How much does GEO cost per month, and what is included?
In short
A monthly GEO fee pays for five jobs: tracking, strategy, content and website changes, refreshes and reporting. UK mid-market retainers run at 1,500 to 5,000 GBP a month, with content production only at the upper end. Compare quotes by those jobs, not by the total. scaile does Managed GEO: all five jobs as one package, run by people and its own software.
Dora is a founding engineer at scaile. She studied computer science, psychology and neuroscience at TUM, which is the perfect fit for GEO: she has a deep understanding of technology and of the human side, and knows how to write and produce content that leads humans to buy and AI to show you in its answers.
Key takeaways
A complete monthly GEO fee covers five jobs: tracking, strategy, content and website changes, refreshes and reporting. A fee without execution buys data and advice.
Five scope choices set the monthly number: markets and languages, prompts and AI engines tracked, content volume and refresh rhythm, integrations, and how much work your team keeps.
Three costs often sit outside the fee: a one-off audit, a second tracking subscription and your own team's review time.
Two quotes with the same price can buy very different work. Ask each provider for a list of monthly deliverables.
With scaile, Track covers tracking only. Strategy with you and We run it add strategy, execution, refreshes and reporting, with your team approving.
How much does GEO cost per month?
GEO costs what its monthly scope costs, and the scope varies more than the price. Gripped, a UK B2B agency, says UK agencies typically charge 1,500 to 5,000 GBP a month for mid-market SaaS clients. At the lower end that buys “monitoring, basic content recommendations, and entity audits”. At the higher end it buys “dedicated content production, structured data implementation, and monthly citation tracking across multiple AI platforms”. [1] That is one agency’s figure for one market, from a firm that sells what it prices.
The spread inside that band is the real answer to the question. WebFX, a US agency that sells GEO, makes the same point: “Two quotes with the same monthly price can cover very different amounts of work”. [2] A monthly price only means something next to the list of what it includes. Published prices for agencies, tools and in-house hires are compared in what generative engine optimization costs.
What is included in a monthly GEO fee?
A complete monthly GEO fee includes five recurring jobs. WebFX describes a service with software included as one “that includes tracking, monitoring, optimization, and reporting in the service cost”. [2] What you should see each month:
The buyer questions you care about, asked in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, with who is named and which sources are cited.
A ranked list of the questions to win next and the pages that will answer them, agreed with your team.
New and rewritten pages, structured data and fixes on your own site, published, not left as recommendations.
Pages that are already live, updated at the same URL when facts, prices or the answers change.
What changed in AI answers and in search, what was delivered, and what comes next.
Execution separates the low end of a price band from the high end. A recommendation nobody executes does not change what ChatGPT says about you. A quote with tracking and strategy but no pages changed per month buys data and advice. How these jobs fall into the weeks of a month is shown in what a GEO agency does in a sample month.
What makes the monthly price higher or lower?
Five scope choices set the monthly price. scaile’s pricing page lists the same parts as the building blocks of every proposal.
- Markets and languages. Each country, region and language adds prompts to track and pages to write.
- Tracking coverage and frequency. How many prompts are tracked, on which AI engines and how often they are collected. scaile tracks up to nine engines, from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Claude. Fewer prompts on fewer engines cost less and show less. Which prompts deserve a place is covered in which prompts to track.
- Content volume and refresh rhythm. The formats, the number of pieces and how often live pages are refreshed.
- Integrations. Analytics, CMS and publishing connections, plus any engineering help your setup needs.
- The share of work your team keeps. A team that writes itself buys a smaller scope than a team that hands over the whole function.
The last choice matters most: it decides whether you buy a partner that executes or one that advises.
What a monthly GEO fee usually leaves out
Three costs often sit outside the monthly fee: a one-off audit, a second tracking subscription and your own team’s time.
An audit is often priced as a separate project. Gripped puts a standalone GEO audit at 3,000 to 8,000 GBP as a fixed project. [1] What a good audit should deliver is covered in technical GEO audits. Keep the technical line in proportion. Google states there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”. [3] For Google’s AI features, the technical part is sound SEO hygiene, not a separate discipline with its own price.
