How much does GEO cost? The common pricing models, and how to judge a quote

You pay for work, not for a spot in the answer

Google is blunt about this: it never accepts money to include or rank sites, and appearing in its organic results costs nothing (Google's documentation). The same goes for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in them and no special optimizations needed.

So a GEO provider is charging for labor: letting AI crawlers in (the programs AI assistants send to read web pages), writing pages that answer the questions your shoppers actually ask, checking every fact on those pages, and measuring what AI says about you. Whether a quote is expensive depends on how much of that work you get and how well it is done, not on where someone promises you will appear.

Google's guide to generative AI search adds a pointer for anyone shopping for help: if you are considering third-party “AEO” or “GEO” services, read its guidance on third-party SEO tools and advice first. That page says Google doesn't evaluate third-party services, that using a service or tool doesn't mean you will rank, and that third-party tools have no access to Google's internal ranking data. Part of what follows comes from that page and from Google's advice on hiring an SEO.

Six pricing models: what you get, what to ask, when each fits

One provider may mix several of these. The table describes the models themselves, not any company.

The last two rows are the better choice for plenty of stores. If your team can edit the site, one audit or a monitoring subscription costs less than a long retainer.

What drives the price

• Product categories. Shoppers ask different questions about each category, and each one has its own facts to check: specs, prices, warranty, returns. More categories means more pages and more facts.
• Shopper questions. One real question gets one page, so more questions means more pages. Count real questions, not phrasings. Google says its systems understand synonyms, so you don't have to worry about missing long-tail keyword variations, and that making pages for every phrasing or fan-out query mainly to manipulate rankings or AI responses breaks its scaled content abuse policy. Example: “best power station for van life” and “what portable power station should I get for living in my van” are one question. One good page covers both.
• Languages. Each language is its own set of pages. Google works out a page's language from its visible text and recommends one language per page, with no side-by-side translations. Our own standard is to write each language for its readers rather than translate sentence by sentence, so each extra language is close to another round of writing and fact checking.
• AI engines covered. Most of the site work is shared. A page has to be indexed in Google Search before it can appear as a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Microsoft says Bing and Copilot rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation. What differs is the crawler: ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot and Perplexity uses PerplexityBot, and each has to be let in. The part that really grows with every engine is measurement: one more engine is one more round of questions every week.
• Off-site work. Reddit threads, review sites and directory listings have to be written one by one under real identities, which takes more hours than on-site work. If a quote includes off-site work, ask whose accounts will post and whether paid placements are labeled as ads. Google's link spam policy covers exchanging money, goods or products for links or for posts that contain links; paid links are fine only with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".
• How results are measured. Asking questions by hand in the apps every week is closest to what shoppers see, and costs the most labor. Running them through each engine's API is cheaper, but API answers are not the same as app answers. A public score such as geo-score's AIV score is cheap and you can re-run it, but it measures whether AI can find, read and cite you, not how often it does.

Two official reports cost nothing: the Generative AI performance report in Search Console counts how often links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools counts how often your content was cited in Copilot and AI summaries in Bing. How to use them is in how to check whether AI recommends your store. When a quote includes monitoring, ask what it adds on top of these two.

Is the quote reasonable? Ask four questions

How to write each of these into a contract is in how to choose a GEO provider and what to put in the contract. Each one moves the price.

1. What exactly is delivered? It should be countable: how many pages, which site changes, how many reports, by what date. If a line just says “ongoing optimization” or “brand visibility management”, ask for the list behind it. Once it is itemized, divide the fee by the pages and reports and you know roughly what each costs. That is also the only way to compare two quotes.
2. How is it measured? The measurement decides whether you can check what you paid for: which questions, which AI engines, how often, and whether you can re-run it yourself. Google says an SEO audit should give you realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved. Hold a quote to the same standard: the work, and the expected improvement, in writing.
3. Who owns the pages and accounts? This decides what is left of your money if you stop. Pages live on your site and the words and images are yours. Search Console and your store admin stay in your name; the provider gets user or collaborator access. Make sure you are the verified owner in Search Console: if every verified owner is removed, the other users lose access after a grace period (Search Console Help). In Shopify, store ownership can't be transferred to a collaborator (Shopify Help Center).
4. How do you exit? The notice period. Whether the current period is refunded. How annual prepayment is settled if you stop early. What you get back at the end: a log of every change, the page source files, and all access removed.

For the methods we refuse and the rule behind each, see what we won't do.

How we charge: quarterly, with public prices

Every CiteSpot price is on our pricing page. The starting points:

• Diagnosis: from US$1,190, one-off. The fee is credited toward the first quarter of the quarterly or managed service.
• Quarterly service: from US$2,990 a quarter, or US$11,690 a year.
• Managed: from US$7,790 a quarter.
• Monitoring: US$590 a quarter. Numbers only, no site changes.

What each tier includes and how refunds work are on the pricing page, so we won't repeat them here.

Why we bill by the quarter

Two reasons. Most companies approve budgets by quarter. And timing: a page written for one specific shopper question usually takes weeks to get indexed and start appearing in AI answers (the evidence is in how long until a new page shows up). On monthly billing, a batch of pages would barely be live before the next invoice. A quarter gives them time to be seen, and we review them together at the end. To stop, give us 30 days written notice and we finish the current quarter; that is on the pricing page too.

Why we don't offer pay for performance

Only one reason: the result is not in our hands. Each AI assistant decides whom to cite every time it answers, and OpenAI's own help page says “Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect.” Traffic also moves with seasons, ads and prices. What we can answer for is the work we did and a score you can re-run yourself: the AIV score, 0 to 100 on a public rubric, from the open-source geo-score. Acceptance is its baseline and its improvement. Whether AI mentions you and how many visitors it sends go into our reports as they are, not into acceptance.

When you shouldn't hire us

• You only want to know whether AI mentions you, and your team can edit the site. A monitoring tool, or the weekly routine in how to check whether AI recommends your store, is enough.
• You need rankings, mention rates or traffic written into the contract. We don't promise those, and we won't use the methods we refuse to chase a number.
• You only care about head terms like “best running shoes”. Those take months. We don't sell that result or accept against it.
• You want to try one month first. A batch of long-tail pages usually needs weeks to show anything, so one month tells you little, and we don't sell monthly. The free quick review or a diagnosis is a better first step.