How Much Does AEO or GEO Cost? Pricing for Audits, Retainers and Builds

How much do AEO services cost?

AEO services cost anything from a small one-off fee for a basic audit to a large monthly retainer, and the spread is wide because providers sell very different things under the same label. The useful way to compare quotes is by shape: audit, sprint, retainer or build, and what each one actually delivers.

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) both mean getting your brand cited and recommended in AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our explainer on SEO vs AEO vs GEO covers the terms; this guide covers the money.

We'll be direct about one thing up front: we haven't found reliable, published market data on AEO pricing that we'd stand behind. Many agencies don't publish prices, and the ones that do bundle very different work. So rather than invent a range, this guide explains how each pricing model works, what drives cost and what to demand for your money. Where we give numbers, they're our own fixed prices or figures from named research.

Designify trial week: one week of design and development

$1,000

Designify landing page, fixed price

$6,000

Designify website, up to 6 pages (+$500 per extra page)

$8,000

Designify monthly design and development retainer

$6,000/mo

What are the main AEO and GEO pricing models?

The main AEO and GEO pricing models are the one-off audit, the fixed-scope sprint, the monthly retainer and the website build. Each solves a different problem, and buying the wrong shape is a more common mistake than overpaying for the right one.

These shapes overlap in practice. An audit might include a few fixes, and a retainer might start with an audit. Always ask what the first 30 days produce, in writing.

What does an AEO audit cost and include?

An AEO audit is usually priced as a one-off fee that scales with the number of pages reviewed and how much research is included. A worthwhile audit covers crawl access, rendering, page structure, a buyer prompt test across engines and an off-site mention review, then ranks the fixes.

At the low end, an audit may be a tool export with a few comments. At the higher end, it should include a fixed set of 20 to 30 buyer prompts run in each major engine, a review of which sources get cited, and a page-by-page plan. Our checklist of what an AEO audit should include lists the deliverables to insist on and the red flags to avoid.

Compare AEO audits to the audits you may already know. Our guides to SEO audit cost and CRO audit cost show how those are scoped, and a good AEO audit overlaps heavily with a solid technical and content SEO audit. If a provider's AEO audit ignores rendering, indexing and page content, it's missing the foundations.

What does a GEO agency retainer cost per month?

A GEO or AEO agency retainer is priced as a monthly fee, often with a minimum term, and the cost depends on how much content, outreach and reporting is included. The key question isn't the monthly number but what ships each month.

Retainers typically bundle some mix of these: monthly prompt tracking across engines, content creation or rewrites, digital PR and mention building, technical recommendations and a report. The more the retainer produces itself, rather than recommends, the more it tends to cost and the more value it can deliver.

• Tracking and reporting only: cheapest, but changes nothing on its own.
• Content plus tracking: new or rewritten articles each month, usually on the blog.
• Content, PR and tracking: adds outreach for mentions, which research suggests matters most for AI visibility.
• Full-service: adds page design and development, which few AEO retainers include.

If you're weighing a monthly SEO or AEO retainer against a design and development retainer, our comparison of SEO retainers vs website retainers breaks down what each one produces for the money.

What drives the cost of AI SEO and LLM SEO services?

The cost of AI SEO and LLM SEO services is driven by scope, who does the implementation, how much outreach is included and the seniority of the people involved. Tools are a small part of the bill; most of the price is people's time.

1. Number of pages and markets. A 10-page site in one language is a small job; a site with hundreds of pages, several products or several languages multiplies everything.
2. Implementation. Recommendations are cheaper than rewritten copy, redesigned pages and code changes. Ask whether the price includes doing the work.
3. Off-site work. Earning mentions through PR, partners and communities is slow, manual and valuable. In Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks.
4. Prompt tracking depth. Running a fixed prompt set monthly across several engines takes time, and engines behave differently. Semrush's AI Visibility Index found ChatGPT cites about 15 sources per answer against about 3 for Gemini.
5. Technical state of the site. If content is rendered only in the browser or pages aren't indexed, that has to be fixed first, and it can be the biggest line item.
6. Seniority. A senior strategist who also writes costs more per hour than a junior running a checklist, and usually spots the bigger problems.