A second tracking subscription can mean paying twice. “If an agency retainer already includes AI visibility monitoring, a separate subscription may pay for the same data twice,” WebFX writes. [2] Part of the data is also in tools you already have: Bing Webmaster Tools now reports how often your content is cited in generative answers and which URLs are referenced. [4]
Your own team’s time is not part of any provider’s fee. Even with full execution, someone on your side reviews and approves. WebFX lists this internal execution time, “reviewing insights, approving updates, and coordinating implementation”, as a budget category of its own. [2] With a tool and no service, your team also does the work itself: GEO tools “don’t do the work for you”, as Gripped puts it. [1]
What each way to work with scaile includes
scaile offers three ways to work, and each one includes a different share of the five monthly jobs.
AI visibility tracking in scaile’s own platform, app.scaile.to
IncludedThe prompts your buyers ask, found with you from data and tracked across the AI engines in your planNot includedStrategy and content. Track is the tracking-only way to workFor companies with their own content or marketing team
IncludedA dedicated AI search strategist and weekly strategy meetings. scaile takes the research, writing, publishing, refresh and reporting workYour teamKeeps strategy, review and approvalFor teams without the capacity, including small businesses
IncludedThe entire function: strategy, customer research, content, publishing, monitoring, refreshes and reportingYour teamProvides context and approvalsStrategy with you and We run it cover all five jobs; they differ in how much your team does. Details are on the pages for teams with a content team and teams without one. scaile’s plans for companies run classic search and answer-engine research in one planning process, start with one-to-one onboarding and answer every question within 24 hours. If you are still deciding whether an outside team should execute at all, agency, in-house, tool or DIY walks through that choice.
How to compare two monthly GEO quotes
Compare two GEO quotes line by line, on the same units, before you look at the totals.
- 1List the monthly deliverables
Ask each provider “to list deliverables, not just a monthly price”. [2]
You checkPages written, pages changed, pages refreshed, reports - 2Put both on the same units
The AI platforms covered, the number of tracked prompts, whether tracking software is included, and how the provider bills. [2]
You checkA quote that tracks only ChatGPT is not comparable with one that tracks five engines - 3Ask who chooses the prompts
Ask “who chooses the prompts, and whether you can expand the list as your priorities shift”. [2]
You checkThe prompts should be the questions asked right before a purchase - 4Ask who executes
Find out whether the fee includes changing and publishing pages, or recommendations your team carries out.
You checkThe number of pages that go live each month - 5Add what sits outside the fee
Audit, second subscription and your team’s hours, as described above.
You checkThe total cost per month, not the quoted fee
The monthly cost of GEO comes down to what the fee includes, set by your markets, prompts, content volume and the work your team keeps. Read every quote as a list of jobs and ask what sits outside it. If your team wants to keep strategy and approval while someone else does the research, writing and publishing, talk to scaile about Strategy with you. If nobody on your side has the hours, ask about We run it on the same call.
FAQ
Does a monthly GEO fee replace my SEO agency?
Not necessarily. scaile works alongside an existing SEO agency rather than replacing it: the agency keeps the site and classic search, scaile produces and publishes the content AI engines cite, and one weekly report shows both.
How soon does a monthly GEO fee show results?
With scaile, the first 90 days bring a baseline of where your brand appears across AI engines, a prioritized roadmap and the first wave of content live and tracked. The first AI citations come in after 7 to 14 days. Rankings and revenue are never guaranteed, and how much revenue follows depends on the questions you win.
Can I start with tracking only and add execution later?
Yes. Track shows where your brand stands in AI answers without strategy or content. When the data shows the gaps, Strategy with you or We run it adds the work that closes them.
Why do GEO agencies not publish their monthly prices?
Most price by scope: markets, languages, prompts, engines and content volume differ from one company to the next, so a list price would describe nobody’s actual plan. At scaile, the proposal sets the price once the scope is agreed on a call.
