What AI SEO services include
AI SEO services are paid work to get your business named, and your pages cited, in the answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI answers write. The same work is sold as GEO services, AEO services, ChatGPT SEO services, LLM SEO services and AI search optimization services. Whatever the label, you get some mix of four things: measurement of which questions name you, technical fixes so AI crawlers can read your site, pages that answer buyer questions plainly, and work on the outside sources assistants trust. The price runs from nearly nothing, if you do the checking yourself, to several thousand dollars a month for a service that writes and publishes.
This page explains what each of the four parts buys you, what no service can deliver, what drives the price and how to compare two quotes fairly. If you are choosing a supplier rather than a scope, our guide to choosing an AI SEO agency covers the questions to ask and the red flags. If you want the plain definition first, see what AI SEO is.
The four parts differ enormously in cost, speed and how much anyone controls them.
Measurement. A question set written in your buyers' words, put to several assistants on a schedule, recording who gets named and how. Quick to set up, changes nothing by itself, and it is the only way to show later whether anything else worked.
Technical access. Confirming that AI crawlers can read your pages. That comes down to what your robots.txt file allows, whether a security layer is challenging them, and whether your pages show their text without heavy scripts. It is binary and usually a few hours of work.
Content. Pages that answer the questions buyers ask, with claims specific enough to quote. This is the largest line in most engagements and the one where quality varies most.
Outside work. Accurate listings, reviews, earned coverage and presence in the forums and guides your category uses. Slow, hard to automate and priced by time.
A proposal that does not separate these four is describing a category rather than a service. This matters more than usual here, because the vocabulary is new enough that a familiar service can be sold as a novel one without anybody quite lying. Both are on the market, sometimes from the same supplier.
Ask which of the four you are buying and how the hours split between them. A supplier who cannot answer has not scoped the work.
The fast half and the slow half
Everything in this work sits on one side of a line, and most disappointment comes from a proposal that blurs it.
The fast half
Confirming AI crawlers can reach your site, and making your existing pages answer their own question in the first paragraph instead of the fourth. Both respond within weeks. Both are cheap. Neither is a program. Commercial writing habitually circles a subject before committing to a statement, and an assistant writing a short answer needs a sentence it can lift, so most sites have easy ground here.
The slow half
Building real depth on a subject you can own, and being referenced in the places that already get cited for your category. Both take a quarter or more, neither can be automated well, and the second involves relationships rather than deliverables. This half decides whether you get retrieved at all, which is why it matters most and why it is most often quietly missing from a proposal. It does not scale, it is hard to bill by the unit, and it looks like nothing is happening for months. Our page on AI search visibility explains why retrieval is the step that decides everything else.
The assistants also move on different clocks. Perplexity retrieves live and can reflect a new page within days. ChatGPT tends to move over ten to fourteen weeks. Google's AI Overviews move when Google rankings move. A single timeline quoted for all of them has not been checked.
What a service can change, and what nobody controls
Nobody can instruct ChatGPT, or any other assistant, to name you. What a service can do is make your business easier to find, understand and trust, and show you whether that worked. Everything else is a means to that or a claim to treat with caution.
Within reach
Whether assistants can read your site. The AI companies publish the names of their crawlers. Confirm GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can all read the site. A surprising number of sites block them by accident through old settings or security tools. It is an afternoon to check and fix.
Whether your pages answer clearly. If your page has the answer in a plain sentence near the top, an assistant has something to use. If the answer is buried or vague, it does not.
Whether outside sources describe you accurately. Answers often draw on third-party material about a business. Correcting a wrong listing, answering reviews and being present where your category is discussed changes what an assistant finds.
Whether you can see what happens. A fixed list of questions, run repeatedly, with the answers saved. That is what turns a hunch into evidence.
Outside everyone's control
The choice itself. There is no setting, submission form or payment that puts you on an assistant's list. Repeatability. The same question asked twice can name different businesses for reasons unconnected to your site. The assistant's method. The companies change how their products pick sources without notice. The step from mention to sale. Someone who hears your name usually searches for you later or visits directly, so the trail rarely shows in your analytics. A service showing you revenue from AI mentions with precision is modeling and should say so.
When an assistant gets a fact about you wrong
One of the most useful things a service can do has nothing to do with being named. It can find where an assistant states something false about your business and trace why. Typical examples are an old address, a discontinued product, a wrong price range or a policy you changed. The cause is usually a stale source: an old directory entry, a review describing a past policy, or an outdated page on your own site. The fix is rarely a message to the assistant. It is correcting the sources, starting with your own pages. Ask any service how it finds and fixes wrong facts. A good one can show a past example with the source it traced.
The kinds of service you will meet
Four shapes of service, and it helps to know which one is in front of you.
Audit only. A one-time review with a report. Fine if you can act on the findings, useless if you cannot. A full AI visibility audit is a good first purchase when you are not sure where the gaps are.
Monitoring. A tool or a person that runs your questions on a schedule. Valuable as measurement, though it changes nothing by itself. Our comparison of AI visibility tools covers how to judge that side on its own.
