Published prices for generative engine optimization (GEO) run from about $499 to over $20,000 a month. Two widely repeated tier lists are WebFX at $1,500 to $50,000+ and First Page Sage at $2,000 to $12,000, and Clutch data puts the average SEO and AI search retainer at about $3,199.
Where you land in that range depends on how much content is written for you, how much technical work your site needs, and whether anyone measures the answers assistants actually give. This page breaks down the published numbers, what moves the price, and how to avoid paying for work that cannot show up in an answer.
What do GEO agencies charge per month?
Most of them do not say. A comparison by Agniverse compiled only prices that agencies disclose on their own sites as of October 2026. It found that most agencies publish no pricing at all. The few that do range from about $499 to over $20,000 per month.
The numbers repeated across blog posts come from a handful of firms. W2B Agency's cross-check of GEO pricing lists WebFX tiers of $1,500 to $50,000+ a month and First Page Sage tiers of $2,000 to $12,000 a month. It also notes that none of these published ranges is based on an independent market study. Read them as individual price lists, not as market averages.
The closest thing to aggregate data comes from Clutch. Citing Clutch's platform data, MV3 Marketing reports an average monthly SEO/AI search retainer of about $3,199. Typical fees range from $2,000 to $20,000 a month, and hourly rates commonly fall between $100 and $149.
| What was measured | Monthly price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GEO prices publicly disclosed on agency sites, October 2026 | About $499 to over $20,000 | Agniverse |
| WebFX published GEO tiers | $1,500 to $50,000+ | W2B Agency |
| First Page Sage published GEO tiers | $2,000 to $12,000 | W2B Agency |
| Average SEO/AI search retainer across agencies on Clutch | About $3,199 (typical range $2,000 to $20,000) | MV3 Marketing |
| Hourly rates on Clutch | $100 to $149 per hour | MV3 Marketing |
What do AI visibility tracking tools cost?
Tracking tools are a separate budget line from agencies. They tell you whether assistants name you. They do not write pages or fix crawler access.
When we asked assistants which GEO tools exist on 21 October 2026, the English answers named Profound in 12 answers, Semrush in 9, Otterly.AI and Peec AI in 8 each, and Ahrefs in 7. We have no verified prices for these tools, so check each vendor's own pricing page before you budget.
For scale, here is what the raw queries cost us. With API prices of October 2026, one question asked once with web search costs about $0.069 with Claude, $0.010 with ChatGPT, $0.009 with Gemini and $0.0013 with Perplexity. A full report of 20 questions, 4 assistants and 3 asks each costs about $5.40 in API fees. When you compare tools, the useful question is less the sticker price and more how many questions, assistants and repeated asks a plan covers, and how long it keeps the history.
How the measuring is done matters more than the tool's name. An academic survey of GEO research from 2023 to 2026 concludes that engines cite different sets of sources and vary across repeated runs. Visibility therefore has to be measured across several engines and over time, not as a single citation event. We see the same thing every week: asked the same question three times, an assistant often names different businesses. We count a business as named for a question if any of the three asks names it, and we compare weeks only on the same questions and the same number of asks. If a tool or agency checks once per question, its week-to-week chart is mostly noise.
What drives the monthly price up or down?
How much content is produced
Assistants can only cite pages that exist and that they can find. In our data, a site with complete markup (server rendering, Article, FAQPage and Organization JSON-LD, a sitemap) but only 75 URLs was still absent from answers on its own article's exact topic. A site with about 190,000 crawlable URLs was crawled constantly. Surface beats markup. A package with two articles a month costs less than one with twenty, and it also gives assistants less to work with.
How much technical repair your site needs
Robots.txt, sitemaps, Bing and Google indexing and IndexNow are often a one-off fix, but they can take real work if nobody has looked before. We learned this on our own site. A robots.txt rule meant to hide one redirect page (/b) was written as a prefix. From 11 August to 21 October 2026 it also blocked /blog, /business and every article in our business blog for all crawlers. Bing Webmaster Tools had listed our business page as discovered but not crawled since 11 August 2026, and Google had none of those pages indexed. We changed the rule to /b$ on 21 October 2026. To rule this out on your own site, start with whether your website is blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
How much is measured
More questions, more assistants, more languages and more asks per question all cost more. They also make the numbers more trustworthy. Ask any provider exactly what they count.
How competitive your questions are
For questions about GEO itself, the sources assistants cited most on 21 October 2026 were the blogs of GEO agencies and tool vendors. In local markets, directories matter. For an orthopaedic practice in Bonn on 20 October 2026, the four assistants named the practice in 12 of 80 answers to 20 patient questions. The directory jameda.de was cited in 12 answers, and competing practices' own websites were the most cited sources. Crowded topics need more pages to compete.
