Straight answer: credible GEO and AEO work is sold either as a fixed-scope diagnostic or as a monthly program. Prices vary with scope and competition, not with magic. Any vendor who cannot tell you what you get for the money is selling mystery.
We publish our pricing openly, so this article uses our own model as the reference point and tells you how to compare everyone else against it.
The Direct Answer
Expect three cost shapes in this market:
- Diagnostic: a one-off, fixed-scope audit with a defined deliverable list.
- Program: a monthly retainer covering implementation and monitoring, usually with a three month minimum because visibility compounds.
- Hybrid: the audit first, then a program built on its roadmap. This is the sequence we recommend and sell.
Our own tiers follow exactly that structure: Audit as the diagnostic, Growth as the implementation program, Scale for teams treating AI visibility as a primary channel. Exact figures live on the pricing page and do not change behind sales calls.
What You Are Actually Paying for
Every serious quote decomposes into three buckets:
- Diagnosis: prompt testing across platforms, entity checks, technical review, competitor benchmarking.
- Fixes: content restructuring, schema and llms.txt work, citation building, comparison assets.
- Monitoring: the weekly measurement loop that proves the work moved the numbers.
Ask each vendor to break their price into those buckets. If they cannot, you are buying effort, not outcomes.
Typical Engagement Models
- One-off audit: best when you have an in-house team ready to execute the roadmap.
- Monthly program: best when execution capacity is the bottleneck and you want the measurement loop running continuously.
- Audit then program: best overall. The audit sets priorities, the program executes them, the quarterly retest proves the delta.
Be suspicious of month-to-month GEO promises. Models reindex on their own schedule. Anything shorter than a quarter cannot demonstrate cause and effect.
What Should Be Included at Any Price
Whatever the tier, hold these as the minimum:
- A frozen prompt set matched to your actual buyers.
- Baseline measurement before any changes ship.
- Deliverables named as artifacts: scorecards, roadmaps, content specs, schema implementations.
- A monitoring loop with a regular report you could cancel everything else and still keep.
- Clear ownership: who writes, who ships, who verifies.
Red Flags When Comparing Vendors
- Guaranteed placements. Nobody sells inventory inside model weights.
- Proprietary secret processes with no sample deliverable.
- No baseline measurement, which means no way to prove their impact.
- Contracts far beyond a quarter with no exit clause tied to results.
- Reporting that counts activity, impressions, or reach instead of mentions, accuracy, and recommendation share.
Price is only expensive when you cannot see what it bought. Insist on the artifact list before the contract, not after.
