Generative engine optimization has no standard price, because the work depends on your starting point. A business with consistent listings, reviews and clear pages needs a little ongoing work; one with mismatched profiles needs fixes first. Ask for a quote that separates one-off fixes from monthly work, lists every task, and promises no AI mentions.
What are you actually paying for?
Every GEO engagement is made of some mix of the tasks below. Knowing which ones you need is most of the way to knowing what it should cost.
| Task | One-off or ongoing | Needed when |
|---|---|---|
| Business facts clean-up | One-off | Your name, address, phone or hours differ between profiles |
| Google Business Profile work | One-off, then light upkeep | Categories, services or photos are missing or wrong |
| Answer-first page rewrites | One-off per page | Key pages bury the answer under long introductions |
| Structured data | One-off | The site does not state its business details in schema |
| Review requests | Ongoing | Reviews are few or out of date, and your rules allow asking |
| Earning mentions | Ongoing | Competitors appear in local articles and directories and you do not |
| Monthly measurement | Ongoing | Always, so you can see whether any of it is working |
Why do GEO prices vary so much?
The number of locations, the state of your current listings, how many pages need rewriting and how competitive your market is all change the effort. Some providers also sell tracking software and call it GEO, while others sell the work itself, so two quotes can describe quite different things.
That is why a quote that only states a monthly figure, without listing tasks, is hard to judge. Ask what will be done in the first month and in every month after it.
What should a GEO quote include?
A useful quote answers these questions in writing:
- Which tasks from the table above are included, and which are one-off?
- Which questions and which AI tools will be measured, and how often?
- Who owns the profiles, listings and content once the work is done?
- What does the monthly report show?
- What happens if you stop, and is there a minimum term?
What are the red flags?
A promise that ChatGPT or Google will recommend you. Nobody outside those companies controls what their models say.
Selling an llms.txt file or special markup as the key to AI answers. Google's own guidance says neither is required for its AI features.
Buying reviews or posting fake ones. In the US the Federal Trade Commission's final rule, announced in August 2024, bans fake reviews and reviews bought for a particular sentiment.
Paid places in "best of" lists that do not say they are paid. Independent mentions only help because they are independent.
How do we price it?
We start with a free AI-visibility check: ten local questions asked in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with a record of who gets named. From that we quote the one-off fixes and any monthly work separately, each at a fixed price, and we never promise AI mentions or rankings.
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Common Questions
Usually both. Fixing listings, profiles and key pages is a one-off piece of work. Reviews, new answer pages, mentions and monthly measurement are ongoing. If your foundations are already in good shape, the ongoing part can be small, so ask for the two to be priced separately.
No. Tracking software asks AI tools a set of questions and reports who gets named. That is useful for measurement, but it changes nothing on its own. A service does the work that moves the result: profiles, reviews, pages and mentions. Some businesses need only one of the two.
We quote after a free AI-visibility check, because the price depends on what is already in place. The quote lists the one-off fixes and any monthly work separately, with a fixed price for each, so you can see exactly what you are paying for before you agree to anything.
Got A Question About Your Own Site?
If "How Much Does Generative Engine Optimization Cost?" raised a question about your own setup, send it over. We answer these properly whether or not it turns into work, and if this is not really your bottleneck, we will say so.