How Much Should You Pay for SEO and AEO in 2026?

Separate the one-time work from the recurring work

Almost every SEO and AEO deliverable falls into one of two buckets, and confusing them is how retainers get sold.

• —One-time (build) work: site structure and page count, server-rendered content, titles and meta descriptions, headings, schema markup, sitemap, robots.txt, llms.txt, canonicals, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, analytics and conversion tracking, and answer-first copy on every page.
• —Genuinely recurring work: new content (service pages, city pages, blog posts), keeping hours, prices and services accurate, monitoring what actually happens, and occasional technical upkeep.

The one-time bucket is where most of the AEO value sits, and it is finished when it is finished. A five-page site does not need its schema rewritten every month. If a retainer is mostly re-reporting on work that was completed in month one, you are paying rent on a finished asset.

What the common price tiers actually include

Prices vary by market, but the shape of the tiers is consistent enough to describe honestly.

• —Under about $300 a month: usually automated reporting, a directory listing tool, and a couple of low-effort blog posts. Little judgment involved. Often net-negative once you count your own time.
• —Roughly $500 to $1,500 a month: the common local agency tier. Some real content, some technical fixes, monthly calls. Value depends almost entirely on whether the structural work gets done early or gets stretched out.
• —$2,000 a month and up: appropriate for larger sites, competitive metros and multi-location operations. For a single-location local business with a dozen pages, it is usually more capacity than the site can absorb.

Notice what is missing from all three: a line that says "when this is done, it is done." That line is the difference between buying an asset and renting attention.

Why AEO should not be a second invoice

AEO — getting cited by answer engines — runs on the same foundation as SEO. Crawlability, clean HTML, structured data, topical depth and reputation signals are prerequisites for both. What is different is emphasis: question-shaped headings, direct answers up front, specifics instead of adjectives, real FAQ blocks.

That is a writing and structure discipline, not a separate technology stack. Anyone quoting you a standalone AEO retainer on top of an SEO retainer should be able to name a deliverable that does not already appear on the SEO list. Ask them to. It is a short, clarifying conversation.

How our pricing works instead

We put the structural SEO and AEO work in the build and charge nothing extra for it. A build is $300 for up to five pages and $50 per additional page. Hosting is $50 a month, with the first payment 30 days after checkout. There is no SEO retainer, no AEO retainer, no contract, no sales call, and a 30-day 100% money-back guarantee.

Google Ads, if you want it, is priced the same way: $300 to set up the first campaign, $200 per additional campaign, and $100 a month of management per active campaign. Ad spend goes to Google, not to us.

The reason those numbers work is production, not corner-cutting. AI drafts and handles repetitive assembly; people in the US make the decisions about structure, accuracy, copy and what is defensible to publish. We pass the efficiency through in price rather than keeping it as margin.

Run the comparison on your own numbers

Take whatever you pay now — or whatever you have been quoted — and multiply by twelve. Then add the build fee if you also need a new site. Compare that against $300 plus $50 a month plus $50 per page over five.

For a ten-page site, our first year is $300 plus $250 in extra pages plus $600 in hosting: $851. A $900-a-month retainer is $10,800 in the same year, before any build fee. The gap is not a discount; it is the difference between paying for finished work once and paying for it monthly.

The savings calculator does this comparison with your actual spend, page count and ad situation, and shows the twelve-month difference. No email required to see the number.

Where the money goes in a typical retainer

It helps to know what you are funding. In a traditional agency, a $1,000 monthly fee is largely staff time: an account manager who owns the relationship, a strategist who reviews the account periodically, a writer who produces a post or two, and the reporting layer that assembles a dashboard for your monthly call.

None of those people are villains, and the model made sense when producing a page took a week. But the majority of that cost is coordination rather than output, and coordination is the part software actually replaced. If your invoice has not moved in three years, you are paying for an old cost structure.

The test is simple: ask what shipped last month. Not what was analyzed or discussed — what changed on your website. If the honest answer is one blog post and a report, price the blog post and skip the rest.

Signals a quote is fair

Fair quotes tend to share a few traits, regardless of the number attached.

• —The deliverables are countable: pages, schema types, FAQ blocks, tracking events.
• —One-time items are labeled as one-time, with an end date.
• —Nothing is guaranteed about rankings or AI citations, because nobody controls those.
• —You keep the asset — site, content and accounts — if you leave.
• —There is no long contract on a small site, and cancellation does not cost extra.

Our own version of that list is deliberately boring: $300 build up to five pages, $50 per extra page, $50 a month hosting, cancel by email, 30-day money-back guarantee, no sales call. You can verify every item before you spend anything.

Where ongoing spend is still worth it

To be fair to the other side: ongoing money makes sense in a few real cases. If you publish substantial new content every month, if you operate in a genuinely competitive metro with many locations, or if you are running paid campaigns that need active management, recurring work earns its keep.

What does not earn its keep is a monthly fee attached to a five-page site whose structure was completed a year ago, justified by a dashboard nobody reads. That is the pattern we built our pricing against.

If you are unsure which situation you are in, run the free audit first. Knowing whether your problem is structural, content-related or competitive tells you whether you need a build, a few pages, or nothing at all this quarter.