What does GEO cost? From doing it yourself to hiring an agency

The short answer: GEO costs anywhere from $0 to several thousand dollars a month. Measuring can be free. Doing it yourself with a platform starts at $49 a month (GreatCompany Pro), or $99 a month on Automatic for WordPress. Doing it with your own team, including internal hours, typically runs a few hundred to around $1,500 a month. Fully outsourcing to an agency usually means a retainer in the thousands.

More and more businesses want to be found in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. The logical question is: what does that cost? Below are the amounts side by side, and what you get back in each scenario.

The amounts at a glance

These are our own rough estimates of the total monthly cost per scenario, including your own time. Your numbers will depend on your hourly costs and how much content you produce.

Scenario	Rough cost per month	What is included	Fits
Measuring only	$0	A one-time free check as a baseline	Anyone who wants to know where they stand
Platform, you do the work	$300 to $900	A tool at $49 to $99, plus internal time	Small businesses that want to work from data
Your own team, no platform	$600 to $1,800	15 to 25 hours of internal time plus $100 to $300 in tools	Businesses with a content team that has capacity
Outsourced to an agency	$3,000 and up	Strategy, content and technical work, plus a few hours of your own coordination	Budget, but no in-house expertise

The reasoning behind these numbers is in the ROI of GEO, including the comparison with SEO and paid search.

Note the difference between the second and third rows. Doing it yourself with a platform is cheaper than doing it yourself without one, mostly because you save internal hours. The tool is rarely the biggest cost; your own time is.

Published prices of GEO tools (checked October 2026)

The scenarios above are total costs including your own hours; the table below shows only the published entry price of each vendor.

Vendor	Entry price per month	Source	Checked on
Otterly.ai	From about $29	otterly.ai/pricing	October 17, 2026
GreatCompany	Pro $49, Automatic (for WordPress) $99	greatcompany.ai/pricing	November 14, 2026
Ahrefs Brand Radar	Custom Prompts from $50, all models $699	ahrefs.com/brand-radar	October 17, 2026
Promptwatch	From $95	promptwatch.com/pricing	October 17, 2026
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit	$99 per domain, as an add-on	semrush.com	October 17, 2026
SEO.AI	From $149	seo.ai/pricing	October 17, 2026
Peec AI	Starter $95, Pro $245, Advanced $495 a month; extra AI models cost more	peec.ai/pricing (via independent pricing trackers)	October 2026
Profound	Enterprise, on request	tryprofound.com	October 17, 2026

Prices change. Always check the vendor’s site for the current amount. What each tool does is on best GEO tools. The trade-off between doing it yourself and outsourcing is in outsourcing GEO or doing it yourself.

What does an agency cost?

Most agencies do not publish a GEO price. They quote per client, often as part of an SEO retainer. What a GEO agency does, how they price their work and when a tool is enough is on GEO agency. Prices for classic SEO per type of provider are in what SEO costs.

Option 1: measure for free

The first step costs nothing. A free check shows for which questions AI mentions your business now, and for which it does not. That gives you a baseline without any commitment, and it is the best way to start before you spend anything. Read about the free AI visibility check.

Option 2: a GEO tool (from a few dozen dollars a month)

For ongoing measuring and improving you use a tool. GreatCompany charges Pro $49 or Automatic (for WordPress) $99 a month. Pro measures and advises. On Automatic, GreatCompany publishes improved titles, descriptions, internal links and alt texts to your WordPress site, up to 5 improvements every Monday. Want to check first? Set any item to Approve first and you get each proposal by email with Yes or No. Every page improvement can be undone with one click. From 4 weeks after an improvement, your overview email shows how many extra clicks the improved pages got from Google.

What you get back: insight into which questions matter, whether you are mentioned, and what to improve. That makes your work targeted instead of guesswork.

Watch the unit a tool charges in. The monthly price says little without knowing what you are allowed to measure for it. Ahrefs Brand Radar, for example, sells several tiers and modules on top of an Ahrefs subscription; see what Ahrefs Brand Radar costs. Peec AI lists a base price, but charges extra per AI model beyond the three included. Profound sells to brands by quote, so you can only compare after a sales conversation. So ask every vendor two things: what is the total, and how many of my own prompts does that leave me per month?

Option 3: hire an agency

If you want to hand off the work, an agency can take on content and technical work. That costs more, usually a monthly retainer or a project fee, but saves time and brings expertise. For many small businesses a combination works best: measure yourself with a tool, and bring in an agency for the heavy lifting. What belongs in a fixed monthly package is in SEO subscription.

What drives the cost?

• Scale: one website or several domains. Almost every tool charges per domain, so for an agency with ten clients the software bill simply multiplies by ten.
• The number of questions you track. For most businesses, 20 to 50 well-chosen prompts are enough for a reliable picture.
• Whether you create the content yourself or outsource it. In practice this is the biggest variable: the tool costs dollars, content costs hours.
• Whether you also work on authority and digital PR. That is the most expensive item and also the strongest lever, because branded search correlates strongly with AI citations.

When does it pay for itself?

Run the numbers with your own deal value instead of a rule of thumb. The calculation in the ROI article uses a B2B service provider with an average deal value of $15,000 and an investment of $800 a month. With 30 extra visits a month from AI channels and a 3 percent conversion rate, that comes to about eleven new clients a year. Even if you halve those assumptions, the spend is small compared with what a single deal brings in.

For an online store with an average order value of $60 it is different: volume has to do the work, and the payback time is longer. So the question is not whether GEO is expensive, but what a customer is worth to you.

First results: count on 2 to 4 months

Costs without a timeline say nothing. You can expect first visibility in AI answers after 2 to 4 months; a mature position with measurable impact on revenue usually takes 6 to 12 months. That is similar to SEO and much slower than advertising, where you see results the same day and lose everything the day you stop.

GEO versus advertising

An important difference with advertising in AI search engines: there you pay per click. With GEO you pay for the tool and the time, not per mention. Organic visibility also does not disappear the moment you stop paying, which makes it cost-efficient over time.

The smartest start

Start small and measurable. Get a baseline first, then use a prompt tracker to measure structurally, and only expand into content and authority once you see where the opportunities are. That way you never pay for more than you need. Prefer to hand off the work? Read about outsourcing SEO and GEO.

Need to justify this budget to leadership? Read what to say when your board asks what you are doing about AI.