Why is AI SEO priced like SEO rather than cheaper?

Because most of the work is the same work. Structure, evidence, schema, and technical health serve both scoreboards. The genuinely new part, citation testing and evidence design, adds effort rather than removing it. Anyone pricing AI SEO far below SEO is either doing less or automating the part that needed judgment.

Do you offer a guarantee?

No, and be careful with anyone who does. Nobody controls what an answer engine cites, and a guarantee in this category is either meaningless in the fine print or a promise to hit a metric that does not matter. What can be committed to is scope, timeline, and reporting you can verify.

Can we start with just the audit?

Yes, and it is usually the right first step. It is fixed-scope, it is self-contained, and the roadmap is yours whether or not you continue. Roughly a third of audit clients execute internally, which is a reasonable outcome rather than a failed sale.

What is not included?

Paid media management, brand design, and web development beyond the SEO-specific work. We specify template and schema changes and work with your developers to ship them. If you have no development capacity, we will say so during scoping rather than after.

How long before it pays for itself?

For local and long-tail categories, typically four to eight months. For competitive B2B and ecommerce categories, eight to eighteen. Technical fixes can move citation visibility faster than that, sometimes within weeks, because answer engines re-evaluate sources more often than Google re-ranks them. Anyone giving you a payback figure before seeing your site is guessing.

Pricing

What AI SEO Costs, and Why the Range Is That Wide

Most agencies will not publish a number, which is understandable and unhelpful. The honest version is that the range is genuinely wide, and the width comes from a small number of things about your business rather than from how much we feel like charging. Here is the whole picture, including the parts that make a quote go up.

Book a 15-min call → Request a quote

Why nobody publishes a single number

A single price would be either wrong or dishonest, because the work scales with things that vary by an order of magnitude between clients. A 200-SKU brand and a 40,000-SKU distributor both want ecommerce AI SEO and need entirely different amounts of it. What can be published is the range and the reasons.

Scale drives most of itCatalog size, number of locations, number of practice areas, number of processes. This is the biggest single factor and it is measurable before anyone quotes.

Starting condition drives the restA site with clean templates and complete schema needs a fraction of the work of one where capability data still lives in scanned PDFs. Discovery tells us which you are.

Competition sets the pace, not the priceA hard category does not make the monthly cost higher so much as it makes the timeline longer. Anyone charging a premium purely for competition is charging for their own risk.

Three shapes of engagement

Scoped so you can judge the work before committing to more of it.

01
Audit, fixed scope

A complete diagnosis with a prioritized roadmap. Prompt testing across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, a technical and schema review, a content gap analysis against the sources that actually get cited, and a walkthrough call. Quoted as a fixed number before it starts.
- $1,500 to $6,000 depending on site size
- Two to three weeks
- Roadmap with effort and impact estimates
- Yours to execute anywhere
02
Implementation build

A defined project rather than an open retainer. Rebuilding a product template, converting capability data out of PDFs, fixing schema across a catalog, building out a service or location page set. Scoped from the audit, quoted as a project, finished and handed over.
- Quoted per project from the audit findings
- Four to twelve weeks typical
- Works alongside your dev and content teams
- Standards documented so the work holds
03
Ongoing retainer

Monthly work for teams that need continuous content, technical maintenance, and citation monitoring. The industry ranges below apply here. Month to month after the first three, because a retainer that needs a lock-in to survive is not working.
- See the ranges below by industry
- Monthly reporting tied to outcomes
- Quarterly citation re-testing
- Scope reviewed every quarter

How to compare quotes, including ours

Most proposals in this category are hard to compare on purpose. Four questions make them comparable, and they work on any vendor.

Ask what happens in month oneA vendor who cannot describe the first month concretely has not thought about your site. Vague onboarding usually means the first month is spent deciding what to do, on your budget.

Ask who does the workNot who wins the pitch. If the answer is a team you have not met, ask to meet them. This single question explains most of the quality variance in the industry.

Ask what they would not doAny proposal that includes everything includes it thinly. A vendor who tells you a piece of your brief is not worth funding is giving you information the others are withholding.

Monthly ranges by industry

These are the retainer ranges we quote within. Audits are separate and fixed-scope. The third column is the thing that actually moves a quote inside its range, which is usually not the one people expect.

Industry	Monthly range	What drives it
Local service business	$1,000 to $5,000	Locations, market size, review volume
Restaurants and hospitality	$1,000 to $4,500	Number of venues, market competition
Real estate	$1,500 to $7,500	Agent, team, or brokerage. Neighborhoods covered
Medical and dental	$2,000 to $8,000	Practice size, locations, YMYL review depth
Accounting and professional	$1,500 to $7,000	Specialties, seasonal cadence
Legal	$2,500 to $10,000	Practice areas, offices, competition level
Supplements and CBD	$2,000 to $8,000	Catalog size, claim compliance work
Manufacturing and industrial	$3,000 to $12,000	Processes, materials, plants, PDF conversion volume
Ecommerce	$2,500 to $15,000	Catalog size above all else
SaaS and B2B platforms	$4,000 to $20,000	Category competition, content velocity

One-time audits run $1,500 to $6,000 depending on site size and how many categories need prompt testing across the answer engines. The audit stands alone. If you take the roadmap to another team or run it in house, that is a legitimate outcome and we price it as one.

Get a number for your site

Book a free 15-minute strategy call or send a quote request below. We respond within one business day.

Book a strategy call

Fifteen minutes is usually enough to give you a range and tell you which of the three shapes fits. If none of them do, we will say that too.

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Request a quote by form

Tell us about your site and what you are trying to change. We reply with a range and a suggested scope within one business day.

Pricing FAQs

Why is AI SEO priced like SEO rather than cheaper?

Because most of the work is the same work. Structure, evidence, schema, and technical health serve both scoreboards. The genuinely new part, citation testing and evidence design, adds effort rather than removing it. Anyone pricing AI SEO far below SEO is either doing less or automating the part that needed judgment.
Do you offer a guarantee?

No, and be careful with anyone who does. Nobody controls what an answer engine cites, and a guarantee in this category is either meaningless in the fine print or a promise to hit a metric that does not matter. What can be committed to is scope, timeline, and reporting you can verify.
Can we start with just the audit?

Yes, and it is usually the right first step. It is fixed-scope, it is self-contained, and the roadmap is yours whether or not you continue. Roughly a third of audit clients execute internally, which is a reasonable outcome rather than a failed sale.
What is not included?

Paid media management, brand design, and web development beyond the SEO-specific work. We specify template and schema changes and work with your developers to ship them. If you have no development capacity, we will say so during scoping rather than after.
How long before it pays for itself?

For local and long-tail categories, typically four to eight months. For competitive B2B and ecommerce categories, eight to eighteen. Technical fixes can move citation visibility faster than that, sometimes within weeks, because answer engines re-evaluate sources more often than Google re-ranks them. Anyone giving you a payback figure before seeing your site is guessing.