Content production. Pages written and published for you. This is where most of the effect comes from, provided the pages answer real buyer questions and are accurate.
Full service. Measurement, access fixes, content and outside work together. The costliest, and the only one that covers the whole job.
Match the type to what you lack. If you have writers but no data, buy monitoring. If you have data but no writers, buy production. If you have neither, look at full service.
Three kinds of supplier wearing one label
Search agencies who added the service are the largest group. They are competent at the underlying work, because most of it is the work they already did, and honest ones say so. The risk is a proposal that never leaves your own website. Specialists who started here are usually stronger on measurement and sometimes thinner on the fundamentals underneath. Ask what they would do if the measurement showed the problem was ordinary search authority, because that is the most likely finding. Tool vendors selling services around their product have excellent measurement. The question is who does the work the measurement points at, and whether that is in the price.
None of the three is wrong. What matters is matching the supplier to the half of the work your measurement says you need, which is another reason the baseline comes before the retainer.
What AI SEO services cost
AI SEO costs anywhere from nearly nothing to several thousand dollars a month, and the label tells you almost nothing about which. That is the honest answer, because the same phrase covers a free afternoon of checking, a software subscription, a consultant's report and a team that writes and publishes every week.
One reference point from the market: an agency doing this work charges about $3,209 a month (2026 average across 439 providers) and publishes 4 to 12 pieces. It reflects agencies broadly, not any quote you will receive, so treat it as an anchor, not a rule. Beyond that, most figures published online for this work are guesses. What you can rely on is the structure of the cost, which does not change from supplier to supplier.
A measurement-only subscription and a full-service retainer can both say "AI SEO" and differ by a factor of ten. Packages in different corners of that diagram are different products, and comparing their prices side by side is how buyers get misled.
Six things that move the price
Number of questions. Fifty cost more to run and read than fifteen, and past a point more questions produce data nobody reads. Number of assistants. Watching one is cheaper than watching five. Frequency. Twenty questions across four assistants weekly is a few hundred answers a month. Two hundred questions daily is tens of thousands. Those are different products at the same nominal retainer. Volume of content. Pages per month is the clearest driver in a service fee and the easiest to inflate with thin pages. Human review. A person reading every page before it goes live costs more and protects you from confident errors. Scope of your business. Thousands of products or many locations need more work than a single-location service business.
Ask a supplier which of these its quote assumes. If it cannot say, the quote was not built from the work.
The common pricing shapes
Subscription software is low risk but changes nothing on its own. A one-time audit is predictable, but the plan then needs staffing, which costs more than the audit. An hourly or day rate suits a specific question and has no link between hours and results. A monthly retainer suits steady effort and can run for months with nobody checking whether it is the right work. Per-page pricing is clear and comparable and rewards volume over usefulness. Outcome-linked fees are appealing, but read how the result is defined, because a target that is easy to hit guarantees nothing.
Costs that are not on the quote
Your own time. A plan creates writing, editing and listing fixes for your team. Review and approval. If the supplier needs you to approve every page, your time becomes part of the cost. Some suppliers do not need approvals, so ask which you are buying. Website changes. Fixes that need a developer may be billed separately. The backlog the measurement creates. A report that lists thirty questions where you are missing creates thirty pieces of work. Budget for acting on it, or the retainer buys a recurring reminder of a problem nobody is addressing.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Line the quotes up in a table you make yourself, with the same rows for each: measurement included or not, number of questions, number of assistants, pages per month, human review, outside work, setup fees, minimum term and what you own on exit. Where a supplier has not said, write "not stated" and ask. You will usually find the cheaper quote leaves out two or three rows. That is not always bad, but now you are choosing, not guessing.
Then divide. The monthly fee over the number of pages actually published gives a rough cost per page. Do the same for questions measured. These are crude numbers, but they put very different packages on one scale.
A better test than price is whether you can describe what you are paying for in one sentence: "I pay for twenty fixed questions measured weekly on four assistants, and eight reviewed pages a month." If you can say that, the price has an explanation. Very cheap packages often work by publishing thin pages in volume with little review, and pages with wrong facts can do harm. Very expensive packages are fair when they pay for real research, writing, review and outreach, and not when they mostly pay for a sales team.
It is also worth asking what a supplier would do with half the budget. A good one explains which parts to keep and which to drop. A weak one repeats the same package at a lower price. Read the contract term as carefully as the number, too. A lower monthly fee with a twelve-month lock-in can cost more than a higher fee you can leave after a quarter.
A staged way to spend
You do not have to commit to a large monthly figure on day one. A staged approach keeps each payment tied to something you have learned.
Stage one costs your time only. Check that AI crawlers are not blocked. Write twenty questions a customer might ask before choosing a business like yours, in their words and with their situation in the question. Ask each in a fresh conversation in two or three assistants, using a logged-out window as well, since a logged-in assistant may adapt to your history. Copy the full answers into a spreadsheet, noting who was named and how you were described, and repeat on different days. Then rewrite your five most important pages so the answer sits in the first paragraph, and correct any wrong facts on your listings. Our guide to the AI visibility checker walks through the method, and our page on how to get your business on ChatGPT covers the fixes.
