In an r/marketingagency thread this year, an agency owner asked how to package AI visibility work now that clients keep asking whether they show up in ChatGPT. The replies split three ways. Some fold it into the SEO retainer, one agency gives it away free until it has case studies, and others insist on a separate retainer.
how are you pricing AI visibility / GEO for clients? or are you not selling it yet
For people running an agency, are you already selling AI visibility / GEO as a service, and if yes how do you package it? I am seeing more clients ask "do we show up when people ask ChatGPT", so the demand is starting. But i am stuck on two...
So we looked at what agencies actually charge. On October 19, 2026, we read the published price lists of 14 agencies selling GEO, AEO or AI search work. Then we turned what we found into an offer an SEO agency can add without overpromising.
What 14 agencies charge for AI search work
We searched Google for GEO, AEO and AI SEO agency pricing and kept only agencies that publish their own prices. We skipped pricing guides that quote market ranges. Here's how the 14 price lists break down.
| Offer type | Agencies | Published prices |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly program sold direct to clients | 10 | Entry from $199 to $5,000 a month, median about $1,750 |
| One-time audit, sprint or setup | 5 | From $19.99 to $3,999, plus setup fees of $7,500 or more at the top |
| White-label or wholesale for agencies | 2 | $479 to $1,599 per client a month at list price; $599 to $3,049 wholesale |
Some agencies appear in more than one row. The top of the range went much higher than the entry prices. A large US agency said most clients pay $4,000 to $8,000 a month and some pay more than $40,000. A French GEO agency runs from €990 to about €10,000 a month.
The cheapest offers weren't really agency work. The $199 monthly plan and the $19.99 audit came from a low-cost submission service rather than an agency team. Leave those out and the middle of the market sits between $1,500 and $2,500 a month to start.
What the pricing guides claim
Published price lists run lower than many pricing guides suggest. One GEO agency's pricing guide, updated in October 2026, puts entry programs at $3,000 to $7,000 a month, mid-market at $7,000 to $15,000 and enterprise at $15,000 to $25,000 or more. Another agency checked published AEO retainers on September 24 and found a range from about $1,600 to more than $15,000 a month.
At the far end, an r/aeo AMA from an agency doing AEO for local businesses claimed a $12,500 average retainer. Treat that as one agency's claim rather than a market rate, since local businesses in our sample were being offered programs at a fraction of that.
The gap between the guides and the price lists is worth knowing before you set your own rates. Guides written by agencies tend to anchor high, and the agencies that publish actual prices cluster lower, between about $1,500 and $2,500 a month to start.
What the packages include
The price lists described the same building blocks, in different amounts.
- A baseline audit of how AI answers treat the brand, often sold separately. One agency charges $699 and credits it in full to the first month.
- Tracking of a set of buyer questions across AI engines, usually monthly or weekly.
- On-site work, like content, page fixes and structured data.
- Off-site work, like press releases, mentions and placements on sites AI engines cite.
- Reporting, usually monthly, with a strategy call at the higher tiers.
Commitment terms varied as much as price. Two agencies ran month to month, one required six months and another asked for three to twelve. The French agency's page also put a number on a cost agencies often hide. AI visibility tracking tools can cost up to €4 to €5 per tracked prompt when a client buys one directly.
How often does ChatGPT mention your brand?
Most founders have no idea. The answer might surprise you.
A warning about off-site work
Two of the 14 price lists included something to be careful with. One agency's entry tier "purchases low-cost placements on ranking websites," meaning paid spots on the best-of lists AI engines cite. A wholesale provider lists "authority links" from DA 50 to 90 sites in every package.
Google's spam policies count buying links that pass ranking credit as link spam, unless they're marked sponsored or nofollow. If paid placements are part of your offer, tell the client exactly what they're buying. Our guide to white hat link building covers the off-site work that doesn't carry that risk.
Layer one: a paid baseline audit
Start with an audit the client pays for. It's the easiest yes, and it gives you the numbers to sell the next step.
A reply in an r/SEO thread, from someone whose client suddenly wanted GEO work, laid out the baseline well. Write 20 to 30 questions the client's buyers would type, run them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, and record whether the client appears and which pages get cited. Then rerun the same list monthly, since answers vary from run to run.
Add a crawler check, a look at Search Console's and Bing's AI reports, and a list of the third-party sites the answers relied on. Our guide to running an AI visibility audit in one afternoon walks through each step. Price it between $700 and $1,500, and credit it toward the first month of a retainer.
Layer two: a monthly program
The audit shows the gaps, and the retainer closes them. In the r/marketingagency thread, one owner argued for a retainer over audits. Clients who only buy an audit tend to come back three months later asking why their numbers dropped.
A monthly program for a small or mid-sized client usually covers four jobs. You track the question set, publish content that answers the questions where the client is missing, fix on-site issues and work on off-site mentions. Price it from the published market, roughly $1,500 to $2,500 a month to start, and higher for competitive markets or clients with several locations.
Some agencies will keep folding it into SEO, and that works too. One agency owner in the thread said AI work is part of their SEO retainer, because you can't do GEO without doing SEO. If you go that way, name the AI search work in the scope so the client sees it.
Layer three: reporting that survives month two
Reporting is where AI search services fall apart. Answers change from run to run, so a screenshot that looked good in March can look bad in April for no real reason.
Agency owners in the r/marketingagency thread had landed on the same fix. Track 50 to 100 questions per client and report how often the client is cited over rolling 30-day windows, as a trend line rather than single answers. One said clients trust that far more than "we ranked #3 this week."
Pair it with what the client can see in their own analytics, like AI-referred visits in GA4 and Search Console's AI report. Our post on AI visibility reporting clients want covers the report itself.
15 hours a week manually. Or 15 minutes with RankControl.
Track citations, monitor competitors, and fix content gaps across every AI search engine. Automatically.
What not to sell
Don't guarantee citations. A white-label provider's own pricing page answers "Are rankings or AI mentions guaranteed?" with a plain no, and that's the honest answer for everyone. AI engines change their sources too often for anyone to promise a spot.
Avoid selling quick fixes as the whole service, too. An llms.txt file, a schema refresh or a single "AI-ready" content audit can be part of the work, but none of them will move results on their own. Our post on selling GEO and AEO without overpromising covers how to set expectations in the first call.
What it takes per client each month
Here's a rough monthly budget for one small or mid-sized client, by our estimate.
| Task | Hours a month |
|---|---|
| Run and log the question set | 3 to 5 |
| Write or update pages that answer missing questions | 8 to 12 |
| On-site fixes and structured data | 2 to 4 |
| Off-site mentions and outreach | 4 to 8 |
| Report and strategy call | 2 to 3 |
| Total | 19 to 32 |
At a $2,000 retainer, that's roughly $60 to $105 an hour before tools. The tracking and content rows are where the hours pile up, and they're also the easiest to systemize.
Doing it all by hand or with software
You can run every layer by hand with spreadsheets and a writing team. Or RankControl can take on the heavy rows for each client. It checks 50 buyer questions every week on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Google AI Mode and shows who gets cited. It also writes and publishes up to 100 pages a month to the client's site once approved, and drafts link outreach from the client's own mailbox. That's one flat $400 a month per client site, which leaves room in a $1,500 to $2,500 retainer for your strategy and reporting.
AI search traffic grew 835% this year. Is your content ready?
RankControl generates 26 content formats optimized for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Published on your domain, matched to your brand.
