How much does AI SEO cost in 2026? Quality retainers generally run four figures a month. Ours are $1,500/month (Forge) and $4,000/month (Foundry), with custom advisory pricing for enterprise teams that execute in-house. We publish those numbers on our pricing page because most agencies won't, and the rest of this article walks through the math behind them so you can pressure-test any quote. Including ours.
Fair warning: we sell the thing we're pricing, so we're not neutral. That's exactly why this piece is arithmetic instead of adjectives. The math works on any proposal in your inbox, whoever sent it.
Why is SEO pricing usually a secret?
Because a hidden price is a flexible price. When you have to book a discovery call to learn a number, that number can stretch to fit your budget, your urgency, and how informed you sounded on the phone. A published price can't do any of that. It has to survive daylight, comparison shopping, and articles like this one.
Hidden pricing doesn't prove an agency is bad. But it tells you who the opacity serves, and it's never the client. It's one of several patterns we cover in the problems with hiring an AI SEO agency, and it's the easiest one to screen for. Ask for the number in your first email. Watch what happens.
What are you paying for?
Skilled hours. That's the whole product underneath every label, whether the invoice says SEO, GEO, or AEO.
A legitimate retainer covers three cost centers:
- Writing worth citing. A page that can rank in Google and get quoted by AI assistants takes research, drafting, editing, and fact-checking. Several skilled hours per page, more for the pages that carry revenue.
- Technical work. Crawls, fixes, structured data, site architecture. Not constant, but real, and it takes someone who knows what they're looking at.
- Earned authority. Legitimate placements on sites that matter require finding them, pitching actual humans, and often writing the piece. Nobody competent does that for pocket change.
Which sets up the only pricing test you need: when the price can't cover the hours, the work isn't happening. It's being faked. Divide any quote by a realistic rate for competent marketing labor and count the hours you're really buying. That single division explains most of the market.
What do real packages look like?
Ours first, since these are the numbers we can vouch for:
| Package | Price | What ships every month |
|---|---|---|
| Forge | $1,500/mo | 4 pages or articles reforged or built, 1 authority placement, Google Business Profile and review system, structured data, weekly update email, live dashboard |
| Foundry | $4,000/mo | Everything in Forge at double output: 8 pages or articles, 2 authority placements, plus bottom-of-funnel landing pages, comparison pages, AI citation testing, monthly strategy review |
| Frontier Advisory | Custom | Enterprise AI visibility audit, GEO/AEO roadmap, executive briefings, team enablement for in-house execution |
A note on what the table doesn't show: the overhead that makes the deliverables real. Strategy, keyword research, editing passes, reporting, and the quarterly re-audit all live inside those prices too. Deliverables are the countable part of the work, not the whole of it, which is another reason suspiciously cheap packages can list impressive-sounding outputs.
And one external benchmark, because our numbers alone aren't a market: HeyTony, an agency in Hamilton, Ontario, publishes $1,750/month for 4 posts and 2 backlinks, with a $3,500/month tier above it (heytony.ca). Different agency, different country, same shape. Four figures, deliverables counted out loud.
Notice what both price lists have in common: you can do hours math on them. That's the property to demand from any quote, not a specific number.
What does $500/month SEO actually buy?
Run the division. After the agency covers its own overhead and margin, $500 buys a handful of labor hours a month, and one competently written page can eat most of them. So something in the package is fake. Usually it's the writing (unedited AI output), the links (directories and farms), or the activity itself (a monthly report that describes "monitoring").
The damage isn't limited to wasted spend. Faked work attaches to your domain. Spam links and filler pages are liabilities you pay to acquire, then pay again to clean up. Cheap SEO isn't a budget version of the real product, the way an economy seat is a budget version of a flight. It's a different product wearing the same name.
If your budget is genuinely under four figures, skip the fake version. Do less, in the open. Work through our free AI SEO checklist yourself, and come back to agencies when the budget is real. One worth hiring will tell you the same thing on the first call.
Why do agencies ask for six months?
The credible ones ask because of how search compounds. Technical fixes can move within weeks. Content-driven rankings and AI citations typically build through months 3-6 and accelerate after that, which means a 90-day engagement ends right before the curve bends. That's why we ask for a 6-month initial commitment, then go month to month.
The dishonest version is the lock-in: twelve months, vague deliverables, painful exit terms. The difference is transparency while you wait. A commitment paired with weekly reporting and a live dashboard lets you watch the work happen before the results do. A commitment paired with a quarterly PDF is a hostage situation. We mapped what those first months should look like, week by week, in what to expect in the first 90 days.
Isn't doing it yourself free?
No. DIY is paid in your hours, and your hours are the most expensive ones your business has.
The method isn't secret. Audit your visibility, rebuild your pages answer-first, publish real expertise, earn real authority. You can execute every step yourself, and if you're pre-revenue, you probably should. But price the fully loaded time: each solid page costs an evening or two, the technical learning curve costs weekends, and the opportunity cost lands on whatever you'd otherwise sell, build, or close. A founder billing their own time at zero is how "free" SEO ends up costing more per page than an agency would.
The DIY question isn't whether you can. You can. It's whether these hours are the highest-value place to spend yours, and that answer changes as your revenue does. A useful middle path while you decide: do the audit and the quick technical fixes yourself, and only price out help once you know how much work remains. Sometimes the answer is less than you feared.
How should you set your budget?
Work backward from a customer's value, not forward from a price list. If a new customer is worth four figures to you, a channel that compounds toward a steady flow of them justifies a four-figure retainer, and cheap-but-fake SEO is the worst deal available at any price. If a customer is worth $40, organic probably isn't your next dollar yet, and an agency worth hiring will say so on the first call.
Then do two things this week. Ask every agency on your shortlist for their price and monthly deliverables in writing, before any call. And run the division on whatever comes back: price, divided by real hours, checked against the deliverables promised. The quotes that survive that math are your real shortlist.