What GEO Costs, and How to Budget for It

The first question every buyer asks is fair: what does this cost? The honest answer is that generative engine optimization is new enough that there is no public benchmark for it. Search “GEO agency pricing” and you will find ranges that disagree with each other by an order of magnitude, because everyone is quoting a different scope. So treat any number you see, including ours, as a quote rather than a market rate.

That does not mean you cannot budget for it. It means you budget from the work, not from a menu. Here is what actually moves the number.

What drives the cost

How much of your category you measure. A narrow B2B niche with three competitors and fifty buyer prompts is a very different job from a broad consumer category with dozens of rivals and hundreds of prompts across five engines. More surface to track, more to price.

How much you need built and distributed. Measurement is the cheap part. Winning buyers means useful pages for the questions they actually ask, accurate product and service data, enquiry flows that work, and presence on the sources the models already trust. A brand that mostly needs a few comparison pages is not the same as one that needs a large, machine-readable content surface.

Your region. Rates are not the same in the Gulf, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia. We scope to your market rather than apply one global sticker.

What we need from specialists. Some work our agents and team can do directly. Some needs a specialist, such as someone who can verify difficult technical product information. That cost is real, and it belongs in the execution allowance rather than hidden in a fee.

Our published prices

All prices are in GBP, exclude VAT, and are ranges rather than quotes.

• Demand snapshot: free, and deliberately capped. One buyer journey, a small set of questions, two surfaces, repeated observations, and a plain statement of what it cannot tell you. Its job is to establish whether there is a commercial question worth paying to answer.
• Demand Diagnostic: £750–£1,500. A bounded commercial and technical assessment of one buying journey. It covers what your buyers ask, where you are absent or unconvincing, what a qualified enquiry is worth to you, what access the work needs, and a straight go/no-go.
• Demand Programme: typically £4,000–£8,000 a month. Execution against an agreed commercial objective, reviewed monthly against the enquiries your sales team accepts. See the Demand Programme for what it includes.
• Buying-question page builds are scoped to the size and complexity of your data, inside a programme or as a standalone build.

How the programme money is split

A programme budget has two parts, and we show both:

1. A fixed orchestration fee, agreed in advance. This is what we earn for planning, managing, reviewing and measuring the work. It does not change with how much of the allowance gets spent.
2. An execution allowance. This is spent only on work you have approved: pages, data, specialist time, technical fixes. Anything unused is credited, returned or rolled forward on terms agreed at the start.

The point of the split is incentives. If our income grew with the amount we spent, we would have a reason to spend it. Fixing the fee removes that reason.

We do not start on “a percentage of whatever revenue you attribute to AI”. It invites arguments about branded search, existing customers and other campaigns. A narrowly defined performance component can come later, once there is a reliable record of accepted enquiries to tie it to.

Budget from the value of an enquiry

The useful budgeting question is not “how many articles does this buy?” It is “how many extra qualified enquiries would this need to produce to pay for itself?” Take what a won deal contributes before acquisition costs, multiply by the share of qualified enquiries that become deals, and you have what one qualified enquiry is worth. Divide the monthly programme cost by that, and you have the break-even volume. The pricing page has a calculator that does this with your own figures.

That number is a hypothesis, not a forecast. It tells you what would have to become true, not that it will.

Is it even worth it?

Reasonable people are still debating that, and the skeptics have a point that a lot of “GEO” advice is recycled SEO. It is worth reading the practitioners arguing both sides, for example this r/GrowthHacking thread on whether GEO is a legit strategy or hype, and a16z’s framing that search is shifting from links to language. Our own view: it is not a new channel, it is a new scoreboard for the same work, plus a few tactics that are genuinely new. The only way to know what it is worth to your brand is to measure your current position.

The no-guessing way to budget

Start with the free demand snapshot. Tell us what you sell, who buys it and where, and we look at one buyer journey across search and AI answers. That tells you whether there is a gap worth closing before you spend anything. If there is, the Demand Diagnostic puts numbers on it, and the pricing page sets out the stages in full.