What does AI search optimisation cost, and what drives the price?

Unlike ads, there is no platform fee. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews do not sell placement in their answers, so the whole cost is the time of the people doing the work. That work falls into a few parts: auditing what assistants say about you now; rewriting key pages so they answer buyer questions directly; cleaning up inconsistent facts across your website, Google Business Profile, social pages and directories; adding structured data; improving your presence on the third-party sources relevant to your trade; and checking the same prompts every month.

Several factors move the price. A ten-page site for a single clinic in F-8 is a much smaller rewrite than a software house with fifty service pages. A business that has moved premises twice and changed its number has more scattered facts to correct. Some trades have obvious directories to join; others need more effort to earn mentions on credible sites. Tracking twenty prompts across four assistants each month takes longer than tracking five. And if the site has technical problems that stop Google indexing it, those must be fixed first, because AI search depends on them.

When comparing quotes, ask what will be produced, not what will be achieved: which pages rewritten, which profiles corrected, which prompts tracked, and what the monthly report contains. Be wary of a low price paired with a promise to 'get you into ChatGPT', which usually means mass-produced articles or fake reviews. AI search groundwork is included in our Business bundle for the site we build and host, whose price is shown on this page; reworking a large existing site is quoted after the free WhatsApp audit, so you know the scope before committing.