What AI visibility work actually costs in 2026
Published prices only, collected from the vendors' own pages. Audits from $440, retainers from $300 to $15,000 a month, full-service from $120,000 a year. Most of this market publishes nothing, which is itself the finding.
Almost nobody in this market publishes a price. Of nine SEO agencies selling AI visibility that I checked, one did. The reason is not mysterious, and one of the few who does publish put it plainly: a public rate card can feel like giving away your method.
So this page collects what is actually published, on the vendors’ own pages, in their own currency. No estimates, no ranges invented to fill a table. Where a figure comes from an agency’s own blog post about market rates rather than from its price list, it is marked.
One-off audits
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| AI search audit, one-off, non-refundable | $440 |
| Pilot engagement, three payments | $7,875 total |
| “Market rate” for an audit, per agency guides | $1,500 to $5,000 |
That last row is the one to be careful with. It appears in several agency-authored guides, which are pages written by sellers that also rank for the query. It is what the market says about itself.
Monthly retainers, published on the seller’s own site
| Tier | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Small business, entry | $300 to $479 |
| Small business, mid | $700 to $799 |
| Small business, upper | $1,599 to $2,000 |
| Specialist agency, minimum | $3,500 to $4,000 |
| Content-led, priced per article | $3,000 for 10 articles, $8,000 for 40 |
| Independent operator, B2B | $5,000, three-month minimum |
| Senior specialist | from $15,000 |
| Full service, annual | from $120,000 |
Two observations about that table.
The per-article line is the most revealing figure in this market. When AI visibility is priced by the article, it is a content retainer with a new label on it. That is not necessarily bad work, and content genuinely is most of the job. But you are buying articles, and you should compare the price against what articles cost.
The spread is scope, not skill. The gap between $479 and $15,000 is not a gap in competence. At the bottom you are buying monitoring plus a short list of fixes. At the top you are buying a team that also does the off-site work, which is the expensive and slow part.
Builds that include it
A handful of studios fold the work into a website build rather than selling it as a retainer:
| What | Price |
|---|---|
| Site build with AEO included, tiers | $2,500 / $5,000 / $9,000 / $15,000+ |
| Brand sprint | $4,500 |
| Webflow launch | $18,000 |
| Brand plus web, bundled | $20,000 |
| Brand build, full | $25,000 to $100,000+ |
| Search and AI visibility, monthly | $2,000 to $10,000 |
Worth noticing: even the outfits that argue the work is one job tend to price it as several. One agency states on its homepage that brand, website and AI visibility “aren’t separate jobs. They’re one job”, and then offers each separately on purpose, saying it would rather earn the next piece of work than bundle you. That is a defensible position and an honest one. It also means the combined product is, as of late 2026, mostly a sentence rather than a thing you can buy.
Tools
| Tool tier | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Entry monitoring | $29 |
| Mid | $189 to $295 |
| Upper | $489 |
Tools diagnose. None of them deploys a fix, which is the gap worth understanding before you buy one: you will still need somebody to change the site, and for most teams that is where the recommendation goes to die.
What nobody publishes
A day rate. I looked specifically. Not one operator in this category publishes one, including consultants who sell a day of their time.
A guarantee with a bar in it. Of 60 agencies surveyed in September 2026, 13% promised a result or a refund, 32% said results are not guaranteed, and half said nothing either way. Exactly one vendor I found publishes a checkable standard with a refund path attached.
What you are actually buying
Before comparing any two prices here, settle three questions, because they move the number more than the vendor does.
Who deploys? Monitoring costs under $300 a month and tells you where you stand. The expensive part is changing the site, and if that lands in your development queue the engagement stalls there. Ask explicitly whether recommendations get shipped and by whom.
What is off-site, and who does it? Most citations come from third-party sources rather than from your own site. Any scope that stops at your domain is necessary and not sufficient, and a vendor who does not say so is leaving you to find out.
What is the baseline? A fixed set of prompts, recorded before anything changes, rerun on a schedule. Without the first measurement nobody can tell you afterwards whether anything moved, which is convenient for everyone except the buyer.
On precision
One last number, from a study worth reading before you buy anything in this category: 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts across three tools, 2,961 runs in total. The author’s conclusion was that measuring a brand’s presence in AI answers with precision is a fool’s errand, and that any tool reporting a ranking position in AI is overselling. He disclosed that he had just joined an AI tracking startup, which makes the conclusion more interesting rather than less.
The systems are non-deterministic. Two identical prompts can return different sources. That does not mean measurement is pointless, it means the honest unit is a trend across many runs, not a position. Price accordingly, and be suspicious of anything sold as a rank.
Questions
- How much does AEO or GEO cost per month?
- Published retainers range from about $300 to $15,000 a month, and the spread is not quality, it is scope. The cluster for a small business sits around $500 to $2,000. Specialist agencies with a named method start around $3,500 to $4,000. Full-service engagements run from $120,000 a year upward. Most vendors publish no price at all.
- What does an AI visibility audit cost?
- The only firmly published one-off audit price I found was $440, non-refundable. Guides written by the agencies themselves cluster the figure between $1,500 and $5,000, which is a different kind of number: it is what sellers say the market is, not what any of them charges.
- Should I pay for an AI visibility tool?
- Monitoring tools run from about $29 to $489 a month. They tell you where you stand and cannot change it. For one person or a small business, the free stack is usually enough to start: Bing Webmaster Tools reports actual citations, GA4 has an AI Assistant channel, and a fixed list of prompts run monthly in a spreadsheet catches what neither shows.
- Does anyone guarantee AI citations?
- A survey of 60 agencies in September 2026 found 13% promised a result or a refund, 32% stated plainly that results are not guaranteed, and 50% said nothing. Nobody can guarantee a citation, because the systems are non-deterministic and the sources that get cited are mostly not yours. Treat a guarantee as a reason to leave.