We charge from €10,000 for a project and €7,000 to €12,000 a month. Here is what moves a company inside that range, and when we would tell you to spend it elsewhere.
Almost nobody in this industry publishes what the work costs. You can see why. A number on its own looks either too high or suspiciously cheap, and the real answer starts with "it depends", which sounds like dodging the question.
We are going to publish ours anyway, and say which parts really do depend.
We charge from €10,000 for a fixed project and €7,000 to €12,000 a month for an ongoing partnership. Those are on our pricing page and have been for a while. What that page cannot hold is the rest of it: what moves a company from one end of the range to the other, what the money actually buys, and when we would tell you not to spend it with anyone.
Key takeaways
- We charge from €10,000 for a project and €7,000 to €12,000 a month for a partnership. Twelve-month term, with an opt-out after six months.
- A monthly rate without a term is an incomplete number. The commitment length is doing real work in the price, so compare quotes on both at once.
- Scope and what you already own move you up the range, company size mostly does not. An unoptimized content library often costs less to move than a smaller company starting from zero.
- Most of a retainer should be people doing work you could name. If an agency will not break the number down that far, keep asking until it does.
- Below €7,000 a month a retainer is usually the wrong way to buy this. One project plus your own team gets further than a retainer spread too thin.
Why "it depends" is the true answer, and on what
Two companies with identical revenue can land at opposite ends of that range, and the difference is almost never headcount or funding stage.
What you already own. This is the biggest single factor, and it surprised us before it surprised anyone we told it to. A company with 200 unoptimized blog posts, a documentation set and a dormant YouTube library is cheaper to move than a company with a clean site and forty pages, because the first one has assets that only need re-presenting. Some of our fastest visibility gains have come from work on content that already existed. Starting from nothing means paying for production before anything can be optimized.
How many surfaces you need. Being visible in ChatGPT for five commercial questions is a different scope from being visible across Google's AI surfaces, ChatGPT, Perplexity and a competitor set in three languages. Scope multiplies more than most people expect, because each surface has its own retrieval behavior.
How crowded your category is. If one source with real authority owns the current answers, taking that ground costs more than showing up where nobody is consistently cited. There is no shortcut around this: Google's own guidance on AI features is explicit that no file, markup or schema gets you in, which means what you are buying is the slow work of becoming the better source.
How fast you can approve things. This one is free to fix, and it is what holds most companies up. If publishing needs legal review and three sign-offs, you pay for the same work spread over more months.
What a retainer actually pays for
The most useful question to ask any agency, us included: how much of this fee is people doing work you could name?
For a partnership at our range, most of the fee is hands on the work: strategy and prioritization, content production and editing, technical implementation, and the analysis that decides what to do next month. The rest is monitoring tooling, project management and the account time that is not production.
Push on that ratio. If nobody can tell you which people will do what, or the answer turns out to be mostly account management, you are buying coordination. Ask for the split. Ask who writes and who reviews. Ask what happens in month one and what happens in month five.
Why we ask for twelve months
This is the part of our pricing people push back on most, so it deserves the argument rather than the policy.
Visibility does not move in month one. Content has to be produced and shipped, engines have to crawl it and decide it is the best answer to something, and then citations have to turn into sessions and sessions into pipeline. Those stages run on different clocks, and the last one is the one your board asks about.
A six-month engagement covers the expensive part and ends around the time the result starts to show, which is why we price on twelve months and put the opt-out at six.
The most common way we have watched this work fail, in engagements we took over and in what prospects tell us on first calls, is a cancellation at month four for looking like it failed at month one.
Which is why every contract has an opt-out after six months. If we are wrong about your category or the work is not landing, you should be able to leave. Nobody has used it so far.
When not to hire an agency
We turn down work for these reasons, and you can apply them without talking to us.
Your budget is under our retainer floor of €7,000 a month. Spending more is no guarantee of output. Spending under it is close to a guarantee of the opposite: a few days of attention spread thin, which buys coordination rather than work. A one-off project to fix the technical and structural foundations, then your own team executing against a plan, gets further with the same money.
You have nobody internally to own it. This work needs one person who can approve copy, answer product questions and get things shipped. Without that, the engagement turns into us waiting, and you paying to wait.
Your ACV is very low, or you are D2C e-commerce. Both are stated on our pricing page and they are real. The economics of research-heavy organic work need a deal size that can absorb it.
