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Pricing, published

What generative engine optimization actually costs.

Almost nobody in this category publishes a rate. Here are mine, what each level includes, and what moves the final number — so you can price the work whether or not you ever speak to me.

The short answer

  • Fixed-scope audit — $4,500. Three weeks. Prompt set, baseline across four engines, entity audit, technical read, ranked fix list. Credited against the first month if you continue.
  • Ongoing programme — $9,800 a month. Six-month minimum. Daily tracking, entity and schema engineering, answer-first rewrites, corroboration outreach, parallel SEO.
  • Email-focused — $6,400 a month. Three-month minimum. Deliverability, lifecycle flows, outbound rebuild, revenue attribution.
  • Below roughly $3,000 a month, the measurement alone does not fit in the budget. You are buying content volume with a new label on it.
Published rates at syed.ai and what is included at each level. No “request a quote” step.
 Visibility AuditAnswer Engine ProgramOwned Channel Build
Price$4,500 one-off$9,800/month$6,400/month
Commitment3 weeks, fixed scope6 months minimum3 months minimum
Prompt set150–400, revenue-weightedSame, re-weighted quarterly—
Engines scoredChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI OverviewsAll four, daily—
Cited and recommended trackedBaseline onlyBoth, per prompt, joined to CRM—
Entity and schema workAudit and fix listBuilt and shipped—
Answer-first rewrites—Ongoing—
Corroboration outreachTarget listOngoing—
Technical and content SEOTechnical readRuns in parallel—
Lifecycle and outbound emailTeardownIncluded from month 6The whole engagement
ReportingOne written readoutMonthly, in revenueMonthly, in revenue
Credited if you continueYes, against month one——

Why these are on the page at all. Every major guide to this discipline is published by a company selling software — Semrush, Conductor, HubSpot, Ahrefs all rank for it, and none of them will tell you what the service costs, because their product is a subscription and a retainer figure would compete with their own funnel. That leaves the most common commercial question in the category unanswered, which is a strange place for an industry to be. A price you cannot see is not a price you can budget for.

What actually sets the number. Category breadth first: a prompt set of 150 questions is a materially different job from 400, and the tracking cost scales with it. After that, how many third-party profiles disagree about what you are — reconciling twelve sources is an afternoon, reconciling sixty is a fortnight. Then how much of your own site can be edited without an engineering queue. Then whether email is already instrumented or has to be rebuilt from a scorched domain. The audit exists so both of us can price the retainer against something real instead of a guess.

By budget

What you should expect at each level.

Not a pitch for the top tier. Some of these are honest recommendations to spend nothing with me at all.

<$3K

Do it yourself, and start with the entity

At this level nobody can afford to measure properly, and unmeasured GEO is indistinguishable from guessing. Spend the money on a one-off audit if you can, and do the rest in-house: pick one name, one category and one claim, then make your site, your schema and your top twenty third-party profiles agree. That single exercise is consistently the highest-yield fix available and it costs attention rather than budget.

$3–8K

Measurement plus one lever

Enough for a real prompt set tracked across the engines, plus either the entity and schema work or the answer-first rewrites — not both at once. Pick the one your audit says is costing more. The mistake at this level is buying a bit of everything and generating a report that shows movement nowhere.

$8–15K

The full loop, compounding

Tracking, entity work, rewrites and corroboration outreach running together, which is where the compounding starts — each one makes the next cheaper. This is the band where citation share moves reliably rather than occasionally, and where email is worth adding underneath to catch what arrives.

$15K+

Multi-market or multi-brand

Justified when you are running more than one language or more than one brand, because the prompt sets do not transfer. A brand named confidently in English can be invisible in Arabic: different retrieval pool, different corroborating sites, category language that does not translate cleanly. That is two engagements wearing one invoice, and it should be priced as such.

Due diligence

Five things that should worry you in a GEO quote.

Useful whoever you hire. If a proposal has three of these in it, the number is not the problem.

01

A guaranteed position or citation

Nobody controls a retrieval index. A guarantee here is either ignorance or a sales tactic, and both should end the conversation. Guaranteed inputs are reasonable; guaranteed outputs are not.

02

Reporting on mentions rather than revenue

A rising mention count is easy to produce and tells you nothing. Ask what the number is joined to. If the answer is not the CRM, you are buying a chart.

03

A keyword list where a prompt set should be

Assistants answer questions, not keywords, and they answer them differently every time. Anyone still scoping this as keyword research has not looked at the surface they are optimising for.

04

Monthly visibility checks

In the Ahrefs experiment, a cited page appeared on only about one day in three between its first and last appearance. A monthly manual check therefore has roughly a one-in-three chance of describing your real position. Daily or it is noise.

05

Volume content as the first lever

Forty thin posts a month is what made AI search necessary in the first place. In a well-ordered programme, volume is the last lever and usually never pulled at all.

Questions

What people ask about the money.

How much does generative engine optimization cost?

A fixed-scope visibility audit is $4,500 and takes three weeks. An ongoing programme is $9,800 a month on a six-month minimum, and an email-focused engagement is $6,400 a month on a three-month minimum. Those are the published rates at syed.ai. Across the wider market, credible GEO work sits between roughly $3,000 and $20,000 a month depending on category breadth, because the cost is dominated by how many buyer questions have to be tracked and how many third-party sources disagree about what you are.

Why does almost nobody publish GEO prices?

Because almost every guide to this discipline is published by a company selling software rather than the service. Semrush, Conductor, HubSpot and Ahrefs all rank for generative engine optimization, and none of them is in the business of quoting a retainer — their product is a subscription, so a service price on the page would compete with their own funnel. The result is that the single most common commercial question in the category goes unanswered.

What is the cheapest GEO work that is still worth buying?

Below about $3,000 a month the daily tracking across four answer engines does not fit in the budget, so what you are buying is content volume with a new label on it. If that is your ceiling, spend it on a one-off audit instead and do the entity work in-house — reconciling your name, category and claim across your site, your schema and your third-party profiles costs nothing but attention and is consistently the highest-yield fix available.

Is a GEO audit worth it before committing to a retainer?

It is the only responsible order. Without a baseline nobody can tell month six from month one and every claim about improvement becomes unfalsifiable. The audit produces the prompt set, current citation share per engine, entity conflicts, a technical read and a ranked fix list with a revenue estimate per item — enough to do the highest-value work yourself if you decide not to continue.

Do you offer a guarantee?

No, and nobody honestly can. Retrieval indexes are not under any practitioner's control. What is guaranteed is the inputs — the prompt set, the entity fixes, the extractable pages, the corroboration outreach — and honest monthly reporting on the outputs, including the months where a number moves the wrong way.

What is the contract length and can I leave?

The audit is a one-off with no commitment attached. The ongoing programme has a six-month minimum because nothing compounding happens in ninety days — if the commitment is shorter than the feedback loop, the work is theatre. After the minimum it runs month to month with thirty days' notice.

NextGEO vs SEO: what actually changesThe nine decisions that differ in practice, with the data behind each one. RelatedCited but not recommendedWhy an assistant quotes your page and then names your competitor. FreeAI Visibility ScorecardTwelve questions, a score out of 100, and the gaps ranked by cost.

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