What shouldn't you pay for in an AEO package?

You shouldn't pay a premium for llms.txt files, AI-specific schema or content chunking presented as the core of an AEO package. Google's own guidance and independent tests suggest these do little on their own.

Google's documentation on AI features in Search says there are no special requirements beyond normal SEO, and its May 2026 guidance calls llms.txt, chunking, AI-specific schema and AI rewrites unnecessary. Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files got zero requests. In Ahrefs' controlled 2026 schema test, adding schema produced no lift: AI Overview visibility fell 4.6%, while AI Mode and ChatGPT stayed flat.

• llms.txt-only packages: cheap to produce and unproven. Fine as a free extra, not as the deliverable.
• Schema-only packages: schema is good hygiene for rich results, but not a citation lever on its own.
• Self-promotional "best of" lists: Peec's analysis of 232,000 citations found such lists made up only about 4% of ChatGPT citations, and Seer reported listicle citations fell 30% month on month.
• Guaranteed citations: no provider controls what AI engines cite.

Our list of AEO myths covers more tactics that don't move AI citations, so you can strike them from any proposal.

When does a website build replace an AEO retainer?

A website build replaces an AEO retainer when the main problem is the pages themselves: a homepage that doesn't say what you do, no pricing or comparison pages, or content that crawlers can't read. In that case, months of recommendations cost more than fixing the pages once.

The evidence points at pages, not blog volume. TripleDart's Q1 2026 study of 28 B2B SaaS companies found homepages earned 31.9% of LLM citations and 81.7% of AI-attributed leads. General blog posts drew 12,000 sessions and zero leads, while pricing comparisons (1.5% conversion rate) and long-form deep dives (1.47%) were the only blog formats that converted. ChatGPT sent 72% of the AI sessions in that study.

A build that rewrites and restructures those pages delivers the thing most AEO retainers only recommend. The pages should answer questions directly, use real HTML tables for comparisons, as covered in our guide to comparison tables for AI answers, carry named authorship as explained in author pages and E-E-A-T, and be server-rendered.

If you're moving platforms as part of the rebuild, compare the options in AI migration vs agency migration and our guide to hiring a Webflow or Framer migration agency.

How do Designify's fixed prices map to AEO needs?

Designify's fixed prices map to AEO needs by problem: a trial week for a focused sprint, a landing page or website for fixing the pages, and a monthly retainer for ongoing page work. We don't sell AI visibility tracking software or a reporting-only retainer.

Our one-week SEO and AEO sprint shows how a trial week can be spent: diagnosing visibility, rewriting priority pages and shipping them. Migration work, if you need it, is scoped on the intro call.

How do you choose an AEO provider and measure the return?

Choose an AEO provider by asking for a sample deliverable, who implements the fixes and how results will be measured. Measure the return through AI referral traffic, demos from AI-influenced buyers and a fixed monthly prompt check, not citation counts alone.

• Ask for a sample. A real (anonymized) audit page or sprint plan tells you more than a sales deck. See how to choose an AEO agency for ten questions to ask.
• Ask who builds. If the provider only recommends, check whether your team or another agency can implement. Our comparison of SEO agencies vs web design agencies explains the handoff cost.
• Set up measurement first. Add a GA4 channel group for AI referrals (chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini, copilot) and a "How did you hear about us?" field on demo forms.
• Run a fixed prompt set monthly. Track 20 to 30 buyer prompts across engines and record mentions, descriptions and cited sources.

Keep expectations honest. Clicks from search are falling: Ahrefs found the top result's click-through rate is 58% lower when an AI Overview appears, based on December 2025 data. The visits that remain need to convert, which is why page quality belongs in any AEO budget.

Which AEO guides should you read next?

Read the guides below in the order that matches your decision: what to buy, who to buy it from and how the options compare. Each one goes deeper on a part of the AEO budget covered here.