How AI SEO & AEO Are Priced

AEO and GEO run inside our SEO retainers, so the published SEO ladder is the AI-visibility ladder. On the standard ladder — for brands on their own stack — Local SEO runs $899 to $4,499 per month across five tiers, and National SEO runs $1,499 to $5,999 per month, higher at every tier because the keyword universe is wider. One-time onsite projects are sold in hour buckets at $1,699, $3,199, and $4,399, and out-of-scope or custom work is built up at $185/hour. If your site runs on WorkspaceCMS there is a second, cheaper ladder: local campaigns from $499 to $999 per month — but those require an active WorkspaceCMS site plan (from $89/mo) on top of the campaign fee, and they are local only, not national or global. Where you land within a ladder depends on page count, catalog size, competitive density, market count, and whether your category is regulated.

Usually bundled, because the underlying work overlaps heavily — structured data, entity clarity, crawler accessibility, and answer-shaped content improve classic rankings and AI citations at the same time. Splitting them into two invoices tends to mean paying twice for one body of work. Where AEO does get priced separately is when the scope is genuinely distinct: a standalone llms.txt implementation, a schema rollout across templates, or share-of-model tracking across multiple engines as its own deliverable.

Because the platform work is not being paid for twice. On someone else's stack, a meaningful share of every retainer goes into implementation friction — negotiating a theme, waiting on a client dev queue, working around a plugin that owns the head tags. When the site runs on WorkspaceCMS we control the platform, so technical implementation, page creation, and schema changes ship directly. That saving is what separates $499 a month from $899 a month — not a thinner strategy. Two conditions come with it: you need an active WorkspaceCMS site plan (from $89/mo), billed separately from the campaign, and the scope is fixed — Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO.

No. The campaign pricing exists because we own the platform the work ships into, so it is only available on an active WorkspaceCMS site plan — the campaign is an add-on to that plan, not a standalone product. The scope is also fixed — Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO. If you are pursuing national or global demand, you pay the standard national ladder from $1,499 a month regardless of platform, including on WorkspaceCMS. Brands staying on Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, or a headless build price from the standard local ladder at $899 a month.

Diagnosis before spend. An AI visibility check tells you which engines currently cite you and for which prompts; an AEO audit tells you why. Both convert into a scoped proposal instead of a guess, and both frequently reveal that the first fix is technical — crawler accessibility or missing structured data — which is fixed-scope project work (from $1,699 for the smallest onsite bucket) rather than an ongoing retainer. Starting with a retainer before that diagnosis is how budget gets spent producing content that engines cannot parse.

Yes, and predictably so. Regulated categories — alcohol, supplements, firearms, cannabis, medical, financial — require compliance review and stronger claim sourcing, and AI engines apply higher trust thresholds to those topics, so the content bar itself is higher. Multi-location and multi-market businesses multiply the entity work, the local signals, and the measurement surface for every additional market. Both are scope multipliers, not surcharges: you are buying more work, and the proposal shows where the extra hours go.

Our published monthly SEO packages run a six-month initial term and then go month-to-month; one-time Onsite SEO projects carry no contract at all. WorkspaceCMS local SEO campaigns run on the same shape — 6-month commitment, then month-to-month — while local PPC campaigns are Month-to-month — cancel anytime. Ad budget funded directly in your own Google/Meta account. On timing, be sceptical of anyone promising a date — AI engines re-crawl and re-summarize on their own schedule, and citation share moves as sources accumulate, not on a fixed calendar. What you should insist on instead is measurement from day one, so you can see which prompts and which engines are moving rather than taking anyone's word for it.