How Much Does Generative Engine Optimisation Cost?
Ours is £350 a month, inside a retainer that covers everything else too. The more useful question is whether this should be a separate line on any invoice. For most businesses the answer is no.
What It Costs
Our fee is £350 a month for one target area, with no setup fee and nothing billed separately. That covers the search work, the website, the profile, content, citations, AI search optimisation, social posting and reporting. This work is part of it rather than an addition to it.
Why there is no separate figure to quote. Deliberate on our part.
We do not price this as its own line, for the reasons block two sets out. If you want the number for comparison purposes, it is the same retainer you would pay without this subject existing.
What we are not going to give you. Market averages.
Figures circulate for what this costs across the industry. We have not seen one with a published method behind it, so quoting them would breach the standard we apply to every other claim in these guides. Our guide to local SEO cost handles the wider pricing question.
What you will see quoted elsewhere. A wide range, for a reason.
Prices for this vary enormously. The variation is mostly about what is being counted rather than about quality. A supplier billing it separately produces a bigger number than one including it. Neither is necessarily better value.
This page is reviewed quarterly. Along with our own pricing.
Should It Be A Separate Cost At All
For most businesses, no. We sell this service, so weigh that accordingly. The argument stands on facts you can check rather than on our word.
The overlap is the whole issue. And it is large.
Content that answers questions properly, technical accessibility, consistent information about the business, genuine references from other people. Those four are most of the work here and every one of them is ordinary search optimisation. Our comparison of the two disciplines itemises it.
What genuinely sits outside the fundamentals. A short list.
Checking and maintaining access for the crawlers belonging to assistant products, which are permitted separately from the ordinary search crawler. Restructuring content so passages stand alone rather than only reading well in sequence. And the sampling and log work needed to observe any of it, since conventional reporting does not cover it.
What does not sit outside them. Everything else.
If a proposal bills content quality, accessibility or citation work as new activity under this heading. You are already paying somebody for those, you are being charged twice for one piece of work.
The question to ask a supplier. One sentence.
Which items on this proposal am I not already paying you for? A capable supplier answers immediately with a short list. A weak one describes the field rather than the work.
Why saying this costs us little. The work is the same either way.
We would rather be paid once for doing it properly than twice for describing it in two vocabularies. That is a commercial position as much as a principled one.
What Drives The Price
Where a supplier does quote this separately, four things move the figure. Knowing them lets you tell a considered quote from a number somebody reached for.
How sound the fundamentals already are. The largest factor by far.
A site that is accessible, findable and answering questions needs the short list from block two. A site failing those needs the fundamentals first, which is a bigger job and should be quoted as one rather than dressed as this.
Site size. Specifically how many pages need restructuring.
Rewriting content so passages stand alone is per page work. Twelve pages is an afternoon. Four hundred is a project. Anybody quoting the same figure for both has not looked.
How messy the record is. Entity and citation work.
A business trading under one name from one address for a decade needs little. One that has moved, rebranded or acquired anything has a genuine cleanup. That is hours rather than opinions.
How much observation you want. Sampling is labour.
Asking a fixed question set across several products every month takes real time. More questions and more products cost more. No tool removes that labour.
What should not move the price. The label.
If two quotes differ mainly because one calls it generative engine optimisation, you are paying for vocabulary.
What Should Be Included
Seven items, with a line on why each matters. A proposal missing several is either narrower than it appears or has not thought the subject through.
Crawler access, checked and confirmed in logs. The only item with documented consequences, so its absence is telling.
Technical accessibility generally. Including the hosting and firewall layer, not merely the robots file.
Content restructuring. Passages that stand alone, which is the largest piece of work for most sites.
Entity consistency. The business described identically wherever it appears.
Structured data accuracy. Matching the visible page, never describing anything untrue.
Earned references. Independent sources describing you, rather than bought links.
Observation and reporting. Sampling, logs and a baseline, with limits stated.
What should not be on the list. Three things.
A submission to any assistant, since none exists. A dedicated file or markup type, which Google's documentation checked on 30 July 2026 states is unnecessary for its AI features. And a visibility score presented as a measurement.
What To Be Careful Of
Four things worth pausing over. Each is common enough that you will probably meet at least one.
Premium pricing attached to a new label. The commonest.
The same workstreams your previous supplier delivered, renamed and repriced upward. Compare the activities rather than the headings. The overlap becomes obvious quickly.
Guaranteed placement, which no supplier can sell. In any assistant.
Nobody controls whether a system names your business, so a guarantee is a claim about something outside the supplier's control. Treat it as disqualifying rather than as ambitious.
Any proposal built on a mechanism the supplier cannot evidence. The subtle one.
Ask which of their claims a vendor has published and which is their own observation. A supplier who cannot separate those two is not being careful, whatever else they are.
Bundling that hides the split. Worth noticing.
A single figure covering everything is fine, provided you can still ask what is genuinely additional. A single figure that cannot be broken down when asked is a different thing.
The question that does most of the work. Ask how they will measure it.
A capable answer describes proxies and sampling and admits the limits. A weak one produces a number. Our guide to choosing a supplier goes further.
Measuring Whether You Got Value
This is the weakest part of the case for spending anything here. Pretending otherwise would undermine everything else on the page. There is no clean return calculation available.
What cannot be proved. The direct link.
No supplier can show you that being named in answers produced a given number of enquiries. There is no citation report, no position and no attribution path from a mention to a customer. Anybody presenting one has constructed it.
What can be shown. Three things, all partial.
That crawler access exists and was fixed where it was broken, from your logs. That your appearance in a fixed question set has moved over months. And that enquiries have risen, without a clean claim on the cause.
The floor on the value. The most useful idea on this page.
Because most of the work is ordinary search optimisation, its value can be judged the way that work is always judged. If the content, accessibility and citation work is worth the fee on those grounds alone, this subject is upside rather than the thing being bought.
Why that reframing matters commercially. It removes the unanswerable question.
Asking whether AI visibility repaid the fee cannot be answered. Asking whether the work repaid the fee can, which is the question we would rather be judged on. Our measurement guide sets out exactly what we report.
When To Spend Nothing On This Yet
Three situations where the money belongs elsewhere. We would rather lose the sale than take a fee that cannot work, because the alternative is a conversation in month six that neither of us enjoys.
Where the fundamentals are not sound. The commonest by a distance.
A site that cannot be crawled properly, whose business details contradict themselves or whose content answers nothing has given an assembling system almost nothing to work with. Spending on this in that state is buying a layer with nothing underneath it.
Where your customers do not research this way. Checkable in an afternoon.
Ask your customers' actual questions in the products they use. If nothing substantive appears there is little to be visible in. Google's own documentation, checked on 30 July 2026, states its AI Overviews often do not trigger.
Where you cannot attribute an enquiry. The one people overlook.
If you do not currently know where enquiries come from, you have no way to tell whether any of this did anything. That makes the spend unaccountable rather than merely uncertain. Fixing the attribution first is cheaper.
What to do instead. The fundamentals, in order.
Accessibility, the profile, the record, then the pages that answer questions. Our page on whether this is worth it takes the decision further. Our service page sets out what we actually do.
Included, not
invoiced separately.
Most of this work is ordinary search optimisation. We would rather be paid once for doing it properly than twice for describing it in two vocabularies. Ask any supplier which items you are not already paying for.
What is included every month:
One target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Twenty guides.
One subject.
The mechanism, all four platforms, what you can influence, whether it is worth it yet, what it costs, how to measure it and how to judge a supplier selling it.
