How Much Does GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) Cost?

The question of GEO pricing comes up in almost every conversation we’re having with SaaS founders right now. 

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) has gone from a buzzword to a line item in marketing budgets, and people want to know: what exactly am I paying for, what drives the cost up or down, and how much should I expect at my stage?

And honestly, there isn’t a neat, flat answer. 

GEO is a mix of technical groundwork, content operations, authority building, and monitoring, all layered differently depending on the size of your site and the market you’re in. 

So instead of tossing out a single price range, let’s walk through what GEO actually involves, what levers shift the cost, how agencies are structuring their packages, and why pricing looks so different for an early SaaS versus an enterprise player.

What is GEO (and what you’re actually paying for)

GEO, at its simplest, means making sure your name shows up when someone asks an AI tool for a product or solution in your category. That can be ChatGPT recommending the “best CRM for startups” or Perplexity citing your blog when it explains how to set up project management workflows, you want your brand to be in the mix.

To get there, you’re really paying for three things:

• A solid technical foundation. This is the scaffolding that makes your site usable by AI systems. It’s the crawlability, schema, and structured data that signal to large language models: here’s who we are, here’s what we do, here’s how to categorize and cite us. If that base isn’t in place, nothing else matters.
  
• Citable content. LLMs pull from content that is structured, clear, and in-depth enough to be digested and summarized. That means writing articles and FAQs that are not written for the sake of keywords; they need to directly answer real questions in a way that models can confidently surface. For example, a SaaS in HR software might need a well-structured guide on “how to calculate employee turnover” with data tables, FAQs, and context that’s very unambiguous. That’s the kind of content an AI overview will lift.
  
• Trust and authority signals. Here’s where GEO costs start to climb. Unlike SEO, where you can get by with some traditional link building, GEO leans heavily on digital PR and contextual mentions. Being written about in industry outlets, cited in analyst roundups, and showing up on trusted review platforms builds the credibility AI systems need to decide your brand is a safe source.

The Biggest Drivers of GEO Cost

So how much does GEO cost? As we mentioned before, it depends on your scope, your competition, and the depth of execution you need. Let’s break down the levers that drive pricing.

1. Scope & Deliverables: If all you need is a schema tune-up and a handful of content updates, you’re at the lighter end of the spectrum. But if you’re investing in ongoing content ops, digital PR, and visibility monitoring, that’s a much bigger program. The spread between those two scopes is exactly why one company pays $2K/month and another pays $10K+.
   
2. Competitive Intensity: Markets like HR tech or AI productivity tools are saturated. Every competitor is fighting to be cited, which means your program has to go deeper and faster to stand out. By contrast, a SaaS in a less crowded category can achieve visibility with fewer cycles.
   
3. Content Volume & Quality: If your site has 300 product-led blog posts, but half of them are shallow, part of GEO is refreshing or expanding them to match “best answer” depth. So to fix that, a content strategy that produces cluster-level, structured pieces costs more than a program that updates a few FAQs a month (but we both know that the former is what will likely move the needle in AI answers).
   
4. Technical Foundation: This one is straightforward: if your technical SEO is clean, GEO can be added on top of it quickly. But if your site has crawlability issues, messy schema, or gaps in site architecture, we will have to put significant hours into rebuilding the foundation before the content and PR even matter. That upfront rework inflates costs.
   
5. Authority & Reputation: Here’s the big divergence from SEO. Traditional SEO often leans on link-building campaigns that are relatively transactional. But GEO leans on digital PR and contextual mentions, which are more resource-intensive. For example, landing a backlink in a generic directory might cost a few hundred dollars. But getting quoted in TechCrunch or cited in a Gartner roundup? That requires relationships, PR campaigns, and consistent pitching – all of which add to cost. The difference in price here also comes down to scale. Going for one or two placements vs wanting to run a full-fledged PR campaign month over month will obviously vary heaps.
   
