Search for what generative engine optimisation costs and you find vendor retainers published anywhere from $1,500 to $50,000 a month, with none of them itemised and most of them ending in a form. A spread that wide is not a price. It tells you the category is new enough that nobody is embarrassed by their own number, and that most sellers would rather quote after seeing how much you look able to pay.
The short version. Our AI search visibility work is $250 a month, and we do not sell it on its own. It is a line inside the $2,400 Grow retainer and inside the $1,350 standalone SEO fee, because it runs on the same foundations as SEO and a separate price would bill you twice for them. What moves the cost is scope: a second market or language, or a site that crawlers cannot read yet. Nobody can promise you placement in an AI answer, and for a lot of businesses a free check twice a year is the right amount to spend.
- Published GEO retainers run from $1,500 to $50,000 a month because nobody agrees what the work is and none of those vendors itemises it.
- Our AI search visibility is $250 a month, sold only as a line inside the $2,400 Grow retainer and inside the $1,350 standalone SEO fee.
- The $250 covers five jobs: fixing the entity, building corroboration, earning citations, publishing for machines including llms.txt, and tracking the answers monthly.
- A second market or language, or a site crawlers cannot read yet, moves the cost; urgency and company size do not.
- If the assistants already describe you accurately, or your buyers do not start with one, a free check twice a year is enough.
Why the published prices are so far apart
When we reviewed the pages ranking for this question in August 2026, the published retainers ran from $1,500 to $50,000 a month. Not one of them said what the money bought, line by line. Three things produce a gap that size.
Nobody agrees what the work is. GEO, AEO and AIO name one job under three acronyms, and a vendor can sell any slice of that job under any of the names. One retainer is a monthly prompt-tracking report. Another bundles digital PR at a scale no small business needs. Both are called GEO.
The mechanism is not published. OpenAI documents its crawlers and says almost nothing about how answers are ranked, as how ChatGPT chooses which businesses to recommend sets out. A service whose result cannot be guaranteed is easy to price by feel.
The price sheets were written for large companies. In our reading of the market, most of this work is still sold to enterprises, and small businesses are quoted from the same sheet. That is an editorial judgement, not a survey.
What the $250 a month covers
Five jobs, taken from the wording on our AI visibility page. None of them is a trick, and each one is something you can check we did.
Three things are not in it. Content production sits in the SEO line. A rebuild is a build. And paid placement does not exist for organic answers: OpenAI publishes no mechanism for buying a recommendation, and its bots documentation keeps the crawler that checks paid ads separate from the one that powers search.
Why it is not sold on its own
Every job in that table rests on work an SEO engagement already does. Crawler access is technical SEO. The structured data is the same structured data. Answer-first pages are content. Reviews and listings are the same inputs local search runs on. Sold separately, AI visibility is either those foundations paid for twice, or a thin layer on foundations nobody built.
Google says much the same about its own AI features. Its guide to generative AI in Search says: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." The foundations are the work.
So the $250 is priced inside two things. In the $1,350 standalone SEO fee it is $250 of the monthly total, alongside technical work, keyword strategy, four pieces of content and reporting. In the $2,400 Grow retainer it sits next to the $1,100 SEO and content line, $650 paid search management and $400 conversion optimisation. Every line is on the pricing page, and what SEO costs a small business takes the SEO fee apart.
$250 a month is $3,000 a year. Before paying that to anyone, including us, spend ten minutes finding out what the assistants say about you now.
If the answer is already accurate, the monthly line buys monitoring of something that works.What moves the cost
The $250 line covers one market, one language and a site that machines can already read. Two things push the total above it, and both are scope.
- A second market or language. A buyer in the UK and a buyer in the UAE ask different questions and get answers built from different listings. That means a second set of listings, localised structured data and tracking in each market. It is the second-market localisation line in Scale, $1,400 a month on top of Grow, $5,800 a month in total.
- A site that cannot be read yet. A crawler blocked in robots.txt is a one-line fix. A firewall or content delivery network rejecting OpenAI's published crawler addresses is a configuration job. A site whose pages never state what the business does needs rewriting or rebuilding first. A custom build is $4,900 for up to eight pages, with llms.txt and schema inside its $500 technical SEO line. More pages, a catalogue or a large migration move that number.
What does not move it: how urgently you want to be named, how large the business looks, or anything discovered after the scope is agreed in writing.
When the free check is enough
For many small businesses the honest recommendation is to spend nothing monthly. Run the ten-minute check yourself, or have ours done free by a person, twice a year. Keep the money if any of these is true.
- The assistants already describe you accurately. Paying monthly to keep a correct answer correct is insurance, and a twice-yearly re-run is cheaper insurance.
- Your website does not convert the visitors it has. Being named sends people to the same page. Fix the page first.
- Your buyers do not start with an assistant. Ask your last ten customers how they found you, and believe the answer.
The $250 AI search visibility line, the $2,400 Grow retainer with its $1,100, $650 and $400 lines, the $1,350 standalone SEO fee, the $1,400 second-market localisation line, the $5,800 Scale retainer and the $4,900 build with its $500 technical SEO line are our published prices, listed on the pricing page. The five jobs use the wording of our AI visibility page. The $1,500 to $50,000 a month range is what vendors ranking for this question published when we reviewed the search results on 24 August 2026; none itemised its price. The quotation from Google is from its guide to generative AI features in Search, last updated 10 July 2026. The separation of OpenAI's ads crawler from its search crawler is from OpenAI's bots documentation, both read on 15 September 2026. The three reasons for the price spread, the view that the category is still priced for enterprises, the twice-yearly free check recommendation and the four questions are editorial judgement.
Four questions for any quote, including ours
- Which assistants do you check, with which questions, and how often? A named list with a cadence is a service. "AI platforms" is a brochure.
- What will I have at the end of month one? The honest answer is a record of what the assistants say now, and the fixes that follow from it.
- What does this cover that my SEO retainer does not? If the vendor cannot draw that line, you are about to pay twice.
- Do you guarantee I will be recommended? A yes ends the conversation. OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed, so nobody selling to you can guarantee it either.