How much SEO costs per month in 2026, and what GEO costs

An SEO proposal usually splits that time into five line items:

• Audit: finding what stops the site from appearing today, from technical errors to pages competing with each other for the same search.
• Technical SEO: speed, crawling and indexing, meaning that Google can download every page and keep it in its index.
• Content: new or rewritten pages that answer what customers search for.
• Links and mentions: getting other websites to cite and link to the brand.
• Measurement: a regular report on rankings, clicks and, more and more, citations in AI assistants.

Each provider mixes those items in its own way, which is why two proposals with the same price can buy very different work. According to the SE Ranking survey, 85% of agencies sell SEO as packages rather than service by service.

The rest of the monthly retainers in that survey break down like this:

• $1,000 to $2,000 per month: 20% of agencies.
• $2,000 to $5,000 per month: 13%.
• More than $5,000 per month: 2%.

The sample explains part of the result. 94% of the agencies surveyed work for small or local businesses, and 78% have fewer than 10 people; SE Ranking itself warns that this skews the data towards smaller agencies.

Retainers also grow with the relationship. 50% of the agencies in the survey have worked with their clients for two years or more, and that group charges the highest fees.

On hourly pricing, 47% of European agencies charge less than $75 an hour, against 23% in the US and Canada.

The survey does not break out individual European countries. Its European group has 119 agencies, 53 of them based in the UK, so these figures work as a European reference and not as the price in any one national market.

Choosing a model means choosing who carries the risk. With a monthly retainer, the agency allocates hours to whatever each month needs; with a fixed-price project, the client knows the price up front but buys a deliverable that someone will have to implement afterwards.

• Site size: a ten-page site and a shop with thousands of product pages do not need the same audit or the same upkeep.
• Competition: ranking for a search that hundreds of companies fight over takes more work than a niche one.
• Content: every new or rewritten page is hours of research, writing and review.
• Links and mentions: getting other websites to talk about the brand is relationship work, not only writing.
• Languages: each language adds its own set of searches, pages and measurement.

The provider’s size moves the figure too. According to SE Ranking, up to 80% of large agencies charge above-average fees, against 20% to 31% of agencies with fewer than five people.

Of the agencies in that survey, 61% are considering adding optimisation for AI answers: 43% inside the services they already offer and 18% as an extra service. Being the same survey, it shares the same skew towards small agencies.

Much of a GEO budget overlaps with SEO: a crawlable site, content that answers specific questions and mentions on other websites, because an assistant that searches the web can only cite what it finds and understands. What changes is where the brand is meant to appear and what gets measured, as the guide to what GEO is and how it differs from SEO explains.

Citations can already be counted in part with free reports. According to Kulturo’s AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, the site of this DoGeo client collected 11,800 AI citations in three months, from late July to October 2026, with an average of 16 pages cited.

No AI provider, on the other hand, publishes a report of when its assistant reads a site. To find out, you create a rule in the site’s firewall or CDN that logs without blocking the requests from each AI bot, identified by its user-agent, the name it announces itself with, and verified by IP where the provider publishes its ranges. Those logs show which pages each bot visits and when.

The bot that opens a page because a person asked, such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User or Perplexity-User, according to the documentation from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, is the closest signal to “the assistant read this page in a conversation”. This is what DoGeo sets up for each client. The log does not show what the assistant writes in its answer: for that you still need to track a fixed set of prompts in each assistant.

The third line item is mentions on third-party sites, such as media, comparisons, forums and directories, which assistants consult before recommending anyone. It is relationship and content work, and it matters because AI does not recommend a site nobody else mentions.

HeyTalent took just under a month and a half to close the first customer who said they found it on ChatGPT, and Kulturo took almost three months. Both figures measure a closed customer, not the first time the assistant named the brand.

Short relationships are rare in the sector: according to SE Ranking, only 13% of agencies say their clients stay for less than six months.

That is why a monthly retainer with a minimum term is better compared as a project: its real price is the retainer multiplied by the minimum months, and that is the figure to set next to a fixed-price proposal.

Other red flags worth watching for in a proposal:

• Link packages: a fixed number of links a month in exchange for money. Google’s spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as the first example of link spam, and what a site risks by buying backlinks goes well beyond the price.
• A “special relationship” with Google or a “priority submit”: the same Google guide says to be wary of anyone who offers them.
• Secrecy: Google advises caution with a company that will not clearly explain what it intends to do.
• Asking for too much access: for an audit, Google recommends granting read access to Search Console only, never write access.
• Promises about AI: no provider controls what a model answers, so nobody can guarantee that an assistant will name the brand.

1. Which hours or deliverables are included each month, and which are billed separately.
2. What is measured, with which source and how often the report arrives.
3. How long the minimum term is and what happens if you cancel early.
4. Who owns the content, the logins and the data if the relationship ends.
5. How presence in AI assistants is measured, if the proposal includes GEO.

Part of the diagnosis can be done for free before asking for proposals: checking whether AI crawlers can read the site shows whether there is a technical block that any provider would have to fix first.

Anyone comparing GEO providers can also see how a GEO agency like DoGeo works and which questions it answers before quoting.