Ask five Australian agencies what GEO costs and you'll get five confident numbers and very little explanation. That's partly because the discipline is young, and partly because opacity is profitable: when nobody publishes pricing, every quote can be whatever the salesperson thinks you'll wear.
We think that's a bad deal for buyers, so this guide does the uncomfortable thing: it explains what actually drives cost, what the market broadly charges, and what we charge, in the same article.
One framing note before the numbers: price only means something relative to what's included. A $1,000 retainer that's really automated report generation is expensive; a $3,000 retainer doing genuine content, entity and authority work with honest measurement can be cheap.
Everything below is about helping you tell those apart.
What actually drives the price
- Scope of queries and locations: visibility across one suburb and one service is a small measurement and content problem; ten suburbs and five services multiply everything.
- Competitive intensity: being cited for "conveyancer Ballarat" and "buyer's agent Sydney eastern suburbs" are different fights, because authority work scales with how crowded the answer is.
- Content production: decision-useful pages, comparison content and FAQ material take real hours from people who understand your industry. This is usually the biggest single cost line.
- Authority and entity work: reconciling directories and profiles, earning reviews and third-party mentions. Slow, manual, and the part cheap retainers quietly skip.
- Measurement rigour: multi-engine tracking with baselines and holdouts costs more than a monthly screenshot, and is worth more than everything else on this list combined.
What the Australian market broadly charges
Framed generally (because packages vary too much for precision), the market looks like this. One-off audits and AI-readiness projects tend to run from several hundred dollars for a light automated scan to a few thousand for a genuine manual audit with a prioritised plan.
Ongoing programmes for small and mid-sized businesses mostly land in the low thousands per month, with the floor around the point where real human hours become viable and the ceiling set by scope and competition. Enterprise and multi-location work is priced like any bespoke consulting: on scope.
Below roughly a thousand dollars a month for ongoing work, be sceptical: at Australian labour rates that buys very few skilled hours, so something in the deliverables list is probably automated or absent.
What we charge
Our from-prices are published, because we think you should be able to disqualify us on price without booking a call. A Starter engagement (foundations and AI-readiness work as a one-off project) is from $2,500.
Local Hero, our ongoing programme for businesses competing in a local market, is from $1,500 a month. Suburb Dominator, the flagship programme for businesses that want to own their category across an area, is from $2,800 a month, with industry add-on boosts from $500 a month.
Every quote is tailored to scope, and the full breakdown of what each tier includes lives on our pricing page.
Why a 90-day pilot beats a 12-month lock-in
The standard industry argument for long contracts is that "this work takes time". It's half true (authority compounds over months), but notice what the contract structure does: it removes the vendor's obligation to show evidence early.
A 90-day pilot with a defined baseline flips the incentive. The vendor must demonstrate movement (visibility trends, branded-search lift, early enquiries) inside a window short enough that you can walk away cheaply.
Work that's genuinely compounding will show its direction of travel in 90 days even if the full value takes longer; work that shows nothing in 90 days rarely blooms at month eleven.
0–16.3%
sales lift measured in randomised GenAI retail experiments: a range, not a promise, which is why pilots and measurement matter
That range is worth staring at. In controlled retail experiments, generative AI exposure moved sales anywhere from not at all to substantially, which means the honest answer to "what return will I get?" is "it depends, so let's measure yours".
Any pricing pitch built on the top of that range and silent about the bottom is telling you something about the vendor.
Questions to ask about inclusions
- How many human hours does this retainer actually buy, and from whom?
- Which engines are tracked, how many queries, at what cadence, and do I see the raw log?
- How much content is produced monthly, and who with industry knowledge reviews it?
- Is entity and directory work included, or an add-on I'll discover later?
- What's the exit process: notice period, and do I keep all content, data and access?
If a vendor answers those five plainly, you can compare quotes on substance instead of vibes. For what the work itself involves, our services page breaks down the programme stage by stage.
Mostly they're the same engagement now: the foundations overlap almost entirely, and a good programme prices them together. Treat any provider quoting GEO as a separate premium line item on top of SEO with suspicion: you may be paying twice for one set of work.
Yes, and for most businesses it's the right first dollar: a proper audit tells you whether your gaps are cheap fixes you can do yourself or structural problems worth a programme. We'd rather sell you a $2,500 audit you act on than a retainer you didn't need.
Because scope genuinely varies: suburbs, services, competition and content volume change the hours involved. The from-price tells you honestly where each tier starts; the tailored quote tells you what your specific scope costs. What we won't do is hide the floor.
A recorded multi-engine baseline in the first weeks, foundation fixes shipped, initial content and entity work live, and a day-90 review comparing visibility and enquiry signals against the baseline, with a clear recommendation, including "stop" if the evidence says so.