What you are actually paying for
AI SEO, also called AISEO, and overlapping with AEO and GEO, is not a single service. The monthly fee covers a stack of work that mostly happens where you cannot see it:
- Technical foundation, crawler access, schema markup, site speed, sitemap and index health.
- AI discovery layer, llms.txt, an AI-crawler allowlist, IndexNow, structured data that answer engines can actually parse.
- Google presence, Business Profile, Search Console, Analytics, reviews, map pack work.
- Content, answer-shaped pages built to be quoted rather than ranked.
- Reporting, what changed, what it did, what is next.
An agency charging $99 a month is not doing all of that. They are running a tool and emailing you its output.
What the tiers actually cost
DP1 DESIGN prices in five tiers. Every agency structures this differently, but the shape is broadly consistent across the industry:
- Around $375/month, one location, roughly five target keywords. Foundation, Google presence, AI crawler access, llms.txt, IndexNow, monthly reporting. The genuine entry point.
- Around $575/month, two to three locations, ~10 keywords. Adds Bing and IndexNow depth, FAQ and HowTo schema, and one authoritative answer page per month.
- Around $975/month, four to seven locations, ~20 keywords. Adds AI-first business listings, advanced schema, two answer pages monthly, content refresh cycles, quarterly strategy calls.
- Around $1,575/month, seven to ten locations, ~30 keywords. Adds entity and Knowledge Graph work, LLM SEO, AI citation tracking, four answer pages monthly.
- $3,000+/month, eleven or more locations, or a national play. Digital PR, multi-tier links, press distribution, custom AI assistant.
The primary driver is location count. Each additional location multiplies the Business Profile work, the review campaigns, the location pages and the local citations.
What actually moves the price
Locations, first and foremost. One storefront versus eleven is not a small difference, it is eleven times the profile management, eleven sets of location content, eleven review pipelines.
Competitive density. Ranking a plumber in a small parish is not the same job as ranking a personal injury attorney in New Orleans, where every competitor has been spending for a decade.
Content volume. Answer pages are the expensive line item because they are genuinely written, not generated. A real answer page takes hours.
Starting condition. A site with clean technical foundations starts producing sooner than one that needs migration cleanup, redirect mapping and schema rebuilt from scratch.
What cheap AI SEO looks like
Under roughly $300 a month, the economics stop working. At that price an agency cannot afford human hours, so you get some combination of:
- Automated audit PDFs generated by a tool you could run yourself.
- AI-generated blog posts at volume, the exact pattern Google’s Helpful Content system demotes and answer engines ignore.
- Directory submissions to sites nobody reads and no AI model queries.
- Rank reports for keywords nobody searches, chosen because they are easy to win.
The tell is the deliverable. If what arrives each month is a report rather than a change to your website, you are paying for monitoring, not optimization.
Is it worth it for a local business?
That depends on one thing: whether your customers ask AI assistants for recommendations in your category. For restaurants, attorneys, contractors, medical practices and home services, they increasingly do, and unlike a search results page, an AI answer usually names two or three businesses, not ten.
Being one of the named few is worth considerably more than position four on Google. Being unnamed means being invisible, because there is no page two in a conversation.
AI SEO pricing, frequently asked questions
Is AI SEO more expensive than traditional SEO?
Not meaningfully. Most of the technical foundation overlaps, schema, site speed, content quality and crawler access serve both. The additional AI-specific work (llms.txt, AI-crawler allowlists, IndexNow, entity building) is incremental rather than a separate program, which is why 2026 pricing looks similar to 2025 SEO pricing.
Do I need to pay monthly, or can it be a one-time project?
The technical foundation is genuinely one-time, schema, crawler access, site structure. Visibility is not. Competitors keep publishing, AI models retrain, and answer engines change how they select sources. A one-time setup decays; how fast depends on how competitive your category is.
What should I expect in the first month?
Technical work, mostly invisible from the outside: crawler access, schema, site speed, Business Profile, analytics. Visible ranking movement typically starts in months two to three. Any agency promising first-month rankings is either lucky or lying.