Stage two buys measurement, if you want it to run on its own. Spend here only if the rough version showed real gaps.
Stage three buys production. If the measurement points at pages you do not have, pay someone to write and publish them, and check the first batch against what you asked for before committing to volume.
Stage four buys the slow outside work, once the foundation is sound. It is the least predictable spend, so ask for a short term and a clear report on what was done each month.
A supplier who wants stage four money before stage one is done is asking you to pay ahead of what anyone knows. This order also prevents the most common budgeting mistake, which is buying the most complete-sounding package first. Complete is only useful if it fits the gaps you actually have.
What month one should look like, and how to brief it
The shape of the first month tells you most of what you need to know about a service. Expect a crawler access check in the first week, with the crawlers named and what was found. Expect a question set written with you, not generated from your website, because a generated set measures your marketing language rather than your buyers' uncertainty. Expect a baseline before anything changes. Do not accept a strategy deck in month one with the first measurement arriving in month three, because then nothing that happens afterward can be attributed to anything.
The question set is the real contract
Almost every dispute in this category traces back to the same omission. The engagement was agreed in terms of activity, so many pages and so many hours, and nobody wrote down the questions the work would be judged against. Six months later both sides argue about whether it worked, and nothing can settle it.
The question set settles it. Twenty to fifty questions, in the words buyers actually use, agreed at the start, kept fixed and run on a schedule from before the work begins. Add to it deliberately, and keep the originals running unchanged so the old series stays readable. Writing fifty real customer questions is harder than it sounds, and a business that cannot fill the list is usually learning something important about its own market. A supplier who agrees a question set has agreed to be measured on questions you chose, which makes flattering reporting much harder.
Then name success in advance and in writing. Not "improved visibility" but something checkable, such as being named in a third of the shortlist questions on one named assistant by a named date. It may turn out to be the wrong target. A wrong target you can test still beats a vague one you cannot. And say which half you are buying. Fast work should be finished in weeks, not retained. Slow work means accepting that the first quarter looks like nothing is happening.
What a monthly report should contain
The report is where a service is either honest or decorative, so agree its shape before signing.
The same question set every month, unchanged. Any change should be flagged as a new measurement, not folded into a trend. Results split by assistant. A blended number hides the case where you are gaining in one and absent from another, which is usually the most useful finding. Every business named, not only yours. That set is your real competitive position. Actual sentences, quoted. Being named as the cheap option counts as present in any tally, and only the wording shows it. An honest note on what did not move. A report with no negative findings in a field this slow has been curated.
Agree, too, what a quiet month looks like. There will be several in the first quarter, and the pressure to fill them with a list of activity is considerable. And agree what happens to the raw answers if you leave. The question-and-answer history is the valuable artifact, far more than the charts built on it, and if it lives only in a supplier's dashboard, a year of measurement disappears when the contract ends.
What to walk away from
Five, roughly in order of how much they should worry you.
A guarantee of appearing. Nobody controls this. A money-back promise is different and can be fair, if it names the measure, the period, the starting point and who measures it. A promise tied to the 90 days before you joined is checkable, because that earlier period exists in your own data. A promise to "see improvement" with no baseline is not checkable at all.
Reporting that leads with traffic. Most recommendations produce no click, so a supplier measuring referral visits will report failure during real progress and success during a fluke.
Refusing to show the question set. It determines everything the engagement is judged on.
A volume promise as the headline. Pages per month is a promise about output, not outcome, and this is the category where publishing width instead of depth fails hardest.
A proposal entirely about your own website. It has quietly dropped the half that usually decides whether anything gets retrieved. Our page on how LLMs choose sources shows why that outside half carries so much weight.
How RunOctopus does it
RunOctopus sits in the full-service corner of that pricing diagram, with software and people both doing the work. Our AI, Ollie, and our team research your business, then write, publish and link pages directly on your own website. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix. You do not approve each page first, and there is nothing to install, upload or schedule. We also report where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.
Our 90-day promise is the checkable kind described above: more visibility on Google and in AI answers, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. Our case studies show what the work has and has not done for real clients, measured from their own Search Console, with the misses left in. For example, Florida Realtor Careers had 727 pages added between June 25 and September 22, 530 of them have appeared in Google, and monthly clicks went from 2 in June to 130 in September, which the study itself calls real and small.
To see what Ollie would plan for your site first, paste your address for the free site read. No account and no call.
What to remember
Price follows scope. Find out which of the four parts a service covers, who does the work, and what stays with you at the end, and the number will make sense. Measure first, do the fast half yourself if you can, and then decide what is worth paying for.
AI SEO services are measurement, access, content and outside work in some mix. Compare them on that mix, not the label, and never sign a retainer before a baseline exists.