How much does GEO cost for a small business?
Author: AnswerBuild desk · Updated: September 2026
A focused GEO build for a small site is typically $750 for five answer pages and an audit, or $1,500 for ten pages plus a 30-day rerun. Monthly monitoring is about $400. Enterprise "AI search platforms" cost far more per month and are the wrong tool for a business with a $10k–$200k site. The work is writing and structure, so the price tracks hours, not seats.
What drives the number
| Line item | Typical effort | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 15-prompt audit across four engines | 2–3 hours | Run, capture, score, write up |
| Answer page, written and structured | 1–1.5 hours each | Question, answer, sources, FAQs, schema |
| Publishing into an existing CMS | 15–30 min per page | Longer on locked-down or custom builds |
| Citation cleanup on existing URLs | 2–4 hours | Fix pages engines already pull from |
| 30-day rerun and comparison | 1–2 hours | Same prompts, same scoring |
What is included
- — The prompt list and the scored baseline, in writing, so you can rerun it yourself later.
- — Finished pages with author, date, sources, FAQs, and valid schema.
- — One revision round on the copy.
- — A rerun at thirty days on the plans that include it.
What is not included
- — Ad spend of any kind. GEO is not media buying.
- — Guaranteed mentions in any engine.
- — Rebuilding your website or migrating hosting.
- — Ongoing PR, link building, or review generation.
How to tell if it is worth it
Work out what one new customer is worth to you over a year. If that number is a few hundred dollars, a $750 build needs to produce two or three customers to pay for itself, and you should start small and measure. If a customer is worth thousands — contracting, clinics, professional services — the math is easier and the ten-page build is usually the better starting point.
If you have no indexed website at all, spend the money on a basic site first. GEO adds nothing to a page an engine cannot fetch.
Doing it in-house
The method is public and it is on this site. If you have someone who writes clearly and can add schema, run the loop yourself. Budget roughly ten to fifteen hours for a first pass of five pages plus the baseline snapshot. Hiring it out buys speed and a second set of eyes on what the engines currently say about you.
Sources
Prices above are our own published rates. We do not cite third-party market surveys for pricing claims. Current package details are on the pricing page.
What a cheap version looks like
If the budget is under a few hundred dollars, do a reduced version yourself rather than buying a thin package. Pick three questions instead of fifteen. Run them in two engines instead of four. Write two pages instead of ten, and make them genuinely good — question as the H1, the answer in the first eighty words, a real price range, four FAQs from your phone calls. That is perhaps six hours of work and it produces a measurable baseline you can extend later. What does not work at any price is buying twenty AI-written posts. They add words, not answers, and they give an engine no reason to prefer you.
FAQ
- Is there a contract?
- The builds are one-time projects. The watch retainer can be cancelled anytime after sixty days.
- Do you charge per engine?
- Four engines are included. Additional engine snapshots are $150.
- What if I only want the audit?
- The audit is bundled with the starter build. We do not sell a report with no pages attached, because the report alone changes nothing.
- Can you work with my existing agency?
- Yes. We hand over the pages and the prompt set; they can keep running it.