6. Measurement & Reporting: Unlike SEO, which has mature dashboards and KPIs, GEO is still in its early tooling stage. Tracking AI Overview appearances, LLM citations, or share of voice across queries often requires custom dashboards and manual monitoring. Someone has to go into Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT and keep testing what kind of queries your brand shows up for, and that time spent adds up.
   
7. Geography & Language: If you’re only targeting the U.S., costs are contained. But the moment you need to roll GEO into multiple markets or languages, everything multiplies: content, schema, PR, and monitoring. A multilingual SaaS site is effectively several GEO programs running at once.

So you see, costs don’t inflate for vague reasons. They rise when your scope, your content depth, your authoritative work, or your markets expand.

Average GEO Cost (What Most Agencies Are Charging)

When we looked across the top GEO agencies, we found monthly retainers to be the standard. One-off audits and ala carte fixes exist, but they don’t sustain visibility – obviously because GEO is cyclical – content needs refreshing, PR needs cadence, measurement needs eyes on it. And that’s why agencies bundle it monthly.

From there, you see two main pricing models:

• GEO-only retainers. These are for companies with a strong SEO base that only need GEO tactics layered in. Pricing starts around $2K–2.5K/month and climbs based on deliverables (volume of content, scale of PR, depth of reporting).
  
• SEO + GEO retainers. For companies that need the fundamentals baked in alongside GEO, packages start closer to $5K/month and scale upward.

At Singularity, for example, our (discounted GEO + SEO) bundles look like this:

• Starter: $4.1K/month 
• Medium: $8.5K/month 
• Fast: $13K/month

Whereas the GEO-only monthly retainer is priced at $2k/month – for now.

On-off fixes: You’ll also see freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork selling ala carte “GEO fixes” like schema updates or FAQ rewrites for a few hundred dollars. Those can be useful band-aids, but they’re not substitutes for a proper GEO program that actually moves the needle. 

Higher-end models: On the other end of the spectrum, some enterprise retainers go north of $15K–20K/month, but those typically fold GEO into large-scale PR and digital transformation budgets.

For most SaaS founders, the decision comes down to this: do you need GEO-only (because your SEO base is strong) or GEO + SEO (because your foundation still needs work)? That choice is the biggest swing factor in cost.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the simplest way to think about it: GEO scales with the size and complexity of your SaaS.

• Early-stage teams usually need a narrow scope: make money pages crawlable, add schema, land a few discoverability placements, and you’re good.
• Mid-market companies need more depth: content clusters that cover categories, recurring PR activity, structured FAQs, and visibility reporting to track performance.
• Enterprise SaaS plays at a different order of magnitude. Programmatic pages and schema, multilingual rollouts, entity and author strategies, and PR engines that run continuously are the cost of doing business at that scale.

That’s why GEO pricing looks so different across providers. The building blocks are the same: technical, content, authority, measurement, but the depth of execution is what drives the retainer higher or lower.

Not sure what GEO would cost for your SaaS? Book a discovery call with us. We’ll review your site, look at your current visibility in LLMs, and map out a plan that matches your size and growth stage.

FAQs

What drives GEO pricing up or down?

Pricing is tied to deliverables. The more content you need refreshed, the more PR you want placed, the broader your markets, or the messier your technical base, the more hours (and cost) it takes.

What’s included in a typical GEO engagement?

Most retainers include monthly reporting tied to AI citations, answer share, and organic lift; a monthly strategy call with road-mapping; access to monitoring tools; and execution across content briefs, entity/knowledge graph work, schema, on-page updates, and PR outreach. The exact mix varies by tier.

How long until we see results?

Most companies see early signals, like citations in ChatGPT or Perplexity, within 60–90 days. Durable traffic and conversion impact builds over 3–6 months and compounds through 6–12 months if you keep execution consistent.

Do we replace SEO with GEO – or run both?

Run both. GEO makes you visible in AI-driven search, while SEO secures traditional SERPs. Bundling them avoids duplicate effort and ensures you’re covered across both channels.