TL;DR
- Monthly retainers for AI search work typically run from a few hundred to several thousand pounds, depending on how many prompts, markets, and off-site placements are in scope.
- Project-based pricing (an audit plus a remediation sprint) is the lower-commitment entry point, and several agencies, Schmitdy included, offer a free initial audit before you pay anything.
- Performance and hybrid pricing sounds appealing but is hard to structure fairly, since a meaningful share of what moves your visibility number sits outside any agency's control.
- The real red flags aren't about price at all: guaranteed results, no baseline, opaque line items, and reports with no accompanying work.
- If you have one product, one market, and someone in-house who can write clearly, a focused DIY sprint plus a tracking tool may get you most of the way before you need to spend on an agency.
Before you sign a retainer, work out what you're actually paying for. Here is how AI search agencies price their work, what each level should include, and when the cheaper answer is to skip the agency entirely.
What an AI search agency actually does
A GEO or AEO agency works to get your brand mentioned, cited, and recommended when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude a question in your category, rather than optimising for a page-one ranking in Google. The work typically spans content (rewriting pages so they're answer-first and easy for a model to quote), technical retrieval (making sure your site is crawlable and structured so it gets pulled into the index these models draw from), off-site presence (getting named on the comparison sites, forums, and review platforms AI models cite as evidence), and measurement (tracking how often and how favourably your brand shows up, typically with a tool like Peec AI or Profound). We break down the full evaluation criteria in our guide to the best AI search agencies for B2B companies.
If you are still deciding between buying a tool, hiring an agency, or running an agent, start with our tool vs agency vs agent comparison.
The single most common mismatch in this market isn't overpaying. It's paying for a dashboard when what you needed was someone to do the work, or paying for execution when a tool would have answered the question for a fraction of the cost.
What a monthly retainer covers
A retainer is the default structure for ongoing AI search work, and it typically runs from a few hundred to several thousand pounds a month depending on scope. There is no fixed "right" price because scope varies enormously: a single-product SaaS company competing in a narrow category needs far less than a multi-brand retailer competing across dozens of product categories.
What that fee should buy, at any scale, is ongoing content and technical work (not just monitoring), a defined number of prompts tracked across your priority engines, a stated amount of off-site activity (guest posts, directory listings, review platform presence), and a real report on a fixed schedule, not a dashboard screenshot you're expected to interpret yourself. Ask an agency to itemise the retainer against those four things before you sign. If they can't, you're likely looking at a rebadged SEO retainer with an "AI visibility" line item added on top, priced the same as before.
At the lower end of the range, expect narrower prompt coverage, fewer engines tracked, and content-only work with limited or no off-site placement. At the higher end, expect multi-market prompt sets, off-site placement as a standing monthly activity rather than a one-off, and reporting that includes raw prompt-level data you can check yourself, not just a summary.
Project-based and audit pricing
Project-based pricing covers a fixed scope with a defined start and end, most commonly an initial audit and remediation sprint. This is usually the lower-risk way to start: you get a real baseline (where you stand today across a defined prompt set, checked against named competitors) and a scoped set of fixes, without committing to an ongoing monthly spend before you've seen how the agency actually works.
Some agencies, including Schmitdy, offer the initial audit for free precisely because it lowers the barrier to finding out whether you have a problem worth paying to fix. Whether you take a free audit or a paid one, insist on the same thing you'd want from a retainer: a scope document stating what gets audited, how many prompts and engines are covered, and what the remediation sprint (if you proceed) will actually touch.
Performance and hybrid pricing
Performance or hybrid models tie part of the fee to visibility metrics moving. It sounds like the safest way to buy this work, since you're only paying for results. In practice it's harder to structure fairly than it looks, because a meaningful share of what moves your visibility number sits outside any single agency's control: a competitor publishing more content, a platform changing how it weights sources, or a model update can shift your number independent of anything the agency did.
Be cautious of performance pricing tied purely to visibility metrics for this reason. A clearer structure, if you want cost tied to outcomes at all, is a fixed scope with a measurement checkpoint you both agree to track independently, rather than a fee formula that assumes the agency controls a number it only partially influences.
