Pricing pages in this industry love to hide the number behind a demo call. We'll do the opposite — including publishing our own prices, since we're a vendor in this market and you deserve to read this guide knowing that.
The Short Version
GEO spending in 2026 falls into five tiers. Each buys a genuinely different thing:
| Tier | Typical range | What you're buying |
|---|---|---|
| Free scans & trackers | $0 | A snapshot: does AI mention you today? |
| One-time audits | ~$100–$500 | Diagnosis: why you're invisible and what to fix |
| Self-serve software | ~$30–$500/mo | Ongoing monitoring, sometimes content tooling |
| Done-for-you platforms | ~$300–$1,000/mo | Monitoring plus execution: content, fixes, reporting |
| Agency retainers / fractional CMO | ~$2,000–$10,000/mo | Strategy, execution, and a human accountable for results |
The most common overspend: paying retainer prices for what software does. The most common underspend: buying a dashboard when what you needed was execution.
What You're Actually Paying For
Every GEO service is some bundle of four jobs:
- Monitoring — asking AI engines the questions your customers ask, across engines, on a schedule, and keeping the receipts.
- Diagnosis — connecting "AI skips you" to the specific causes: schema, entity confusion, thin reviews, missing content, inconsistent information.
- Execution — writing the content, fixing the markup, building the citations. This is where most of the labor (and therefore cost) lives.
- Accountability — someone who looks at the trend line each month and answers for it.
Free tools do job 1 shallowly. Audits do job 2 once. Software does 1 and sometimes 3. Done-for-you covers 1–3 continuously. Retainers cover all four with a human attached.
Our Prices, Since We're Asking You to Trust This Guide
At Cited by AI: a free three-engine scan, a $97 automated Quick Scan across all five engines, a $497 deep manual audit (30+ pages, fixes written for you), a $497/month platform (weekly monitoring plus content generation in your voice), and a CMO partnership tier for businesses that want a strategist attached. That's the done-for-you category — built for local and service businesses without marketing teams. If you have an in-house team, cheaper self-serve tracking plus their labor may genuinely serve you better.
How to Spend the Right Amount
Spend $0 first, always. Run a free scan or a manual audit. If AI already recommends you consistently, your money belongs in defense (reviews, fresh content), not in a big program.
Buy an audit when you're invisible and don't know why. A few hundred dollars for a real diagnosis beats a year of guessing. Judge audits by specificity: they should name your pages, your schema, your gaps — not deliver a generic checklist.
Buy software when you have hands to do the work. A tracker plus a capable marketer is a legitimate, cost-effective setup.
Buy done-for-you when you don't. The math for a local business is straightforward: if AI referrals bring customers worth a few hundred dollars each, a mid-hundreds monthly cost pays for itself on a handful of wins — if the service actually publishes fixes, not just reports. Ask any vendor: "show me the last three things you shipped for a client and what happened to their citations afterward."
Buy a retainer when the stakes justify a human. High-value clients (healthcare, legal, B2B services with five-figure lifetime values) can justify $2K–$10K/month — but hold retainers to before-and-after citation evidence, not activity reports.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is there no standard GEO pricing yet? The category is young and bundles wildly different labor. A dashboard subscription and a content-producing service can both call themselves "GEO tools" while doing completely different jobs. Price the jobs, not the label.
Is GEO more expensive than SEO? The market rates are similar, and the work overlaps heavily — GEO and SEO share a foundation. If you're already paying for SEO, ask your provider what they're doing for AI engines specifically. "Nothing yet" is a common and honest answer.
Can I do GEO entirely for free? The basics, yes: consistent information everywhere, a real FAQ, schema markup, steady reviews. Our free 5-step guide covers the fixes any owner can do in an hour. What's hard to do free is the ongoing loop — monitoring, content, re-checking — which is exactly what the paid tiers automate.
What's the biggest pricing red flag? Guarantees. Nobody controls what AI engines say. Trustworthy vendors show you verbatim answers and trend lines; untrustworthy ones promise rankings.
Spend nothing until you know where you stand. Then buy exactly the jobs you can't do yourself — no more, no less.
See where you stand free — the real questions, the real answers, and your score in about a minute.
