Pricing guide
AI search optimization is priced in three bands. Monitoring-only tools publish roughly $29 to $489 per month, with enterprise tiers above that. Direct-to-brand done-for-you retainers are commonly $6,000, $10,000 or $15,000 per month. Wholesale programmes bought through an agency start lower, from around $450 per client per month for tracking and reporting and around $2,200 with execution included.
Almost nobody in this category publishes numbers, which makes the first quote a buyer receives impossible to judge. This guide sets out the published bands and what a fair contract looks like. The same figures apply whether a provider calls the work AEO, GEO or LLM SEO; the three names describe one practice.
Every quote in this category covers two different things, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake a buyer makes.
The first is measurement: asking the engines the questions your buyers ask, logging every answer, and recording which sources were cited. This part is genuinely cheap to produce. A full four-engine audit of one brand costs single-digit dollars in API spend, and a Google AI Overview query costs about $0.002. Nothing about querying an engine is expensive.
The second is execution: publishing citable pages, correcting entity records, fixing technical citability, and securing third-party mentions. This is where the hours and the judgment sit, and it is what the price of a real programme reflects.
That gap explains the whole market. A monitoring tool sells the cheap half at a software price; a retainer sells the expensive half and includes the cheap half. When a provider charges a retainer and delivers only a dashboard, the arithmetic above is the argument against it.
| Band | Published price | What it delivers | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring tools | ~$29–489/mo | Dashboards, prompt tracking, alerts. No work performed. | Teams with in-house content and PR capacity who only need the scoreboard. |
| Agency retainer | Set by the agency | The agency's own account team, usually with a wholesale provider behind it. | Brands that already have an agency relationship and want AEO added to it. |
| Direct done-for-you | $6,000 / $10,000 / $15,000 per month | Full measurement and execution, banded by client revenue, with add-ons billed separately. | Brands buying the category leader directly and paying retail for it. |
| Wholesale | Audit $1,200; from $450, $600 or $2,200 per client per month | The same measurement and execution, delivered under the agency's brand. | Agencies reselling to their own clients. |
The tiered figures are taken from the publicly listed rate card of an established direct provider in this category, verified August 2026. That card bands the retainer by client revenue and prices add-ons separately: around $250 per secured mention and around $600 per 10 community posts. The wholesale figures are our own, published on our site: $1,200 for a one-off audit, which agencies typically resell at $2,500–3,500; Lite from $450 per client per month; Track and Report from $600; Track and Execute from $2,200.
Read across the table and the structure becomes clear: the direct band and the wholesale band buy substantially the same work, and the difference is who owns the client relationship and keeps the margin.
These figures come from audits we run ourselves. If you would rather have your own numbers than ours, apply for a free audit on one brand — real prompts, real answers, across all four engines.
Five variables account for most of the spread between a $450 engagement and a $15,000 one.
The reason execution dominates the price is that engines mostly quote other people's pages. In our own audit of a global consumer brand across 232 answers and 3 engines, 92% of cited sources were third-party pages rather than the brand's own site — 100% on Gemini, 98% on Perplexity and 80% on ChatGPT. Of the 196 answers that named the brand, 157 did not cite the brand's own site at all.
One audit of a global consumer brand: 232 answers across three engines, every cited link classified. Measured by BrandsNode, August 2026.
Third-party pagesThe brand's own site
Earning a place on pages you do not own is slow, manual work, and it cannot be automated into a subscription. Buying the placement instead is poor value: Muck Rack's analysis found roughly 95% of AI citations come from non-paid media, and sponsored or advertorial content accounts for roughly 0.3% of AI citations (what AI is reading). Money spent on paid placement buys a share of that 0.3%.
Price is only half the question. The terms decide whether the price is fair.
Set the scoreboard before signing. Across the 232 answers in that audit, not one contained a contact address. AI answers hand the user a brand name rather than a link, so the value appears as branded search, direct visits and shortlist inclusion. A client measuring only AI referral traffic will conclude that nothing happened, whatever they paid.
Ask what the money produced, and hold each item to its own timeline.
| Timeline | What the spend should produce |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1–2 | A baseline audit on an agreed prompt set, with the raw answers and cited sources attached, naming which questions are lost and to whom. |
| Weeks 3–8 | The fixes inside your own control: entity records corrected, technical citability resolved, the first citable pages published. |
| Weeks 6–12 | Outreach either lands or does not. Perplexity tends to reflect newly published pages fastest; the other engines lag. |
| Month 3 onwards | A readable trend on the fixed prompt set, plus movement in branded search and direct visits. |
A provider charging a retainer should be able to name, each month, the pages published, the records corrected and the mentions secured. If the monthly deliverable cannot be counted, the price cannot be justified, and the honest comparison is against a monitoring tool at the bottom of the $29–489 band.
Monitoring-only tools publish roughly $29 to $489 per month, with enterprise tiers above that. Direct-to-brand done-for-you providers publish tiered retainers of $6,000, $10,000 and $15,000 per month, banded by client revenue. Wholesale programmes resold through an agency start from around $450 per client per month for tracking and reporting, and around $2,200 per month with execution included.
Because querying the engines costs almost nothing. A full four-engine audit of one brand costs single-digit dollars in API spend, and a Google AI Overview query costs about $0.002. The expense in a real programme is the execution and the judgment — content, entity records, technical fixes and outreach — not the queries behind the dashboard.
Not necessarily, but the deliverable has to be compared rather than the price. A cheap engagement that measures four engines on a fixed prompt set and publishes work each month is good value. A cheap engagement that measures one engine and publishes nothing is a dashboard, and should be priced as one.
Pay per secured mention, which is around $250 on the published direct rate card, rather than per attempt. Paying for sponsored or advertorial placement is a different matter and represents poor value: Muck Rack found roughly 95% of AI citations come from non-paid media, and sponsored content accounts for roughly 0.3% of citations.
A three-month initial term followed by month-to-month with 30 days' notice. Three months is the shortest period over which a trend becomes readable, and it is the term used both on the published direct rate card and in our own wholesale terms. A 10% discount for annual prepayment is a fair trade; a longer lock-in without one is not.
We will run a full audit on one brand using the method described here: an agreed prompt set asked across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, several runs each, with every answer and cited source logged. You receive the prompt set, the named-rate and position, the citation log and a prioritised fix list — in your own branding if you are an agency.
Apply for a free AI visibility auditOne brand, no cost, no card, no obligation. We reply with the audit or with an honest reason it would not tell you anything useful.