Sauce · AI Search
AEO and GEO pricing, explained: how the quote is built
Quick answer
An AEO or GEO quote is set by five things: how many pages you have, how good your content is now, the state of your technical setup, how competitive your space is, and how fast you want results. Agencies bill it three ways: monthly retainer, flat project, or pay-for-performance. Setup fees cover the one-time audit and build. Read three quotes by matching the work, not the number.
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Get the free scanThree AEO quotes. One is a monthly retainer. One is a flat project fee. One says “pay when you get cited.” All for the same goal.
They look impossible to compare. Different shapes, different numbers, different words for the same tasks.
They are comparable. You just have to line up the work behind each price. Here is how a quote gets built, and how to read one without getting fooled.
The five things that set your quote
Every honest AEO or GEO quote comes down to these. Ask each provider to show their read on all five.
A 20-page site is a few days of structure and markup work. A 400-page site is weeks. Page count is the biggest single driver of the number.
If your pages already answer real questions clearly, the job is tuning. If they are thin or salesy, the job is rewriting. Rewriting costs more because it is hours of writing, not a settings change.
Schema markup, site speed, clean internal links, a readable page structure. A tidy site needs a light pass. A messy one needs a rebuild of the plumbing first.
If ten strong competitors are already cited for your main question, earning a spot takes more content and more third-party mentions. That is more hours, so a higher price.
A steady pace over a year is cheaper per month than a push to move quickly. Speed means more people on the work at once.
The three ways it gets billed
Pricing models
A fixed monthly fee for ongoing work. Best when the job is continuous: content, mentions, tracking, tuning. You get a steady pace. The risk is paying months in with little to show, so ask what the first 90 days produce.
One flat fee for a defined build. Best for a one-time job: an audit, a schema build, a batch of rewritten pages. You know the total up front. The risk is that the work ends and nothing keeps it fresh, so plan who maintains it after.
You pay when a result happens, like a citation or a ranking. Sounds safe. In practice the targets can be easy wins that do not move revenue, and the rate per result is high. Read exactly what counts as a result before you sign.
What a setup fee actually covers
Most plans start with a one-time fee before the monthly work begins. It is not padding when it is itemised. It should list things like this.
A full read of your site, your current AI visibility, your competitors, and where the gaps are. This is the map the rest of the work follows.
Adding structured data across your pages so machines can read your business, services, reviews and FAQs. Done once properly, then maintained.
Reworking key pages to lead with a direct answer, add clear headings, and include sourced facts. This is the shape AI tools quote from.
Making your name, address, phone and description match across your site, your profiles and the directories. Mismatches make an AI tool unsure it is the same business.
If a setup fee is a single line with no breakdown, ask for one. You are entitled to know what the hours buy.
Basic, advanced, enterprise: what changes
Tiers are roughly consistent across the pricing guides. The numbers are directional.
| Tier | Rough monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | ~$1,500 | Monitoring, core schema, light content fixes, one or two AI platforms tracked. |
| Advanced | ~$5,000 | Ongoing content, digital PR for mentions, entity work, several platforms, a real report cadence. |
| Enterprise | ~$15,000 | Many product lines, dedicated PR, custom tracking, fast pace. Built for national brands. |
A local service business almost always fits Basic, or fits nothing separate at all because a real local SEO plan already carries it.
Go deeper
The rest of the AI search picture
Cost, mechanics, and strategy.
Before you sign anything,get a free 49-point scan so you can check each quote against reality.
Get the free scanHow to read three quotes side by side
- Line up the tasks, not the totals. Write each quote’s work into the same list of rows. Now the prices mean something.
- Ask for hours. “How many hours a month, and on what?” A clear range is a good sign. “It depends” with no number is not.
- Check for double billing. If you already pay for SEO, mark every row that overlaps. Do not pay for it twice.
- Find the exit. Month-to-month, or a lock-in? What do you keep if you leave? You should keep the audit, the schema and the pages.
- Match it to a goal. The quote should point at booked revenue, not a “visibility score.”
What determines the price of an AEO or GEO quote?
Five things: your page count, how good your content is now, the state of your technical setup and schema, how competitive your space is, and how fast you want results. Page count and content quality move the number the most, because both are measured in hours of work.
Retainer, project, or performance-based: which is safest?
A retainer fits ongoing work and gives a steady pace, but ask what the first 90 days deliver. A project fee fits a one-time build and caps your spend, but plan who maintains it after. Performance pricing sounds safe but the targets can be easy wins that do not drive revenue, so read exactly what counts as a result.
Why do agencies charge a setup fee?
Because the first month is front-loaded: a full audit, a schema build across your pages, reworking key content to be answer-first, and cleaning up your business details everywhere. A fair setup fee is itemised. If it is one line with no breakdown, ask for one.
What is the difference between basic and enterprise AEO plans?
Basic plans, around $1,500 a month in the pricing guides, cover monitoring, core schema and light content work on one or two AI platforms. Enterprise plans, around $15,000, add dedicated digital PR, many product lines, custom tracking and a fast pace. Enterprise is built for national brands, not local service businesses.
Can I get AEO as a one-time project instead of monthly?
Yes, for the parts that have an end: the audit, the schema build, and a batch of rewritten pages. The ongoing parts, fresh content and earning new mentions, do not have an end, because competitors keep working too. Many businesses pay once for the build, then keep the upkeep light or in house.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Intro to structured data, and AI features and your website: structured data helps machines understand a page; Google’s AI features are built on its standard index and SEO signals. Read it
- OpenAI, ChatGPT search: ChatGPT search reads live web pages and links the sources it used in an answer. Read it
- Perplexity, How does Perplexity work?: a live web search on every query, then a synthesised answer with numbered citations. Read it
- Search Engine Land, GEO for people who have to hit revenue targets: most AI-search budget advice optimises the wrong KPI; tie spend to revenue, not visibility. Read it
- HeyTony, The problems with hiring an SEO agency: watch for agencies inventing acronyms to make a standard service sound new, and for quotes with no clear breakdown of the work. Read it
- Peer-reviewed: Aggarwal, P., et al. (2024). “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.” Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference (KDD ’24). Which content changes measurably raise the chance of being cited in a generated answer.
- Peer-reviewed: Lewis, P., et al. (2020). “Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks.” NeurIPS 2020. The retrieve-then-generate design that makes a clear, indexable page the unit AI answers quote.
- Peer-reviewed: Liu, N. F., Zhang, T., & Liang, P. (2023). “Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines.” Findings of EMNLP 2023. AI answers often cite imperfectly, so being the clearest source on a question is worth more than volume.
- Peer-reviewed: Dulleck, U., & Kerschbamer, R. (2006). “On Doctors, Mechanics, and Computer Specialists: The Economics of Credence Goods.” Journal of Economic Literature 44(1), 5–42. Buyers of expert services cannot verify what was done, which is why matching the work behind each quote matters more than the price.
- Peer-reviewed: Bergen, M., Dutta, S., & Walker, O. C. (1992). “Agency Relationships in Marketing: A Review of the Implications and Applications of Agency and Related Theories.” Journal of Marketing 56(3), 1–24. On aligning what a client pays for with what the provider is actually incentivised to do.
Tier prices are summarised from published 2026 AEO/GEO pricing guides and are directional, not quotes.
Next step
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