How Much Does GEO and AEO Cost in 2026?

GEO and AEO are new enough that there's no settled market rate, and most agencies don't publish prices at all — which is why the quotes a business gets can differ by a factor of ten for what sounds like the same work. The ranges below come from published 2026 pricing guides and surveys, sources listed at the end. Most of those sources are agencies that sell these services, so treat them as the going rate agencies charge, not as what the work has to cost.

Agency retainers sort into rough tiers. Entry programs aimed at small businesses run about $1,500 to $5,000 a month. The middle of the market, where most growing businesses land, sits at roughly $2,500 to $5,000 a month for AEO and $5,000 to $10,000 for GEO — GEO usually costs more because it depends on off-site work: earning citations and mentions on other sites, which takes outreach and can't be done from inside your own CMS. Full-service and premium programs run $10,000 to $20,000 a month, and enterprise engagements with the most technical agencies reach six figures a year.

One-time work is priced separately. A standalone AI visibility audit runs anywhere from free to about $5,000 — at the low end it's an automated scan, at the high end a manual review across several AI engines with a prioritized plan. A setup project covering schema markup, llms.txt, content restructuring, and a baseline citation test typically costs $1,500 to $5,000 before a retainer starts. If you'd rather do the first pass yourself, a free self-audit and the schema markup generator cover a meaningful share of that setup work at no cost.

The do-it-yourself route is much cheaper in cash and much more expensive in time. Self-serve tools that track whether AI engines mention you start around $29 a month for a small number of prompts, with mid and upper tiers running into the hundreds per month. These tools measure — they show where you appear and where you don't — but they don't fix anything. The restructuring, schema, content, and citation-building is still work someone has to do, which is what an agency retainer actually pays for.

Four things move a quote up or down. How many AI engines and prompts are tracked: monitoring 50 buyer questions across three engines is a different job from 200 across five. How much content gets produced or rewritten: agency-written articles commonly add $500 to $1,500 apiece. How much off-site work is included: citation placements and digital PR are the most labor-intensive part of GEO and usually the biggest single driver of price. And how competitive your category is: the more established the brands you're up against, the more work it takes to get cited ahead of them.

For comparison, here is where this studio sits, since we publish our prices instead of quoting case by case: AEO starts at $499 a month and GEO at $799. That's well below the agency ranges above, and it's worth being plain about why. Part of it is structural — a solo-led studio with no account managers or sales team has far less overhead to pass on. Part of it is scope: the entry tiers track 50 questions or prompts rather than hundreds, and GEO Starter includes two citation placements a month rather than an ongoing PR program. The higher tiers expand both. A $10,000 retainer and a $799 one aren't the same product; the useful question is which scope your business actually needs right now.

When you compare quotes, ask each provider for the same four numbers: how many prompts or questions they track, across which engines, how many pages or articles they produce each month, and how many citations or placements they commit to. Those four make quotes directly comparable. A quote that won't break down into deliverables is the one to be careful with — in a market this new, a vague scope is how two providers can charge wildly different prices for what sounds like the same thing. It also helps to know what GEO and AEO each actually do before reading a proposal, since many quotes bundle them.

Where these numbers come from: agency tiers and audit pricing from Red-engage's survey of 20 GEO agencies, mid-market AEO retainers, setup projects, and per-article content costs from StayCitable's 2026 AEO pricing guide, and tracking-tool pricing from a published comparison of AI visibility tools. Several of these sources note that many agencies don't publish prices, so some of the underlying figures are estimates rather than confirmed rate cards.