AI SEO Pricing: Stages, Scope and Figures

An audit is a one-off diagnostic — 40 checks across 5 categories, 7 assistants queried for a citation baseline, findings in 10 business days. A retainer is a fixed monthly fee buying measurement and shipped changes. Every retainer starts from an audit.

Stated as three sentences: the audit costs $750 once and returns 40 checks in 10 business days; Tier 1 costs $1,200 per month and queries 4 assistants weekly against 20 tracked prompts for 1 location, reporting monthly; Tier 2 costs $2,800 per month and queries 7 assistants — 4 weekly and 3 monthly — against 40 tracked prompts for up to 3 locations, reporting weekly.

Both retainer figures sit under the published national floor for this category. WebFX prices AI SEO for a small business at $1,500 to $5,000 per month in 2026, and Tier 1 at $1,200 falls below that floor. The same publisher prices local SEO at $500 to $3,000 per month, and Tier 1 falls inside that band. Local rates for AI-era work is the position, and the arithmetic states it plainly. Tier 2 at $2,800 runs 44 percent under the $5,000 national mid-market floor.

Scope is the count of pages, templates and locations an engagement commits to changing. Scope moves the repair stage and the first retainer month, never the two published monthly figures.

• Page countrepair works template by template, so a 40-page site carries 40 heading structures to rewrite against a 400-page site's 400.
• Content management systemWordPress, Shopify and Webflow accept structured data through existing fields, while Wix, Squarespace and hand-coded templates need custom work per template.
• Market competitivenessthe number of providers already cited for your buying questions sets how much original evidence the site needs.
• Service locations1 location selects Tier 1 at $1,200 per month, and 2 or 3 locations or practice areas select Tier 2 at $2,800 per month.
• Index presencea site absent from Bing needs crawler access, sitemap submission and a re-render before measurement starts, all inside month one.

Four of the five land in repair rather than in the retainer, and what happens when each stage runs is published with its exit criterion.

1. No website.

   Retrieval fetches a page and quotes from it. A business with no page hands an assistant nothing to fetch, and a social profile carries no crawlable main content. We decline, and we name the website as the purchase that comes first.

2. Fewer than roughly ten substantive pages.

   Ten substantive pages give an assistant ten distinct passages to match against ten distinct buying questions. Below ten, retrieval samples too little surface to separate signal from noise. We decline, and we name content as the purchase that comes first.

3. No customer reviews anywhere.

   Assistants assemble local recommendations from third-party corroboration. A business named nowhere outside its own domain carries one source, and one source is a claim. We decline, and we name review collection as the purchase that comes first.

Three conditions, three declines, published before the call rather than discovered during it. We found no page among the nine Kansas City competitor pages audited on 21 September 2026 publishing a threshold of its own.

Citation rate is the share of tracked prompts whose answer names or links the site, read against the baseline captured during the audit. Three months is 12 weeks, which buys 12 weekly measurement runs at both tiers and 3 monthly runs of Claude, Grok and Meta AI at Tier 2.

The minimum is the measurement window rather than a lock, and the engagement ends on written instruction once the window closes. Two of the nine Kansas City competitor pages audited on 21 September 2026 publish a price, and one publishes a delivery turnaround. A buyer comparing providers in this metro has almost nothing countable to hold them against, which is the reason both figures and the term are published here.