How much should SEO and AEO cost together in 2027?

On published 2026 price lists, buying SEO and AEO as two separate retainers adds up to roughly $3,000 to $8,500 a month for a small business and $6,500 to $35,000 or more for a mid-sized one. Agencies that sell both as one program publish prices from $750 to $12,000 a month. The gap is real, but part of it is thinner scope, so compare deliverables before you compare totals.

This post is for the owner or marketing lead who already pays for SEO and is being quoted for AEO (answer engine optimization, also sold as GEO or AI visibility) on top. We priced the two services side by side on our AEO vs SEO cost page. This one is about the combined bill for a 2027 budget and how bundling changes it. Every figure was read from its source on 14 November 2026.

What do two separate retainers add up to?

More than most budgets expect, because each vendor prices a full program. The cleanest way to see it is to take one publisher's ranges for both services. WebFX publishes SEO retainers by business size and, in a guide dated 15 October 2026, GEO agency retainers by business size. The third column below is our addition of the two, not a figure WebFX publishes.

Read the sum as a ceiling on asking prices, not as what buyers pay. WebFX also lists a "large business" SEO band of $5,000 to $20,000 that has no GEO counterpart, and its own key takeaways say most businesses spend about $2,500 a month on SEO (WebFX). The widest independent check on the SEO side is the Ahrefs poll of 439 SEO providers, which put the average retainer at $2,917 a month. That page was last updated in August 2024 and covers SEO only, so it says nothing about the pair.

What do agencies charge when one price covers both?

Published one-price plans start well below the stacked figure, with large differences in what the price buys. These five agencies publish a plan that names both search and AI visibility under one monthly fee. Each row is from the agency's own page.

Two details matter more than the headline numbers. First, the bundles are not the same service. An hours-based plan at $750 and a plan with 45 assets and a separate placement budget are both "SEO plus AEO" on the label. Second, the same agency can sell AI work two ways. WebFX's SEO plans include AI tracking and prompt targeting from $2,900, while its standalone GEO service starts at $3,000 a month. A buyer who needs both pays far less when the AI layer sits inside the SEO plan, and gets a lighter AI program for it.

One estimate sits well above these rate cards. GTM 80/20, which offers combined programs, puts a combined SEO and AEO engagement at $8,000 to $20,000 or more a month and SEO alone at $3,000 to $10,000. Treat that as the price of a full program on both sides, with off-site work included.

What does it cost to add AEO to an SEO retainer you already have?

Published guidance prices the add-on at a fraction of the SEO fee, not a second full retainer. Three models are in print:

• A share of budget. 310 Creative suggests dedicating 10% to 20% of the total organic or SEO budget to AEO, then adjusting.
• A percentage retainer. GTM 80/20 describes AEO priced as a separate retainer at 30% to 50% of the existing SEO retainer, and says fully integrated firms fold it into one program.
• A monitoring tier. The Digital Elevator lists a "monitor and maintain" tier at $1,000 to $2,500 a month for businesses with solid SEO fundamentals, and calls the added spend on a healthy SEO program incremental.

For example, suppose a firm pays $5,000 a month for SEO. The budget-share model adds $500 to $1,000, the percentage model adds $1,500 to $2,500, and a second standalone retainer at small-business rates would add $1,500 to $5,000. The same firm could be quoted $5,500 or $10,000 for "SEO and AEO" depending on which model the vendor uses. The figures are illustrative arithmetic on the published percentages, not quotes.

Why does bundling change the price?

Because part of the work is shared, and because some bundles simply contain less. Both effects lower the number, and only the first is a saving.

The shared part is well documented. Google Search Central states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special optimizations necessary, so indexing, technical health and clear service pages count for both. A single vendor bills that once. 310 Creative makes the same point from the seller's side: bundling under one vendor often reduces total cost because content strategy and technical work serve both channels.

Tooling is the second overlap. Conductor, which sells a combined platform, prices standalone AI visibility tools at $500 to $5,000 or more a month and says teams often end up paying for one on top of their existing SEO software. Two agencies can mean two tracking licenses for the same brand.

The part that does not overlap is where thin bundles cut. Off-site work on directories, reviews and third-party mentions, and repeated sampling across several engines, are AEO-specific costs. DerivateX bills its citation budget separately for that reason, at $1,000 to $3,000 a month on top of the retainer (DerivateX). A bundle that prices AI visibility at close to zero is usually a tracking report attached to an SEO plan.

When is keeping two vendors the right call?

When your SEO agency is performing and the AEO work it cannot do is narrow. Good SEO still does most of the work Google's AI features depend on, and replacing a team that knows your site has a real cost. Keep the current agency if all three of these hold:

• Organic leads and rankings are steady or growing, and the reports are clear.
• The agency will name which AEO tasks it already covers (schema, crawler access, core pages) so a second vendor does not bill them again.
• The second vendor's scope is limited to what is missing: multi-engine tracking, answer pages and off-site sources.

For multi-location brands there is a governance cost to weigh as well. Two vendors mean two question sets, two reports and two views of which locations are behind. If you split the work, give one team the scorecard. Our post on what changes between SEO and AEO covers which jobs carry over and which need a new owner.

Consolidating makes sense when the two proposals overlap heavily and neither vendor will give up the overlap, or when your SEO agency's AI offer is a dashboard with no work behind it.

How to check where you stand

Put your current SEO invoice and the AEO quote side by side and mark every line that appears on both: technical fixes, schema, service pages, tracking software. Then ask each vendor four numbers for the AI work: questions tracked, engines tested, pages produced per month and off-site sources worked per month. If the combined quote is lower than the two separate ones, confirm those four numbers did not shrink.

For reference, ElytraCo's AEO plans run from $2,500 to $10,000 or more a month, and enterprise programs are custom scoped (see AEO pricing). ElytraCo also offers traditional SEO alongside AI visibility, and businesses on an AEO program may qualify for preferred SEO pricing. We review what you pay your current SEO provider and show how both can run under one strategy, potentially for less. The comparison covers equivalent services and is subject to qualification. The starting point is the free AI visibility audit. Multi-location programs are scoped on our enterprise page.

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