The short answer. The price of an SEO and AI-visibility audit is driven by four things: how many page templates and markets the site has, how much of the work is diagnosis versus implementation, whether the AI-assistant baseline is sampled properly or screenshotted, and who does the work. Our own Diagnostic is a fixed fee of $2,500 for a six-stage review, a prioritised plan, an AI-visibility baseline on a 40-prompt set and a walkthrough, delivered in ten business days. Whatever you pay, you should get a plan your team can act on without the auditor.
We are not going to quote other firms’ prices here. They change, they are rarely published, and a number without its scope is meaningless. Instead, this article explains what moves the price so you can compare proposals on scope rather than on the headline figure.
What drives the price of an audit?
1. The size and shape of the site
Auditors work by template, not by URL. A site with 50,000 pages built from eight templates is usually quicker to review than a 400-page site where every page is hand-built. Multiple countries or languages add a second axis: each market has its own indexing, hreflang and entity questions. Ask any auditor how they scope: by templates and markets is the sign of someone who has done it before.
2. Diagnosis versus implementation
A diagnosis says what is wrong, in what order to fix it, and why. Implementation changes the site. They are priced differently because the second depends on your developers, your content team and your release cycle, none of which the auditor controls. A proposal that bundles the two into one number is hard to compare with one that separates them. Ask for the split.
3. How the AI-assistant baseline is produced
This is where audit prices diverge most, because the work is new. Three levels exist:
- Screenshots. Someone asks ChatGPT a few questions and pastes the answers into a slide. Cheap, and worth about that much: a single run of a single prompt tells you nothing about the next run.
- Tool scores. A SaaS tool reports an “AI visibility score”. Useful as a trend if you know what it samples; useless if you do not, and most do not say.
- A sampled baseline. A fixed set of prompts that your buyers actually use, run several times each in logged-out sessions across the named engines, recorded as mention, citation and accuracy rates with the spread shown. This takes real hours, which is why it costs more, and it is the only version you can repeat next quarter and compare. Our sampling method describes it.
Screenshots
A few prompts asked once and pasted into a slide.
One run tells you nothing about the next
Tool scores
A SaaS tool reports an “AI visibility score”.
A trend only if you know what it samples
Sampled baseline
A fixed prompt set, several runs each, logged out, across named engines.
Repeatable next quarter, so change can be compared
The two first-party reports, Search Console’s Generative AI features report and Bing’s AI Performance report, should be in any audit at any price; they are free and take minutes to read.
4. Who does the work
A senior consultant’s time costs more than a junior analyst running a crawler. The difference shows in the plan: a senior person ranks findings against each other and against your business; a crawler export lists them. Ask who writes the recommendations and who presents them.
5. What is excluded
Cheap audits are often cheap because they omit the slow parts: log-file analysis, rendering checks with JavaScript disabled, entity review across profiles, and the sampled AI baseline. None of these is optional if the symptom involves AI assistants. Ask for the exclusions list before comparing prices.
What should every audit include, at any price?
- A crawl and index review against Google’s documented basics: status codes, redirects, robots rules, canonicals, sitemaps, indexed versus submitted pages.
- A rendering check: what the page looks like with JavaScript disabled, since the documented AI crawlers do not describe a rendering step.
- A crawler-access check for the documented AI agents, not just Googlebot.
- An entity review: do the site, the profiles and the structured data agree on who you are.
- A citability review of priority pages: is there a passage an answer engine could lift.
- A measured baseline: Search Console, analytics and the sampled AI prompts, dated.
- A prioritised plan with effort, dependencies and the expected direction of change for each item, written so a developer or writer can act on it.
- A walkthrough, because a report nobody explains is a report nobody implements.
Google’s AI features documentation is explicit that there is no special markup or opt-in for AI Overviews beyond normal indexing and snippet controls. An audit that sells “AI Overview optimisation” as a separate line item should be able to explain what, concretely, that line item changes.
How do you spot a thin audit?
- The findings are a crawler export with severity labels and no order of work.
- Every finding is “critical”.
- The AI section is screenshots.
- There is no baseline date, so nothing can be compared later.
- The plan depends on buying the auditor’s retainer or tooling.
- It promises a ranking, a mention or a citation. Nobody controls those; the vendor documentation linked above describes no mechanism for it.
Our own price, stated plainly
We publish the price because it is the first thing a buyer wants to know and the last thing most proposals say. It also keeps us honest: the scope above is what the fee buys, and nothing in it depends on a follow-on contract.
What should you do with the audit afterwards?
Give it to the people who will implement it and ask them to estimate the top ten items. If the estimates are impossible, the plan was not written for your team. If they are reasonable, book the work in order and take the second measurement at the date the audit named. An audit that is not followed by a dated second measurement was an expense, not an investment.
What we don’t claim
- We do not claim our price is typical, cheap or expensive. We claim it is fixed and that the scope is stated.
- We do not claim an audit improves rankings, mentions or citations. It tells you what to change and how to measure the change; the improvement, if any, comes from the implementation.
- We do not quote competitors’ prices because we cannot verify their scope. Compare on the deliverables list above.