AI search optimization services: what you should get, and what it costs

If you have been pitched AI search optimization recently, you have probably seen very different offers under the same name: a monthly dashboard, a schema install, a content package, or a retainer that looks a lot like the SEO you already pay for. This guide sets out what the service should actually contain, what the market charges, and how to tell the work from the packaging. It draws on what buyers, agency owners and in-house marketers describe in Reddit's SEO and marketing communities, where people are blunt about what they paid for and what they got.

What is the actual work?

Strip out the labels (GEO, AEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO) and the useful work falls into four parts. The LLM SEO guide explains the reasoning behind each.

1. Measurement. Putting the questions your buyers ask to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, repeatedly, and recording who is named and which pages are cited.
2. Access. Making sure the AI search crawlers can reach your site and that Google and Bing have indexed the pages that matter.
3. Pages. Publishing pages that answer one buyer question each, clearly and near the top: prices, comparisons, reviews, "who is this for".
4. Outside sources. Finding the directories, review sites, lists and articles the answers rely on, then getting you onto them or correcting what they say.

If a proposal cannot tell you which of these four it covers, it is selling reporting rather than optimisation.

What should a good service include?

The table sets out what each part looks like when it is done well, and the warning sign when it is not.

The mass-content warning is not theoretical. One junior SEO described a boss pushing 10 to 50 AI articles a week until Google issued a manual action against the blog for scaled content, which Google's spam policies name directly.

What do AI search optimization services cost?

There is no standard price, and forum reports show how wide the range is. Broadly, and with plenty of exceptions:

• Tracking tools run from roughly $50 a month for a couple of dozen questions to a few hundred a month for a hundred or more. Enterprise platforms quote far higher. One UK retailer with a budget of around £1,000 a month found the best-known enterprise tool well beyond it.
• One-off audits range from free (usually a sales tool) to several thousand for large sites.
• Retainers range from a few hundred a month added onto existing SEO work to $10,000 a month or more for full programmes. One SEO said a company that left them signed with a platform for about $4,500 a month and, a year on, had less organic traffic and less AI presence than before.

Two candid admissions from agency owners are worth knowing. Some say they fold AI search work into ordinary SEO but feature it in pitches because it makes higher retainers easier to sell. And several who use the tracking tools say no tool measures this precisely; they use them as a rough guide.

For comparison, M/AFZAL publishes its prices: a $700 AI visibility audit to diagnose the problem, then the work itself inside a $2,500 a month retainer, as the AI SEO services page sets out.

Which parts are usually padding?

• Proprietary visibility scores. A buyer who ran a formal pitch with six agencies found every one led with its own score, and two would only explain it under a non-disclosure agreement. A score you cannot check cannot tell you what to fix.
• Paid llms.txt maintenance. One analysis shared in r/SEO counted more than 62,000 AI crawler visits over 90 days, of which 84 touched the llms.txt file. A commenter in the same thread said agencies charge monthly to "maintain" it. The llms.txt guide covers what it is and is not for.
• Schema rebadged as GEO. Structured data is useful hygiene, but larger tests people have shared show it barely changes whether AI tools cite you.
• Guarantees. No one controls what an AI tool says, and answers change with the wording, the tool, the location and the day.

What should you ask before you sign?

1. Which questions will you track, and can I see and change the list?
2. How many times is each question run, in which tools, and from where?
3. Will I see the full answers and the pages they cite, not only a summary?
4. Which outside sources do my competitors appear on that I do not?
5. Can you show me a client named in ChatGPT or Perplexity in the last 30 days, with the date visible?
6. How will we know whether this produced enquiries?

The fifth question comes from a buyer's guide shared in r/digital_marketing, and it is the quickest filter there is. Agencies doing real work have recent, dated examples to hand; agencies selling a deck tend to change the subject. The sixth is the one most providers struggle with, and an honest answer admits that much AI-referred traffic shows up in analytics as "direct", so a free-text "how did you hear about us?" question on your enquiry form is often the best evidence available.

The broader list of questions to ask an SEO agency applies too, as does the guide to what a marketing retainer should include.

What results are realistic?

Practitioners describe three speeds. Fixing a crawler block or adding a page that answers a missing question can show up in AI answers within days to a few weeks. Getting onto the lists, directories and review sites that shape "best" answers usually takes months. Changing what a model learned in training is beyond anyone's timetable.

Expect the numbers to wobble. One owner who tracked a local business daily for a month found ChatGPT named it almost every day, Google's AI Mode on most days and Perplexity never. A good provider reports the trend across repeated runs and is honest that a single good or bad week means little.

And keep the end goal in view. Citations do not always bring clicks: one SEO tool company's test brand gathered tens of thousands of citations and almost no visitors. What matters is being named, and named correctly, for the few questions that lead to a sale.

Do you need it at all?

Not always. If your buyers find you through referrals and repeat work, a one-off check may be enough. If they research online before choosing, and especially if AI tools already name a competitor, the work is worth doing.

Start with the free ten-minute AI test, or read the full AI search visibility guide first.