Research
What generative engine optimization actually costs
We priced seventeen AI-visibility vendors for our comparison pages and recorded what each one publishes, with the date we checked it. That turns out to be the clearest answer available to a question almost nobody answers straight: what does this cost? The short version is that tools publish their prices and agencies do not, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the confusion lives.
Key takeaways
- Self-serve tools publish $20 to $800 a month. Enterprise platforms start around $2,500 and run to five figures.[1]
- Almost no agency publishes a retainer price. Of the seventeen vendors we audited, every one selling services rather than software quoted on a call.
- A tool subscription is not the same purchase as an agency. One tells you what AI answers say; the other changes it. Buying the first and expecting the second is the most common mistake we see.
- Treat any promised timeline under a month with suspicion: answers vary 34–42% between consecutive days, so a short window cannot separate a real change from noise.[2]
What is actually published#
These are the prices the vendors themselves list, taken from our comparison pages where each figure carries the date we checked it.[1] They are monitoring and analytics products, which matters for the comparison below.
Entry tiers, $20–$99 a month.Rankscale from $20, Otterly Lite at $29, Peec Starter at $95, and a cluster at $99: Profound Starter, Rankscale Pro, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit per domain, and Similarweb's AEO Intelligence billed annually. At this level you are usually buying a small prompt allowance and one seat.
Mid tiers, $189–$699 a month. Otterly Standard $189, Ahrefs Brand Radar $199 for a single AI platform index, Peec Pro $245, Scrunch Starter $250, Athena HQ Starter $295, Rankscale Growth $385, Goodie Explorer and Profound Growth both $399, Scrunch Growth $417, Otterly Premium $489, Peec Advanced $495, and Brand Radar again at $699 for all seven platforms. This is where prompt counts and engine coverage become usable for a real category. Peec has since taken pricing off its site; the two Peec figures above are the last it published, checked 2026-07-22.
Above that.There is no single normal monthly fee, but this is where the range ends for self-serve: Evertune's Pro plan is $800. seoClarity publishes three “starts at” floors rather than one range: $2,500 for research and content, $3,200 for technical SEO, $4,500 for enterprise. Conductor does not publish at all; third-party review sites estimate $30,000 to $150,000 a year, with a median near $49,510.
And five publish nothing on their own sites. Conductor above, plus Bluefish AI, BrandRank.AI, BrightEdge and Daydream, each of which gates its number behind a demo or a sales call. Checked 2026-09-07: none of the four serves a pricing page, and BrandRank.AI returns 404 on one. Third-party directories sometimes list a figure for these vendors; we record only what the vendor publishes. So seventeen audited vendors yield twelve published prices.
Why agency pricing is not published#
Every price above is software. Search for what a generative engine optimization agency charges and you will mostly find nothing, because scope is the variable that moves the number: how many buyer questions, how many engines, whether anyone writes and ships the fixes or hands you a list.
That is a legitimate reason for the silence, not just a convenient one. It also makes the quote hard to compare, so the useful move is to stop comparing prices and start comparing what arrives. A fixed-scope diagnostic and an open-ended retainer can carry the same monthly figure and deliver completely different amounts of work.
Questions to ask before hiring, and what a retainer should include#
Ask for these four in writing before signing anything, whatever the number is. They are the same questions we set out in how to tell a good agency from a reseller, applied to a monthly engagement.
The prompt set, and who owns it. Which buyer questions get tracked, how many, and whether you keep them if you leave. A retainer measured on prompts you cannot see is not auditable.
Runs per prompt, per engine. One reading a month tells you nothing. Ask what the sampling schedule is and whether they publish it. Ours is on the methodology page.
Who ships the fixes. Most of the category delivers a dashboard and a list. If the retainer does not name who writes the pages and who puts them live, you are buying measurement.
Off-domain work.Across 25 million links, 84% of AI citations were earned media and 0.3% paid, not the brand's own site.[3] A retainer that only touches your own pages is working part of the surface.
GEO instead of SEO, or as well?#
As well, and the reason is measurable rather than rhetorical. Only 12% of the URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot rank in Google's top ten for the same prompt, across a 15,000-prompt dataset.[4] Ranking and being cited have come apart far enough that one does not stand in for the other.
So “my SEO is already good, do I need this” has an empirical answer: a strong Google position is not evidence of AI visibility, in either direction. The cheapest way to find out is to ask the engines your own category questions and count.
How long before it moves#
Longer than a dashboard makes it look. The sources an engine cites overlap only 34–42% between consecutive days,[2] so a fortnight of readings can show a swing that nothing on your site caused. Anyone quoting a result inside a month is quoting variance.
What a competent engagement can show early is input rather than outcome: pages shipped, rendering fixed, coverage placed. The outcome shows up as a change in citation rate across repeated runs, and the honest way to report it is per engine with the run count attached.
Once you have a number, the other half of the decision is evidence: how to tell whether it actually worked.
Want the real number for your category? We scope it on a call.
Sources
- Noetio vendor comparison pages— 17 AI-visibility tools, each pricing claim carrying the date we checked the vendor's own page. Prices move; the dates are on each page.
- “Don't Measure Once: Measuring Visibility in AI Search” — arXiv:2604.07585. Source sets overlap 34–42% between consecutive days.
- Muck Rack, Generative Pulse — 25M+ links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude; 84% earned media, 0.3% paid. Vendor study, method disclosed.
- Ahrefs, “Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10” — 15,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, August 2025. Vendor study.
The pricing figures are our own audit of published vendor pages, each dated on the comparison page it came from. The research claims link to the studies they rest on.