How Freelancers Can Price GEO and AEO Services for Clients

What does the market pay for comparable work?

There is no settled price for GEO yet, so the closest reference is SEO. In a poll of 439 SEO providers (Ahrefs, updated August 2024), the most common monthly retainer was $500 to $1,000, chosen by 23%. Ahrefs' averages, estimated from those price bands, came to $3,209 a month for agencies and $1,348 for freelancers, so many providers charge less. The most common retainer band was $500 to $1,000 a month, chosen by 23% of respondents, and 78.2% charged a monthly retainer. The average hourly rate was $111, and one in ten charged more than $150 an hour. Tool costs are the other reference. Published entry prices for AI visibility tools start at around $20 to $25 a month for basic tracking, and around $99 a month for broader toolkits. What agencies charge for GEO specifically is covered in how much GEO and AEO agencies charge per month.

What does a worked cost model look like?

Take an illustrative freelancer whose hourly cost, including taxes, software and unpaid admin time, is $90. Consider a small business client tracked across four assistants.

Audit (one-off): about 12 hours to build the question set, run it several times, analyse sources, check the site's crawlability and write findings. That is $1,080 of time. A price of $1,200 to $1,500 covers it with a margin.

Monthly retainer:

Ten hours at $90 is $900. Add a $99 tool, and the monthly cost is $999. At a 25% margin, the price is about $1,330 a month. That is at the upper end of what freelancers typically charge for SEO, so show clients the extra work it covers.

How should agencies price AI visibility services against competitors and costs?

Use costs as the floor, competitors as the reference, and value as the ceiling:

• Floor: never price below your hours and tools. Underpricing a service that needs repeated runs and follow-up work leads to skipped checks and weak results.
• Reference: compare with what clients already pay for SEO and with competitors' published packages. Position yours by what is included, such as the number of tracked questions, assistants, fixes and reports, not by being cheapest.
• Ceiling: estimate what the client gains. If one new customer is worth $2,000 and AI answers could plausibly bring a few more a month, a $1,300 retainer is easy to justify. If a new customer is worth $50, it is not, and a lighter package fits better.

Publish or quote prices by package, with scope written down, so comparisons are like for like.

Is GEO billed separately from SEO or included in an SEO retainer?

Both approaches work, as long as the AI-specific work is visible:

Shared work, such as crawlability, page structure and content quality, benefits both SEO and AI answers, and can stay in the SEO retainer. Work that only exists because of AI answers should be priced as its own line: prompt tracking, answer audits, correction of wrong answers, and third-party validation for AI citations. How to describe these services is covered in whether to call your service GEO, AEO, AI SEO or LLM optimization.

How should you price AI visibility services with a retainer and performance bonuses?

Bonuses can align incentives, but AI answers vary between runs, so a careless bonus pays for noise. If you offer one:

• Fix the baseline first: a written question set, assistants, number of runs and the starting mention rate, measured over at least two rounds.
• Measure beyond the noise. Pay only for a gain larger than the run-to-run variation you measured, sustained over two consecutive months.
• Use neutral questions. Bonuses tied to questions containing the client's brand or house vocabulary are too easy to earn. How named brands distort scores is covered in whether competitor names should be allowed in prompts for fair category visibility reporting.
• Cap it. For example, 20% of the monthly retainer. On the $1,330 retainer above, that is about $266.
• Consider outcome bonuses carefully. Bonuses on leads that customers say came from AI assistants tie pay to business results. They depend on the client capturing that attribution honestly.

Keep the retainer large enough to cover your costs without the bonus. A bonus-heavy structure pushes the risk of model changes, which neither of you controls, onto you.

Should GEO retainers be priced by prompts, engines, locations, or revenue potential?

Use the first three to set scope tiers, and the last to set the level:

A tiered offer might be a starter tier with 25 questions, 3 assistants and 1 location, a growth tier with 50 questions and 4 assistants, and a multi-location tier priced per location. Revenue potential then decides which tier to recommend. It should not change the price for the same scope from client to client, which is hard to defend.

How should a freelancer start?

Offer the audit as the entry product, with a clear deliverable and price. Convert audits into retainers only when there is enough ongoing work: a question set to track, fixes to make and sources to pursue. Agree a 60- to 90-day review with the decision rule written down. How to keep a pilot from being cancelled early is covered in how to prevent an AEO pilot from being defunded after 60 days.

What do people ask about pricing GEO services?

Can I charge more than for SEO?

Only if the scope is larger. Most clients compare the price with what they pay for SEO, so explain the extra work.

Should tool costs be passed through?

Either include them in the retainer or list them separately at cost. Say which.

How often should prices be reviewed?

Every six to twelve months, as tools, assistants and the work involved change.