How Much Does GEO Cost?
GEO costs $500 to $3,000 a month with most agencies and freelancers. It is the same work as good SEO with a new scoreboard, so the range matches what SEO retainers already run. Expect it inside your SEO retainer, not billed on top. Done yourself, GEO costs a few hours a week and almost no money.
What Do Agencies and Freelancers Charge for GEO?
Agencies and freelancers charge $500 to $3,000 a month for GEO, the same range they charge for SEO. Ahrefs polled 439 providers and found $501 to $1,000 a month is the most common retainer, with the overall average at $2,917. Almost nobody prices GEO as its own service yet.
| Who you hire | Typical price | What that buys |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | $1,348 a month on average | Focused work on your most important pages |
| Agency | $3,209 a month on average | Content, technical fixes, outreach, and reporting |
| Hourly consultant | $75 to $100 an hour | An audit or a second opinion |
| One-time project | $2,501 to $5,000 | A rewrite of your top pages, with no retainer |
Inside that table, the split matters more than the average. Agencies averaged more than double what freelancers charged in the survey, so a small store can get solid GEO work done at freelancer rates.
Experience moves the number too. Providers in business more than two years charged about a third more, and on a discipline this new the premium is usually worth paying. The cheap version of GEO is often guesswork with a dashboard attached.
Those survey numbers also match what I found pricing the sibling acronym. My breakdown of how much AEO costs landed in the same place: the work lives inside a normal retainer, not beside it.
Just know you will see much bigger numbers on agency pricing pages. Published GEO rate cards run $1,500 to $5,000 a month for small businesses and climb past $25,000 for enterprise brands. Those prices are for a separate GEO retainer sold on top of SEO, and that is the setup I would steer most stores away from.
What Moves the Price Up or Down
The price of GEO moves up or down mostly with how many pages need rewriting and how crowded your category is. A 40-product store with five collections is a $500 to $1,000 a month job. A 2,000-product catalog in a category full of national brands sits closer to $3,000.
Page count comes first, since the core of the work is editing. Every collection page, product page, and post that should show up in an AI answer needs its opening rewritten and its claims sourced. More pages means more hours, and hours are what a retainer sells.
Beyond page count, your category sets how much outreach you need. If the roundups and review sites in your space already mention you, the off-site work is light. If five competitors are named everywhere and you are named nowhere, someone has to close that gap one pitch at a time.
Your starting point matters as well. A store with clean technical SEO and a blog that already answers buying questions is most of the way there, which is the argument I make in whether GEO is just SEO with a new name. A store with thin pages is paying for the SEO it skipped, whatever the invoice calls it.
Retainer, Project, or Hourly: Which Pricing Fits?
A one-time project fits most stores buying GEO for the first time, and a retainer fits once the first rewrites prove out. The project caps your risk at $2,501 to $5,000, the most common project fee in the Ahrefs survey. Hourly billing fits an audit or a second opinion and little else.
With a project, you are buying a fixed list: your top ten pages rewritten to answer first, your crawler settings checked, and a baseline of what the AI engines say about your brand today. You own that result whether or not you hire anyone afterward.
Once that baseline exists, a retainer starts to make sense. Mentions and fresh content need steady hours every month, and outreach is the kind of work that never finishes. A retainer is also the only model where someone is paid to notice when a model update drops you from an answer.
Hourly billing, by comparison, charges you for the provider’s learning curve. Use it for a two-hour review of someone else’s proposal, and keep the bigger jobs on a fixed price.
What a GEO Retainer Should Include
A GEO retainer should include four jobs: answer-first rewrites of your money pages, sourced numbers added to them, mention outreach, and AI visibility tracking. At $500 to $1,000 a month you get the first two on your top pages. At $2,000 and up you should get all four.
Each of those jobs has a plain test you can check on an invoice:
- Answer-first rewrites: every collection page, product page, and top post opens with a two-sentence answer to the query it targets.
- Sourced numbers: each claim gets a figure and a named source, which is the kind of passage AI engines lift into an answer.
- Mention outreach: someone pitches the roundups, reviewers, and YouTube channels in your category, since AI engines name the brands other sites talk about.
- Tracking: someone checks each month what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say for your top buying questions.
Of the four, tracking is the only one with a hard tool cost. Otterly’s pricing page lists its Lite plan at $29 a month for 15 prompts and its Standard plan at $189 for 100. Fifteen prompts cover the buying questions that matter for most small stores.
Hours are the other way to read a quote. At the survey’s common rate of $75 to $100 an hour, each budget buys a set amount of work:
| Monthly budget | Rough hours | What gets done each month |
|---|---|---|
| $500 | 5 to 7 | Three or four page rewrites and a prompt check |
| $1,500 | 15 to 20 | Ten page rewrites, one new post, and tracking |
| $3,000 | 30 to 40 | All of the above plus steady mention outreach |
That scope is how I price my own AI search services for Shopify stores: one retainer, with the AI work riding on the same pages the SEO work already touches. At any price, ask for the task list before you ask for the number.
