AI SEO is the fastest growing line item in Australian digital marketing. Searches for “ai seo services” are up more than 400% year on year, and advertisers are paying over $75 a click for the term.
Almost nobody will tell you what it costs.
On 26 August 2026 we crawled 42 Australian agencies that appear when you search for AI SEO or AEO, and looked for a published price on any of their pricing, packages or AI SEO pages.
Only 8 of the 42 published a price at all. That is 19%.
Here is what those eight actually charge, what the work involves, and how to tell a real scope from an SEO retainer with a new cover sheet.
What Australian agencies publish
| Monthly retainer | How often we saw it |
|---|---|
| Under $1,000 | Entry packages from around $750 |
| $1,000 to $2,000 | The most common published band |
| $2,000 to $3,000 | Common, often labelled the standard tier |
| $3,000 to $7,000 | Less common, up to about $6,800 |
| Project and enterprise figures | Quoted from roughly $10,000 to $50,000+ |
The realistic middle of the market for an ongoing AI SEO or AEO retainer in Australia is $1,000 to $3,000 a month. Entry offers start near $750. Anything above about $7,000 a month was quoted as a project or enterprise engagement rather than a standard retainer.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. This is what agencies publish, not what they invoice, and published prices skew low because they are marketing. And the eight who publish are unlikely to be a fair sample of all 42.
Why so few publish a price
Partly it is scope. AI visibility work genuinely varies between a five-page trade site and a national franchise.
But mostly it is that the category is young and nobody wants to anchor low. We noticed the same agencies are also poor at publishing other checkable facts. Across all 42, the average homepage carried 1.37 of six quotable facts, worse than the 1.94 average across 500 ordinary Australian businesses we measured earlier.
That has a cost. When an AI is asked what AI SEO costs in Australia, it has almost nothing to quote, so it either avoids the question or reaches for overseas figures.
What you should actually be getting
Most of the money should go on things that are checkable. Based on what we see move AI visibility, a real scope covers:
| Work | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Crawler access audit | About one Australian site in eight returns an error to AI crawlers while serving browsers normally. Nothing else works until this does. |
| Quotable facts on key pages | AI recommends by quoting a specific claim. 22% of Australian homepages publish none. |
| Structured data that names your business type | 81% of sites have schema, but only 37% declare what kind of business they are. |
| Third-party presence | Directories, registers and review platforms are 6% to 12% of AI citations, and far more in some categories. |
| Multi-engine measurement | ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity cite different sources. One report covering one engine is not measurement. |
| Repeat-run reporting | Identical searches share only about a quarter of their sources. A single screenshot proves nothing. |
Three things that should make you walk
A guarantee. Nobody can guarantee an AI mention. We ran identical searches seconds apart and they shared only 24% of their sources, with no two answers the same. Anyone promising a fixed position is selling something that does not exist. We showed the numbers in this study.
Before-and-after screenshots. The natural variation between two identical searches is larger than most reported improvements. Ask for a rate across repeated runs instead.
Three separate retainers for SEO, AEO and GEO. AEO and GEO are the same work under two names, and most of it overlaps with SEO. We broke down what genuinely differs in GEO vs AEO vs SEO.
What we would spend it on
If your budget is at the lower end, the order matters more than the amount. Cheapest and most certain first:
- Fix crawler access. Usually a settings change. Often free.
- Write the facts onto your main pages. Usually an afternoon of copy.
- Fix your business schema. Usually a plugin setting.
- Sort your listings and registers in whichever platforms your category’s AI answers actually cite.
- Then start measuring monthly, across engines, as a rate.
The first three are close to free and cover most of what we see holding businesses back. Any agency that starts with a content calendar instead has the order wrong.
We publish our own approach on the AI SEO page, and we prefer to start with a small scoped audit rather than a twelve-month commitment, so you can see the measurement before you buy the retainer.
Common questions
How much do AI SEO services cost in Australia?
Published prices from the 8 of 42 agencies that show them run from about $750 to roughly $6,800 a month, with most between $1,000 and $3,000. Project and enterprise work was quoted from around $10,000 upwards.
Why do most agencies hide their pricing?
Scope varies genuinely, and the category is new enough that few want to anchor low. Only 19% of the Australian agencies we checked publish any price.
Is AI SEO worth paying for?
It depends how your customers search. If they are asking ChatGPT or using Google AI Mode, then yes, because only 21% to 40% of the sites those engines cite are on Google’s first page. If your customers are still clicking blue links, ordinary SEO will do more for the same money.
Can I do any of it myself?
Yes, and you should do the cheap parts first. Checking crawler access, writing specific facts onto your pages and fixing your business schema cost little and address the most common gaps we find.
How long before it works?
Give it at least three months of monthly measurement before judging, because AI answers vary so much run to run that anything shorter is noise rather than a trend.
What is a fair reporting standard?
A set of real customer questions, each run several times, across more than one engine, reported as how often you were named rather than where you appeared. Competitor rates on the same day make it more useful again.
Should I pay separately for AEO and GEO?
No. They describe the same work. If a proposal prices them as two services, ask what is different between them.
Method: 42 Australian agencies appearing in searches for AI SEO and AEO services were crawled on 26 August 2026 for published prices across pricing, packages, plans, cost and AI SEO pages. Eight published a figure. Prices are as displayed on those pages and are not quotes. Supporting statistics come from our crawls of 589 Australian websites and 500 homepages, and from live tests across Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Always confirm current pricing directly with any agency.
