If you’re getting quotes for AI search optimization, the honest range you’ll see in 2026 is roughly €300 to €3,500+ per month, with most small businesses landing somewhere between €500 and €1,500. The number moves depending on how much content you need written, how technical your site’s problems are, and whether you’re starting from zero or already have a few hundred indexed pages to fix.
That’s a wide range, and vague ranges are exactly what make people distrust marketing quotes. So this post breaks down what actually drives the number up or down, what you should expect at each price tier, and which questions expose a quote that’s really just SEO with a new label stapled on top.
What are you actually paying for?
GEO (generative engine optimization, sometimes called AEO or AI-SEO) is the work of making your site legible and citable to AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot. In practice, the deliverables look like this:
- Content work — writing or restructuring pages so they answer specific questions directly, usually in the first two or three sentences.
- Technical work — making sure AI crawlers can actually reach your content (robots.txt rules, JavaScript rendering issues, site speed), plus structured data markup.
- Measurement — tracking whether you’re actually showing up in AI answers, which is a different (and clunkier) discipline than checking Google rankings.
- Ongoing maintenance — AI answer engines change their citation patterns often enough that a one-time project rarely holds its position for more than a few months.
Any quote you get should map to some combination of these four. If it doesn’t, ask what exactly you’re buying.
Why does the price range vary so much?
Five factors explain almost all of the spread we see when businesses compare quotes:
1. How much content already exists
A site with 200 reasonably good blog posts often needs an audit and restructuring pass — cheaper than building a content program from a blank slate. A site with five pages needs volume before it needs polish, and volume is where the hours go.
2. How competitive the niche is
Local services (plumbers, dentists, electricians) compete against a handful of nearby businesses. B2B software competes against every other company answering the same buyer questions, globally, in English. The second case needs more original research and a sharper angle per page, which takes longer to produce well.
3. Technical debt
If your site is a modern, fast, server-rendered setup, technical GEO work might be a single afternoon. If it’s a JavaScript-heavy site where crawlers can’t see half your content without rendering it first, that’s a developer problem before it’s a content problem, and it costs accordingly.
4. How often the deliverable updates
A one-off technical audit is a fixed-cost project. A monthly content program that keeps producing new pages, updating old ones, and tracking citation rates is a retainer, and retainers are priced for sustained output, not a single deliverable.
5. Who’s doing the work
A freelancer with one AI-SEO client at a time prices differently than an agency running the same playbook across dozens of accounts with tooling already built. Neither is automatically the better choice — it depends on how much oversight you want to do yourself.
What does each price tier actually get you?
| Monthly budget | What’s realistic at this tier | What’s usually missing |
|---|---|---|
| Under €300 | A handful of AI-optimized pages per month, or a one-time technical checklist you implement yourself. | Measurement, ongoing iteration, competitive research. |
| €300–€800 | A steady stream of 2–4 new or restructured pages monthly, basic technical fixes, light citation tracking. | Deep technical work on complex sites, dedicated strategy calls. |
| €800–€2,000 | A full content program (4–8 pages/month), structured data implementation, monthly reporting on AI citation appearances, strategy input. | Custom research studies, large-scale technical rebuilds. |
| €2,000+ | Everything above, plus dedicated technical resources, original data/research content, and coverage across multiple markets or languages. | Usually nothing — this tier is scoped to the business, not a template. |
Most of the SME accounts we see land in the €300–€800 range for a monthly content program, scaling up from there once the technical side is sorted — but the table holds regardless of who you hire.
Is GEO worth paying for at all, or should you DIY it?
DIY makes sense if you already write consistently and just need a checklist to follow — our GEO audit checklist covers the eight technical checks worth doing yourself before spending anything. It stops making sense once you need volume (more than one or two pages a month) or once nobody on your team has time to track whether the work is actually landing in AI answers, which requires checking outputs manually since there’s no equivalent of Google Search Console for ChatGPT yet.
We wrote a longer breakdown of when the investment pays off versus when it’s premature in Is GEO Worth It in 2026? — the short version is that it’s worth it once you have something worth citing, and premature if your core offer or site content still needs basic clarity work first.
Questions that expose a bad quote
Before signing anything, ask these three questions. The answers tell you more than the price does.
- “How will you show me this is working?” If the answer is only “rankings will improve,” that’s an SEO answer wearing a GEO label. Ask specifically how they check for citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
- “What happens to the technical fixes if I cancel?” Structured data and site fixes should stay live and useful even after you stop paying. Content-only retainers with no technical component sometimes leave you no better off structurally once the contract ends.
- “Can you show me an example of a page you’ve written that’s actually getting cited?” Anyone doing this work seriously has a screenshot of an AI answer citing their client’s content. If they can’t produce one, they may be new to the discipline — not disqualifying, but worth knowing.
A few of the GEO myths we see wasting budget come directly from businesses buying the wrong tier for their actual need — paying enterprise rates for a problem a €500/month content program would have solved, or trying to DIY a technical problem that needed a developer.
How long before the spend actually shows results?
This is the question that gets skipped in most sales conversations, and it matters more than the monthly rate. Based on the accounts we’ve watched move through this: technical fixes (structured data, crawlability) can start affecting citation eligibility within a few weeks, since that’s mostly a matter of AI crawlers re-indexing the site. New content is slower — a freshly published page competing for AI citations typically needs one to three months before it shows up consistently in answers, longer in competitive B2B categories.
That means a three-month minimum commitment is reasonable to ask for, and anything promising “results in two weeks” for new content specifically is either talking about technical fixes only, or overselling. A fair way to structure the first quarter with any provider is: month one for the technical audit and first content batch, month two for iteration based on what’s getting cited, month three for a real read on whether the approach is working before you commit to a longer retainer.
The bottom line
There’s no single “right” price for GEO in 2026, but there is a right question: does the quote match your actual content gap and technical state, or is it a flat rate applied regardless of what your site needs? Get an audit first — even a free or cheap one — before committing to a monthly number. It’s the only way to know whether €400 or €2,000 is the honest price for your situation.