ~1.6× by month 18-24 as compounding kicks in. The chart reflects that ramp.
Where does 'AI traffic lift' come from?
It's the extra visitors AI search delivers on top of your current traffic, as a % of your existing baseline. 12% is the default we use because AI search is roughly 15-20% of total query share, and a well-optimized site can expect to capture a fair share of cited queries in its niche. If you're in a B2B SaaS niche where AI answers dominate (productivity, dev tools, AI itself), 20-30% is realistic. For e-commerce broadly, 5-10% is more conservative.
Should I adjust the defaults?
Yes — that's the point. The defaults give you a reasonable starting estimate, but use real numbers if you have them. Pull your actual monthly visitors from Google Analytics, actual conversion rate from your funnel data, and use LTV (not just first-order value) for customer value when your business is subscription-based.
What about churn / refunds / ad costs?
This calculator gives gross revenue uplift, not net profit. Subtract whatever your gross margin is to get profit contribution, and subtract your AEO tooling/agency spend to get net ROI. For most B2B SaaS the rule of thumb is: AEO is profitable if the year-1 uplift exceeds 3× your annual AEO spend, which is a low bar for most teams.
How do I actually capture this uplift?
The compounding pillars are: (1) structured data (schema.org markup for every important page), (2) llms.txt at your root, (3) clear answer-shaped content (H2 questions → factual answers), (4) entity citations (Wikipedia, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, industry directories — sameAs in your schema), and (5) freshness (publishing/updating regularly so crawlers re-fetch). FixAEO scans for all five and tells you where you're weakest.
Is this free?
Yes. The calculator runs entirely in your browser — no signup, no email. If you want a real assessment of where your site stands today across the six major AI engines, run the free FixAEO audit.

Like the number? See if it's reachable.

The free FixAEO audit checks your site against every signal in this model — schema, llms.txt, robots.txt, citation strength, and how your brand currently appears in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok.

Run a free AEO audit