What you should get for the money, whatever the pricing model
Whatever structure you're paying under, track three things, ideally with a tool independent of the agency doing the work, so you're not grading your own homework. Visibility rate: the percentage of a defined, realistic prompt set where your brand appears at all, checked monthly against your baseline. Share of voice: how you appear relative to named competitors on the same prompts, since visibility in isolation doesn't tell you if you're winning or just present. Citation quality: whether your own domain is being cited as a source, not just mentioned by name, because citation is what drives referral traffic and what you can influence fastest.
Agree on this measurement approach and the tool you'll use to check it before you sign anything, and get access to the raw prompt-level data yourself rather than relying solely on the agency's summary reporting. If a proposal doesn't include this as standard, that's a pricing conversation worth having before you talk about the fee itself.
When you don't need an agency at all
If you sell one product in one market, have someone in-house who can write clearly and understand your buyers, and have the discipline to publish and update a small set of genuinely useful, answer-first pages, you can do the content half of this work yourself. Pair that with a visibility-tracking tool to see whether it's moving the number, and you may not need to spend on execution capacity from an outside agency at all, at least not yet.
Where DIY tends to fall short, and where the spend starts to justify itself, is the off-site half: getting mentioned on the third-party comparison pages, forums, and review sites that AI models treat as independent evidence is slower and more relationship-dependent work, and it's the piece most in-house teams don't have the time or contacts to run consistently. That is usually the point at which an agency retainer starts to pay for itself, not before.
Red flags that should stop you spending
Walk away from anyone who guarantees rankings, mentions, or citation counts inside a fixed timeframe, at any price point. Nobody has that level of control over what a generative model outputs on a given prompt, and a guarantee attached to a fee is a sign the pricing is built on a promise the agency can't keep.
Walk away from anyone who can't show you a before number, regardless of what they're charging. If they didn't baseline your current visibility across a defined prompt set before starting, there is nothing to measure your spend against.
Walk away from anyone whose entire monthly fee buys measurement with no execution and no clear handoff. A dashboard telling you that you're missing from 80% of relevant AI answers is useful diagnostic information. It is not worth a retainer on its own. If the deliverable each month is a report and nothing changes on your site or off it, you are paying agency prices for a tool's job.
Be cautious of anyone who won't explain, plainly, how retrieval works for the platform they're claiming to optimise for, however reasonable their rate card looks. An agency that talks about "AI search" as one undifferentiated thing hasn't done the technical homework, whatever they're charging you to do it.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an AI search agency cost per month? Retainers typically run from a few hundred to several thousand pounds a month. The main scope drivers are how many prompts and engines are tracked, how many markets you're competing in, and how much off-site placement work (guest posts, directory listings, review platform presence) is included alongside content and technical work. There's no single "normal" number; a single-product company in one market pays far less than a multi-brand retailer across many categories.
What should a GEO audit cost? An audit is usually priced as a fixed-scope project rather than a retainer, and the price varies with how many prompts and markets are covered. Some agencies, including Schmitdy, offer an initial audit for free, which is a reasonable way to see what the work would involve before committing to ongoing spend.
Is AI search optimisation worth the money? It depends on whether your buyers research your category through AI assistants before purchasing, which covers most B2B software, professional services, and considered-purchase B2C categories. The way to answer this for your own business, rather than in the abstract, is to baseline your current visibility first and decide whether the gap you find is worth paying to close.
Should pricing be tied to results? Be cautious of performance pricing tied purely to visibility metrics, since a meaningful share of what moves that number (competitor activity, platform changes) sits outside any agency's control. A clearer structure is a fixed scope with a measurement checkpoint you both agree to track independently.
Can I just use a tool instead of hiring an agency? Tools like Peec AI and Profound tell you where you stand and where the gaps are, and cost a fraction of a retainer. They do not write your content, secure off-site placements, or fix technical retrieval issues. If you have the in-house capacity to act on what the tool tells you, a tool alone can be enough and is the cheaper route. If you need someone to do the work, that's what an agency retainer is actually paying for.
How long before I see results? Off-site work and content restructuring typically take eight to twelve weeks to show up in visibility tracking, because AI models re-crawl and re-weight sources on their own schedules, not yours. Factor that lag into how you judge whether a retainer is earning its cost; judging it after four weeks will make good work look like it isn't working.
