What GEO agencies actually charge per month

Some GEO agencies publish their pricing. The stock line in this category is that everyone hides behind a custom quote, and it is not true. Of the agencies checked on 10 August 2026, two competitors published a complete rate card on their own site with no form in front of it, and a third published an entry point without a tier breakdown.

What is true is narrower and more useful. The number an agency publishes is frequently not the number you end up paying, because the largest variable cost in this work is often quoted separately from the retainer that appears on the pricing page.

Every figure below was re-read from the agency's own site on 18 October 2026. Rate cards move, so treat the date as part of the number.

RevenueZen publishes the widest ladder in the group, six tiers from $3,000 to $15,000, which is the clearest public statement anyone in this category makes about what more money buys, and it is the one to read first if you want to see how scope scales with spend. DerivateX publishes three tiers plus one one-off product, a $3,500 diagnostic that is compared against our audit in what an AI visibility audit costs. Omniscient Digital states that full-service engagements start at $120,000 a year, which is $10,000 a month, and stops there, which is a reasonable thing to do when engagements are genuinely scoped per client.

The bands overlap between $3,000 and $12,000, so the monthly figure on its own tells a buyer very little. Three agencies whose entry tiers sit inside a $2,500 spread are not offering the same work at slightly different prices, and the differences that matter sit in what the retainer covers rather than in what it costs.

Because placement costs money and somebody has to pay for it. Getting a brand into a roundup, a review platform or a guest post usually involves paying the publisher, and an agency can either absorb that inside the retainer or bill it separately.

One agency in this group publishes what that costs. DerivateX states on its pricing page that off-site citation budgets sit outside the retainer at $1,000 to $1,200 per month on the entry tier, $1,500 to $2,000 in the middle, and $2,000 to $3,000 at the top, with every spend approved before it goes live. Billing it that way is defensible, because placement cost genuinely varies by target and a fixed allowance either overcharges some clients or starves others.

It does mean a published $5,000 is an all-in $6,000 to $6,200, and that comparing headline retainers across agencies compares numbers covering different work. Salienz, a GEO agency, includes placements in the retainer, which is why its headline figure is the whole cost and why the volume has a fixed ceiling of 15 placements a term on Domination and 25 on Expansion. Neither model is dishonest, but a budget built by reading one as though it were the other will be short by several thousand a month.

The ordering changes once the column on the right exists. On headline retainers DerivateX's entry tier sits $499 below Salienz's. On all-in cost it sits about $500 to $700 above, which over a 90-day term is roughly $1,500 to $2,100, the other way round from how most buyers would read the two headline figures.

One of the four says nothing about placement budget either way, so its row cannot be completed from public information. That is not an accusation. It is the reason to ask the question on the call rather than assume the published number is the whole of it.

A GEO retainer should come with a committed count of placements on pages you do not own. Citations come from pages the client does not own, so the number of third-party surfaces an agency will get a brand onto each month is the unit that produces the result. Everything else is a means to it.

• How many listicle and roundup placements per month, and whether that is a target or a commitment.
• How many guest posts or digital PR placements, and who pays the publisher.
• Whether review platform work on G2 and Capterra is in scope, since those profiles are cited heavily and are slow to build.
• What measurement is included: how many prompts, across how many engines, and how many runs per prompt. On Salienz's own testing, about 90 to 100 questions is the smallest set that shows a change bigger than day-to-day noise, as set out in when you need an AI visibility audit, and when you need a retainer.
• Whether the reporting names competitors, because citation share against a named set is the only number that survives a board meeting.

An agency that answers all five in writing is easy to compare against another that does the same. An agency that answers in hours per month is describing its own costs rather than your outcome. Our own answers to all five are on the services page, which is the fairest way to ask other people for theirs.

Add the placement budget to the retainer before anything else. A quote that excludes placement spend is not wrong to exclude it, but it is not the price, and adding it moves some of the cheaper-looking options above the dearer ones.

Then divide the all-in monthly figure by the committed output count. Two agencies at $5,000 a month where one commits to 10 deliverables and the other to 25 are $500 and $200 each, and nothing on either service page surfaces that.

Two other agencies publish enough to run that calculation. One quotes a count of published assets per month and the other per 90 days, so the all-in retainer divided by that count is comparable, and it is the closest this category currently gets to a like-for-like unit price.

Listicle placements resist the same treatment, because Salienz is the only agency in the group that publishes a count: up to 15 over a 90-day term on Domination and up to 25 on Expansion. Those are ceilings rather than fixed counts, and the retainer also pays for assets, community work and reporting, so a single price per placement would be false precision. As a general range, the full published counts put it at roughly $700 to $1,100 a placement. DerivateX now publishes a placement volume of its own, 2 to 3 a month on the entry tier and 4 to 5 in the middle, but for guest posts, brand mentions and link insertions rather than listicles, so the two counts are not the same unit. Nobody else publishes a listicle count, so the column cannot be filled. That is the question to put on a call.

Check the commitment shape last. Terms in this group run from 90-day pilots to a six-month minimum on the largest engagements, and Salienz runs 90-day terms throughout. A longer minimum is not automatically worse, because placements take weeks to be picked up and a change needs a quarter of tracking to stand out from noise, so a quarter is close to the shortest honest term anyone can offer. What is worth asking about is a long minimum with no published exit.

The honest answer is that it depends on a number this page cannot source: what an outreach hire costs in your market. What can be said is what the job involves, because that is what the retainer is buying.

Up to 25 listicle placements and 12 guest posts or digital PR placements a quarter is a standing outreach workload rather than a task somebody absorbs alongside another role. It means maintaining a target list, pitching editors who mostly do not reply, correcting outdated entries in roundups that already exist, and keeping review velocity moving on two or three platforms. Add the placement spend on top, since publishers charge you the same whether an agency or an employee sends the email.

The case for doing it in-house is strongest when the category is narrow enough that the target list is short and stable, and one person can own the relationships permanently. The case for an agency is strongest when the list is long, the relationships already exist somewhere, and the work needs to start producing inside a quarter rather than after a hire. Either way the target list is what an $800 audit returns, and it is worth having before you decide who works it.