How Much Does GEO Cost? Retainers, Audits, Tools

GEO costs anywhere from a tool under $100 a month to a five-figure monthly retainer, and the published ranges are too wide to budget from. For a DTC store doing €500k to €5M, the useful answer is a unit price: how many buyer prompts are measured, on how many engines, and what work is delivered each month. Below are the prices we read on 8 October 2026 and three worked first-year budgets.

What the published GEO price ranges say

The pages that rank for this question all split GEO into tools, audits and retainers, but their numbers sit far apart. Tools start in the tens of dollars a month, audits in the low thousands, and agency retainers in the low four figures a month. None we read gives a euro price or is written for ecommerce.

WebFX, an agency that sells GEO, says GEO costs "$10–$1,000+ per month" for tools and "$1,500–$50,000+ per month for agency services." At the agency end, the top of that range is at least 33 times the bottom, so it cannot tell a store what to budget.

The narrower figures come from B2B SaaS agencies. TripleDart benchmarks total startup spend on tools, content, PR and measurement combined in the low thousands of dollars a month. Gripped says most SaaS companies spend between £1,500 and £6,000 per month and prices a standalone audit at £3,000 to £8,000. AOK Marketing puts an audit or readiness assessment at $2,000-$8,000. All four are agencies pricing their own market, in dollars or pounds.

What tracking costs per AI answer

The fair way to compare AI-visibility tools is the cost of one AI answer: one prompt, asked once, on one engine. Vendors sell that unit under different names, as checks, responses or credits, and most state the conversion. Where they do, the plans we read on 8 October 2026 cost about two to eight cents an answer.

We read ten vendors' pricing pages that day. Profound, Peec AI and Otterly.AI did not show a price in page text we could verify, so they are left out rather than quoted from reviews. For the rest, we compared each vendor's first self-serve monthly plan that states what it includes; Rankscale and AthenaHQ also sell smaller or free tiers.

Ahrefs' pricing page defines the unit plainly: "Tracking one prompt on one platform in one location uses 1 check," and the Basic custom-prompt plan is $50 a month for 2,500 checks. Its own plan guide says custom prompts are available "from Lite plan onwards", so check whether you also need a base Ahrefs plan. Scrunch's Core plan is $250 a month for 5,000 responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. LLMrefs charges $79 a month to track 500 prompts on all engines with weekly reports, a price it marks as limited-time. Semrush lists its AI Visibility Toolkit at "$99 per month" with "25 prompts for Prompt Tracking" but gives no engine count for those prompts.

Plan caps matter as much as the unit price. Scrunch Core covers one country and one language, so a store selling in the Netherlands and Germany in two languages would outgrow it on day one.

Here is what that store needs. Forty buyer prompts, such as "best merino hoodie under €100 that ships to Germany", on four engines, run weekly, in two languages, is 1,280 answers a month. On Rankscale Pro that uses about 320 credits a month, well inside the plan's allowance, so the $99 plan covers it with room to add engines.

What a retainer pays for, line by line

A GEO retainer pays for three kinds of work: measurement on a fixed prompt set, pages built to be cited, and placements on the other sites engines already quote. The price moves with the volume of each, so a quote that leaves out any of the three volumes is missing the number you need.

TripleDart's own breakdown shows where the money goes. It prices writer and editor time at $300 to $1,500 per page and digital PR retainers for GEO at $2,000 to $8,000 per month. So if a retainer costs less than two pages of writing a month would, ask what it delivers beyond a dashboard and a monthly report.

Off-site work is the line cheap scopes most often leave out. Dominykas Jankauskas, DeviLabs' founder and this post's author, has written that "the work that moves AI citations doesn't happen on your website," and that it is "slower and less packageable than a keyword campaign." Ask which line of the quote pays for it, and how many placements a month that line buys.

He also names a double-billing trap: "the most common failure I see is a brand paying an SEO retainer and a 'GEO retainer' that are both, on inspection, invoicing for the same schema markup and the same content briefs under different names." Put both scopes side by side before you add the second one.

One published price list: ours

DeviLabs sells GEO, so read this as one seller's published price list rather than a neutral benchmark. We include it because every price and volume is public, in euros and excluding VAT, which lets you hold another quote against it line by line.

Every figure in the table is on our pricing page. The €1,500 audit fee is credited in full against Foundations at €4,500 if you continue within 30 days. Core is €2,200 a month, Growth €3,500 and Authority €5,500, with a 6-month minimum on Authority and three months on the other two, then 30 days' notice. Against the ranges above, our audit sits below AOK's and Gripped's audit bands, and Core sits in the low-thousands band TripleDart gives for a startup's total spend.

The minimum exists for a reason we have stated on our Full Growth Partner page: we ask for a first quarter "because GEO does not produce a readable signal in a month." Anyone selling a twelve-month lock "to prove work that compounds in three is protecting themselves, not you."

Three first-year budgets for a €2M Shopify brand

Take a Shopify brand doing €2M a year, selling merino basics online in the Netherlands and Germany, with a store in English and German. A tool with in-house work costs about $1,188 a year plus staff time. A tool with freelance writing runs $8,388 to $37,188. An agency retainer on our list runs €29,900 to €44,200.

The freelance path uses TripleDart's per-page writing range for two pages a month, plus the $99 tool. The agency rows use our list: Foundations is €5,700, the base price plus the fee for the second language, with the audit credited against it. The list prices locations separately from languages; if a second market counted as a location too, add €900, taking the Growth year to €45,100.

On Growth, getting through the audit, the sprint and the three-month minimum costs €16,200, including €10,500 of retainer. A year on Growth is about 2.2% of the brand's revenue, and on Core about 1.5%.

To judge whether that pays back, work from margin. At a hypothetical €90 average order and 60% gross margin, each order earns €54, so €44,200 needs about 819 extra orders in the year, or about 68 a month, to break even. DeviLabs does not publish client ROAS or revenue, so set that target against your own baseline and AI-referred orders rather than against anyone's case study.

Product-feed submission for ChatGPT shopping is a separate job with its own routes, covered in our guide to the ChatGPT product feed.

Six questions that turn a quote into a unit price

Ask these before you sign, and write each answer next to the price in your comparison sheet. A quote you cannot get these answers for in writing is one you cannot compare with the others, so leave it out of the shortlist.

1. How many prompts, on which engines, run how many times a month? That is the measurement volume you are paying for, and it converts to a cost per answer.
2. How many pages and how many off-site placements are delivered each month? Get numbers, and ask what counts as a placement.
3. Is the one-time setup priced as a project? If it sits inside the retainer, it keeps being billed after it is done.
4. What is the minimum term and the notice period? Three months is enough to see a first signal, and twelve leaves you no exit if there is none.
5. What is excluded? Ad spend, creative production and product-feed work are often outside the fee.
6. Which currency, and is VAT included? Most tool prices are in dollars, while EU agency quotes are often in euros ex VAT.

For the vetting questions that sit around price, such as red flags and how to test an agency's method, use our guide on how to choose a GEO agency. To judge what the money bought, measure the same prompt set before and after, as set out in how to measure AI visibility.

Start now: write down ten buyer questions for your best-selling product, then send them with the six questions above to every vendor on your list. Compare the replies by cost per answer, page and placement.