You need pipeline this quarter. Nothing here is a demand-generation channel on a one-quarter horizon. If that is the constraint, paid is the honest answer and we will say so.
One thing to refuse outright, whoever you hire: paying for pages nobody would choose to read. Google's scaled content abuse policy turns on purpose and value rather than production method, targeting pages made mainly to manipulate rankings "no matter how it's created". Volume with real review is not the problem. Volume instead of review is the cheapest-looking line on a proposal and the most expensive one to undo.
Budgeting it across the year
The mistake we see most often is a flat twelve-month budget line, because the work is not flat.
The two weeks before kickoff and month one carry the setup: audit, prompt and question research, technical fixes. Months two to six are peak production. After that the mix shifts toward measurement and finding the next lever, because the first one starts to run out.
Two implications for how you plan it. Do not commit your whole content budget to a plan written in month one, since the monitoring data from months two and three is a better input than anything available at kickoff. And leave room in the second half, because that is when you learn what actually needs building, and a fully committed budget cannot act on it.
What you should get for the money
Independent of who you hire, these are reasonable to demand:
- A named list of the questions and prompts you are being measured on, agreed before work starts.
- Work aimed at being genuinely the better source rather than at a checklist, with the fundamentals in place before anything clever.
- A monthly report that separates what was done from what moved, and says which of the two the numbers reflect.
- Visibility numbers you can reproduce yourself in a tool you have access to.
- A named person doing the work, not a rotating pool.
- An answer to "what would make us stop this" that both sides agree to at the start.
That last one matters more than the price. Proving that this work drives pipeline is genuinely hard, because the buyer who heard your name in an AI answer arrives as Direct traffic. Agreeing in advance how you will judge it is how you avoid arguing about the definition at month six.
What our numbers do and do not tell you
We are one agency, in Europe, working on research-intensive B2B, so our range reflects that and not the market. An agency with a different model will sit somewhere else, and being cheaper or more expensive proves nothing on its own.
We have not published what other agencies charge, because we would be guessing at their scope.
And what this costs and what it returns are separate questions. The second depends on your category, your conversion rate, and how long you stay with it.
Why we published this at all
The reason almost nobody publishes these numbers is that a price invites comparison, and comparison is uncomfortable when the scope behind it is vague.
We would rather be compared. A number you can argue with is more useful than a range you have to request, and if ours turns out to be wrong for you, we would rather you worked that out here than four calls in. If the only way a price looks reasonable is by hiding it, the problem was never the price.
If you want a scope and a number rather than a range, that is what a first conversation produces. Run a free audit or book a meeting, and we will tell you if we think you should spend the money somewhere else.
FAQ
What does AI Search optimization cost?
We charge from €10,000 for a fixed project and €7,000 to €12,000 a month for an ongoing partnership on a 12-month term. What moves a company within that range is scope, how competitive the category is, and how much usable content already exists. Any monthly figure quoted without a commitment length is an incomplete number.
Why is there a 12-month commitment?
Because visibility takes months to move. In the one engagement where we have published a month-by-month curve, it climbed from 5.5% to 52.5% between month one and month four, with pipeline following later, and another program took about ten months to reach a comparable position. Twelve months is how we price that risk rather than a promise about when results land, and every contract has an opt-out after six months so the commitment is not a trap.
Is AI Search optimization more expensive than SEO?
For us it is the same work and the same price, because it is one program rather than two. The mix differs: more attention to structure, extraction and off-domain sources like video, less to link building. An agency charging a separate premium for "GEO" or "AEO" on top of SEO should be asked what specifically is additional.
Can we do this in-house instead?
Often yes, and sometimes you should. If you have a writer who understands the product and someone who can ship technical changes, the main things you are buying from an agency are prioritization and pattern recognition across categories. A sensible middle path is one project to set direction and fix foundations, then your team executing it.
What is the minimum budget worth spending?
Below our retainer floor of €7,000 a month, a retainer spreads too thin to produce much, and you get coordination instead of output. Under that, a one-off project plus internal execution is a better use of the same money. We would tell you that rather than take the retainer.
How do we know we are not overpaying?
Ask how much of the fee is people doing work you could name, and ask who those people are. Ask what will be materially different in 90 days and which parts the agency does itself. Then agree at the start what would make you stop. A price is hard to judge in isolation and easy to judge against a scope.
