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What AI Search Optimisation Actually Costs

Pricing in this category is opaque enough that buyers cannot calibrate, which suits sellers. So here are ranges, what moves them, and the patterns worth refusing. Our own published rates...

📅 Cập nhật 18/09/2026 5 phút đọc

Pricing in this category is opaque enough that buyers cannot calibrate, which suits sellers. So here are ranges, what moves them, and the patterns worth refusing. Our own published rates are on the pricing page; this article is about the market, including engagements we would not take.

The three shapes an engagement takes

Shape Typical range Duration What you should get
One-off audit $800 – $3,000 2–4 weeks Technical findings, an AI visibility baseline with the method stated, a competitor board, and a prioritised action list you could hand to any team
Ongoing retainer $2,000 – $8,000 / month 6–12 months Execution against the plan, content production, third-party work, and re-measurement on a frozen prompt set
Enterprise programme $6,000 – $20,000+ / month 12 months+ Multi-market or multi-language scope, engineering coordination, custom measurement, named senior time

Vietnamese-market pricing sits below these ranges, which reflects local salary structure rather than a different scope of work. If you are buying delivery from Vietnam at Western agency rates, you are paying for the sales office.

What actually moves the number

  • Languages and markets. Each additional language is close to a full additional prompt set, content stream and measurement track. It roughly scales cost; it does not marginally increase it.
  • Engine coverage. Measuring one engine via an API is cheap. Measuring surfaces that require browser-based collection costs materially more to build and to run.
  • Technical debt. A site that renders client-side, or that has years of duplicate pages, can absorb an entire quarter before any content work begins.
  • Who produces content. Agency-produced expert content in a technical field is the single largest line item in most retainers. Clients who can supply subject-matter drafts cut it substantially.
  • Third-party work. Earning coverage is slow, human and expensive, and it is also the lever with the clearest observed effect on mention rate. This is the part clients most often cut and most often should not.

Pricing patterns worth refusing

  1. Guaranteed mentions or placements. Nobody controls model output. A guarantee here is either meaningless or is being met by something you would not want to be associated with.
  2. Per-mention pricing. It creates an incentive to game the measurement, and whoever is being paid per mention should not also be defining what counts as one.
  3. A score with no method behind it. If you cannot get the prompt set, the engine list, the dates and the raw answers, you are buying a number rather than a measurement.
  4. Twelve-month lock-in with no exit. Six months is a fair minimum for slow-moving work. Twelve with no break clause protects the agency, not you.
  5. Quoted before anyone looked at your site. A price produced without a crawl is a price for a generic engagement.

How to work out your own budget

Start from value rather than from market rates. Take the annual value of one closed customer, and your current close rate from organic enquiries. If a customer is worth $20,000 and you close one in five qualified enquiries, then three additional enquiries a month justifies a $4,000 retainer several times over — and that arithmetic, not a price list, should set your ceiling.

Then apply the honest caveat: this work compounds and it is slow. Third-party coverage accumulates over quarters, and models reflect it later still. A six-month engagement is the minimum at which the question “did this work?” can even be asked, and anyone promising a faster answer is describing a different, less durable tactic.

What a fair proposal contains

Scope in writing, including which engines and languages are in and out. The measurement method, in enough detail that another provider could reproduce it. A named team with named senior involvement. A reporting cadence. A stated minimum term and what happens at the end of it. And a clear statement of what is not included — the absence of that section is usually where disputes start.

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Frequently asked questions

Why is Vietnamese-market pricing so much lower?

Salary structure, almost entirely. The method, the tooling and the measurement are the same; the delivery cost base is not.

Is a cheap audit worth it?

Only if it includes the raw measurement data. An audit that hands you a score and a slide deck, with no prompt set and no raw answers, is not auditable and therefore not worth much.

Can I just do this in-house?

The measurement, yes — the method is published and the scoring is simple. The slow part is third-party coverage, which is a relationships-and-time problem rather than a tooling problem.

What is the minimum sensible commitment?

Six months. Below that you will have spent the money before the first re-measurement can tell you anything.

Want your own numbers instead of ours?

Send us your domain. We run the baseline on your category prompts and send back the raw answers, not just a score.

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