How much does AI SEO cost? What drives the price, and what ours includes
AI SEO and GEO quotes run from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands a month. What actually drives the price, what you should get at each level, and the full breakdown of what our $1,000 a month covers.
"How much should AI SEO cost?" is a fair question with a frustrating answer: anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands a month, for services with the same name. We can't give you a market average we'd trust, and we'd be suspicious of anyone who claims one.
What we can do is show what drives the price, what you should get for it, and exactly what's in ours.
What drives the price
Pages per month. Writing a well-researched, accurate, cited-worthy article takes hours. A plan with 12 in-depth pages a month costs more than one with two, if the pages are real.
Technical work. Fixing crawler access, rendering, schema, internal links and speed takes developer time. Some agencies send a report and leave the fixes to you. Others ship them. The second costs more and is worth more.
Measurement. Tracking a fixed list of questions across four assistants with repeated runs is real work every month. A screenshot is cheap. A method is not.
Who does it. An agency with account managers, a strategist and writers prices differently from a specialist doing the work directly.
Contract terms. Long minimums lower the monthly price and raise your risk.
What you should get at any price
If a provider can't say yes to these, the price doesn't matter:
- An AI crawler access check, covering robots.txt and CDN or firewall bot settings for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot. Why that's step one.
- A fixed list of buyer questions, agreed with you, tracked across several assistants with repeated runs. In our study ChatGPT kept only 4.5% of its cited pages across three runs of the same question, so single checks are noise. The method.
- A set number of deliverables you can count each month.
- A report that states its limits. What was measured, how, and what it can't tell you.
- No guarantees of placement. Anyone guaranteeing ChatGPT recommendations is selling something they can't control.
What ours includes, in full
Our AI search optimization plan is $1,000 a month. Every month:
- Citation tracking: your buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, three runs each
- 12 in-depth articles, comparison and alternatives pages included
- 50+ fixes to pages you already have: crawler access, rendering, schema, titles, internal links
- Every change made in your site or CMS and listed, so you can see exactly what changed
- A Friday changelog and a month-end citation report
Plus a free tool when your category has room for one. No contract; if you're not satisfied, tell us and we stop 30 days later. The first month is covered by a 100% money-back guarantee: ask within 30 days and you get all of it back. Five clients at a time, because nothing is outsourced.
For local home service businesses that mainly need Google Maps and local pages, our local plans start lower and may fit better.
How to compare quotes
Put every quote in the same table:
| Quote A | Quote B | Ours | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $1,000 | ||
| New pages a month | 12 | ||
| Fixes a month | 50+ | ||
| Who ships the fixes | we do | ||
| Assistants tracked | 4 | ||
| Runs per question | 3 | ||
| Minimum term | None | ||
| Placement guarantee | None, by design |
Fill in the blanks by asking. If a provider won't answer, that's your answer. More questions to ask in how to hire an AI SEO agency.
What we'd skip paying for
- llms.txt as a line item. Google said in 2025 that no AI system uses it. Details.
- "AI schema packages." Google says there's no special schema for its AI features. Schema for AI search.
- One-off "AI audits" with no fixes. Unless the price is low and the findings are specific, you're paying for a list.
Next steps
Start free: run the AI crawler check on your site. If it's clean, you know the first item on any quote is already done. If it isn't, you know what to ask for first.
Then, if the plan above fits, book a call. It's 20 minutes, we'll have looked at your site before we talk, and you'll leave with the first fixes either way.
Frequently asked questions
How much does AI SEO cost per month?
Quotes vary widely, and we don't know of a trustworthy market average. What you should look at is the monthly deliverables: how many pages, how many fixes, which assistants are tracked and how. Our own AI search optimization plan is $1,000 a month with no contract and the deliverables listed on the page.
Is AI SEO more expensive than regular SEO?
It shouldn't be much more. Most AI SEO work is SEO work. The additions are AI crawler checks and measuring answers across assistants, which take time each month but not a separate team.
What should a monthly AI SEO retainer include?
At minimum: an AI crawler access check, a fixed list of buyer questions tracked across several assistants with repeated runs, a set number of new or improved pages each month, technical fixes, and a report that shows what changed and what the measurement can't tell you.