When Is a GEO Bill a Red Flag?
A GEO bill is a red flag when it sits next to an SEO retainer you already pay. The two jobs share crawlable pages, answer-first content, sourced claims, and clean structure. Google’s AI features guide says there are “no additional requirements” to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
So ask one question before you sign: which tasks on this GEO line are not already in my SEO scope? A good provider has a short, specific answer, like brand-mention outreach or AI visibility tracking. A vague answer means the same work is being sold twice.
| Line item | Already in an SEO retainer? | Fair to bill extra? |
|---|---|---|
| Content rewrites | Yes | No |
| Technical fixes and crawler access | Yes | No |
| Brand-mention outreach | Sometimes | Yes, when the hours are listed |
| AI visibility tracking | No | Yes, at tool cost |
| llms.txt setup | No | No, Google says it is not needed |
That table is short for a reason. I mapped the overlap between the two jobs in what GEO is, and there is not much left over to invoice.
Pay for new tasks, never for a new name on old tasks.
Do GEO Yourself for the Cost of a Few Hours
Doing GEO yourself costs three to five hours a week and $0 to $29 a month in tools. Rewriting openings to answer first, adding sourced statistics, and fixing headings are editing jobs, not technical ones, and my GEO checklist lists all ten of them in order. The owner who wrote the product pages is often the best editor for them.
A first month on that budget fits into four weeks:
- Week one goes to your top five collection pages. Open each with a two-sentence answer to the query it targets.
- Week two goes to your ten best-selling products. Fill in every spec, price, and availability field, and answer the top customer question on the page.
- Week three goes to the blog posts that already get traffic. Turn each heading into a question and answer it in the first two sentences under it.
- Week four goes to checking. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini your five main buying questions and write down which brands get named.
After that first month, measurement stays cheap. My walkthrough of the AI performance report in Search Console shows where Google’s AI clicks land, and a GA4 channel group shows you referrals from ChatGPT and the other assistants.
Just know that one page done well beats five pages skimmed. Budget your hours by page value, with money pages first and your best blog posts second. Spend money on GEO only after your own hours run out.
How Long Before GEO Pays Back?
GEO takes three to six months to pay back for most stores. Page rewrites get picked up within weeks, but the outside mentions that get a brand named build slowly. Budget for at least a quarter before you judge the spend.
The two halves of the work run on different clocks. An answer-first rewrite can show up in an AI Overview soon after Google recrawls the page, and I track those timelines in how fast AI picks up new content. A mention in a roundup can take months to land and longer to get read by a model.
That gap is why a three-month contract is the shortest one worth signing. One month buys the rewrites and tells you nothing about mentions. Twelve months locked in up front is a red flag of its own, since a provider confident in the work does not need the lock.
Is GEO Worth the Money?
GEO is worth the money for most stores. Semrush found the average AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times the average organic visitor by conversion rate, since the AI answer pre-qualifies shoppers before they ever click. A small stream of those visits can outearn a large stream of regular ones.
On top of that, the channel is growing while classic clicks shrink. The same study projects AI search visitors could pass traditional search visitors by 2028. Pew found users click a regular result on just 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, against 15% without one.
So run the math on your own store. If an organic visitor is worth $1 to you, an AI search visitor is worth about $4.40, and 200 of them a month match 880 regular visits. A $1,000 retainer that lifts both kinds of traffic pays back faster than the same $1,000 spent on either one alone.
Even so, GEO is the wrong buy for one kind of store. If your products sit out of stock half the time or your pages load slowly, fix that first. A model that sends a shopper to a broken page costs you the sale and the next recommendation.
What if your store is small?
Start with the do-it-yourself month above, then hire when your hours run out. Under about $500 a month, a retainer rarely buys enough time to move anything. The number to budget for is still what Shopify SEO costs, since the GEO work rides inside it.
Should GEO and SEO come from the same provider?
One provider should handle both, since the same pages carry both jobs. Two vendors editing one collection page will undo each other’s work, and you pay for the meetings where they sort it out. The same test applies if you are weighing an AEO agency: one owner for the pages, one invoice.
Can you pay for placement instead?
You cannot pay for placement inside the answer itself. Ads can sit near AI answers, as I cover in whether you can advertise on ChatGPT, but the brands a model names are picked from what it reads, not from who paid. The only way to own the answer is to be worth quoting, and that is what the budget buys.
Get a Number for Your Store
GEO pricing is SEO pricing: $500 to $3,000 a month for most stores, folded into one retainer, or your own hours if the budget is tight. If you want a figure instead of a range, book a call. I’ll look at your store and tell you what the work would cost, including the parts you could do yourself, and my AI search services cover the rest if you want it handled.