Strategy and reporting hours
At the $100 to $149 hourly rates reported on Clutch, every hour of calls, audits and slide decks adds up. Ask how much of a retainer is hours and how much is published work.
What should you get for the money?
Whatever the price, three things should be in the package:
- Pages that answer your buyers' questions, published on your own domain. Assistants cite pages, so pages are what you are paying for.
- Crawler access and indexing. This means robots.txt, sitemaps, and both Bing and Google indexing. Being in Google's index is not enough. On 19 October 2026 we asked assistants for the exact titles of 18 articles, each older than three weeks, on three client sites. ChatGPT found 1 of 18 and Claude found 7 of 18, while Google had indexed 29 of 30 articles on one of those sites.
- Regular measurement across several assistants. It should count named answers and cited sites, not referral traffic.
That last point matters for how you judge results. In about two weeks of logs from three of our course websites, roughly 1.2 million requests in the two busiest logs, human visitors arriving from AI assistants totalled one from Copilot and zero from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI and others. Assistants mostly answer in place. A better sign is live retrieval, when an agent such as ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot or Perplexity-User fetches a page while answering a real person. In the same fortnight, an edtech platform we work with received 1,918 such fetches on content pages. A client blog of a few dozen articles received 56 across 24 different articles.
Also expect that some questions will never name anyone. In a 23 September 2026 test of 20 German business questions, the model answered 10 without searching at all and cited nobody. Firms were named only on who-should-I-hire and how-to-choose questions. A good provider aims your budget at those questions.
Where does a $499 option fit?
We sit at the bottom of the published range. ItGrows for Business costs $499 a month (plus a one-time $499 setup, free with 3 months or a year). For that, we publish articles on your domain that answer the questions your buyers ask and fix crawler access and indexing (robots.txt, sitemaps, Bing and Google indexing, IndexNow). Every week we put your buyer questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, three times each, and count the answers that name you and the sites they cite.
To be plain about limits: nobody can guarantee that an assistant will name a business, and we do not. In our own day-0 measurement on 21 October 2026, ItGrows was named in 0 of 160 answers to 40 questions about getting a business into AI answers, as we describe in we checked our own AI visibility and were named in 0 of 160 answers. Clients report different outcomes. In October 2026, FreightSizer, a B2B SaaS for freight dimensioning, reported 2 new B2B customers in one month, both from ChatGPT. MagiScan, an iOS 3D-scanning app, reports hundreds of installs a month from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. appslift, an app store optimisation service, reports 2 to 5 leads a month from AI assistants. In our weekly measurement of 20 October 2026, Perplexity cited an article we had published for a German company-formation advisory.
A higher retainer can make sense if you need strategy work, PR or several markets at once. A lower one makes sense if what you mainly lack is pages and access.
How do you decide what to spend?
Start with a baseline before you sign anything. The free check at itgrows.ai generates five buyer questions from your homepage and shows in about 30 seconds whether ChatGPT and Perplexity name you. For a manual method, see how to check whether AI assistants mention your business.
Then ask every provider the same questions:
- How many pages will be published per month, and on whose domain?
- Who checks robots.txt, sitemaps and Bing indexing, and when?
- Which assistants are measured, with how many asks per question, on a fixed question set?
- How much of the fee is hours, and how much is published work?
- Can I leave month to month, and do I keep the content?
Finally, size the budget against what one customer is worth to you. If a single new client covers a year of fees, a mid-range retainer is easy to justify. If not, keep it lean until the measurement shows movement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average monthly cost of GEO?
There is no independent market study of GEO prices. The closest aggregate figure is Clutch's average SEO/AI search retainer of about $3,199 a month, as reported by MV3 Marketing. Published agency prices range from about $499 to over $20,000 a month.
Is a tracking tool enough on its own?
A tool shows whether assistants name you, but it does not create pages or fix crawler access. If you have the team to write and publish content and handle indexing, a tool may be enough. If not, you will see the problem without anything changing.
Why do GEO prices vary so much?
The price reflects content volume, technical repair, how much is measured, how competitive your questions are and how many strategy hours are billed. The published ranges also come from individual firms' own price lists rather than an independent study, so they describe very different scopes of work.
How soon should I expect results for my spend?
No provider can promise that or when an assistant will name you. Judge progress with weekly measurement on the same questions and the same number of asks, and look for live retrievals in your logs rather than referral clicks.