GEO pricing: what Generative Engine Optimization costs
Why GEO is almost never sold on its own, what the money actually buys, and how to tell a real engagement from a relabelled SEO retainer.
GEO pricing is close to unpublished. Search it and you get definitions, vendor pages with a contact form, and almost no numbers at all.
The honest version: GEO is rarely sold on its own, and where it is, it is priced like SEO — a monthly retainer somewhere between $1,000 and $10,000 CAD depending on how much work happens. The invoice looks familiar. What it buys does not.
This page sets out what changes, what it costs, and the specific things to demand from anyone selling you the category. Our own prices are published on the pricing page, and repeated here.
At a glance
GEO and SEO share one foundation
The crawling, rendering and structured-data work that lets a page rank is the same work that lets a retriever read and attribute it. Billing for both separately means billing twice for a single pass over the same site.
Measurement is the genuinely new cost
Rank tracking is cheap and fully automated. Answer tracking means running a panel of real prompts across several engines and reading what comes back, week over week. That labour is the line item GEO adds that SEO never had.
Corroboration is the expensive part
Models weight what other sources say about you far above what you say about yourself. Building listings, mentions and references is outreach, and outreach is the least automatable work in the discipline.
Per-keyword pricing does not map
There is no keyword. There is a question, asked a hundred ways, answered differently by four engines on the same afternoon. A quote priced per keyword is from someone who has not run the panel.
Why GEO is rarely priced on its own
Most agencies selling GEO fold it into an SEO retainer, and for once the industry default is the correct one.
Google's AI surfaces draw heavily on pages already ranking in classic search, which makes classical SEO the entry ticket rather than an alternative. A site that cannot be crawled, rendered and parsed will not be cited, no matter how much GEO strategy sits on top of it. Buying GEO without that foundation is buying a roof with no walls.
So the question to ask a vendor is not whether GEO is a separate line. It is what percentage of the retainer goes to work that would not have happened under a pure SEO engagement. If the honest answer is none, you are buying SEO with a new label, and you should pay SEO prices for it.
What you are actually paying for
Four things, and only one of them is familiar.
The prompt panel is the baseline: forty to eighty questions your buyers genuinely put to an assistant, run across the major engines, with who gets named recorded verbatim. Entity architecture is next — one name, one address, one set of facts, asserted identically on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory that carries you, because conflicting records are the most common reason a model hedges rather than recommends. Passage-level content work restructures pages so a single extract answers a single question without needing the paragraph above it. And corroboration builds the third-party mentions that make your claims checkable.
Only the content work resembles SEO. The other three are new, and they are where a GEO retainer earns its difference.
What GEO costs in Canada
Where GEO is sold as a standalone Canadian engagement, it prices like a mid-market SEO retainer: roughly $2,000 to $10,000 a month, with national and enterprise scopes above that. Bundled into an existing SEO retainer, it typically adds nothing to the invoice and changes the mix instead.
Standalone GEO audits are quoted like technical audits, commonly $1,500 to $5,000, and are worth buying before any retainer. Ours comes in two forms: a free pre-engagement diagnostic you keep either way, and a $2,000 CAD end-to-end audit in which GEO sits alongside organic, paid, social and analytics rather than being priced as its own engagement.
The category is new enough that pricing is unstable, and a low number is not automatically a bad deal. What makes it a bad deal is a low number attached to no measurement, because without a prompt panel neither of you can tell whether anything happened.
Why nobody can honestly quote GEO per keyword
Keyword pricing survives in SEO because a keyword is a stable object. Someone types the same string, a results page returns, and a position exists to be tracked.
None of that holds here. A buyer asks an assistant a question in their own words, the engine expands it into several queries you never see, and the answer is synthesised from sources that shift between sessions. Ask the same question twice in one afternoon and the named brands can differ. There is no position, and often no link.
Which is why GEO is quoted on scope and measured on share of voice across a fixed prompt panel. Anyone offering you a per-keyword GEO rate is either repackaging rank tracking or has not run a panel, and both are worth finding out before you sign.
What to demand at any price
A written prompt panel before work starts, with the current answers recorded. Without a baseline there is no way to prove a change later, and a vendor who skips it has quietly removed the scoreboard.
Per-engine reporting rather than a blended score. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews behave differently, and an average across them hides which one you are losing.
Accuracy tracking alongside visibility. Being named is only half of it; being described correctly is the other half, and a model confidently misstating what you do is a worse outcome than silence. Ask to see how the vendor records what the answer actually said about you, not just whether your name appeared in it.
LumiRank's two published tiers, in Canadian dollars per month. The split that matters is not price — it is whether anything gets built, or only watched.
- LumiRank monthly, CAD
- $299–$1,999LumiRank monthly, CADBoth tiers published in full
- Prompts in a baseline panel
- 40–80Prompts in a baseline panelWritten from how your buyers actually ask
- Answer engines sampled
- 4Answer engines sampledChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews
| Deliverable | Reporting $299 | Execution $1,999 |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt panel baseline | Yes | Yes |
| Weekly answer tracking | Yes | Yes |
| AI crawler access reporting | Yes | Yes |
| Technical and rendering fixes | No | Yes |
| Entity and schema architecture | No | Yes |
| Passage-level content work | No | Yes |
| Third-party corroboration | No | Yes |
| Monthly strategy call | No | Yes |
These are LumiRank's published prices, not a market average. The $299 tier includes no execution work and the tier says so on its face rather than in a footnote. Enterprise programs with a dedicated strategist are quoted individually.
GEO pricing: what Generative Engine Optimization costs: common questions
How much does GEO cost?
Where it is sold standalone in Canada, roughly $2,000 to $10,000 CAD a month, priced like a mid-market SEO retainer. More commonly it is folded into an existing SEO retainer and adds nothing to the invoice, changing the mix of work instead. LumiRank publishes $299 a month for reporting and $1,999 a month for SEO and GEO execution together.
Is GEO more expensive than SEO?
Not usually, because most of the underlying work is shared. The one genuinely new cost is measurement: answer tracking means running real prompts across several engines and reading the results, where rank tracking is automated and nearly free. Expect that to shift the mix inside a retainer rather than raise the total.
Can I buy GEO without SEO?
You can, but it rarely works. Google's AI surfaces lean heavily on pages already ranking in classic search, and a site that cannot be crawled or rendered will not be cited regardless of strategy. If your technical foundation is weak, that work has to happen first whatever either service is called.
What does a GEO audit cost?
Standalone GEO audits are commonly quoted between $1,500 and $5,000. LumiRank's free pre-engagement version includes a prompt panel with current answers recorded engine by engine, plus an entity check covering schema, Google Business Profile and directory records, and you keep both whether or not you continue. If you want the full picture rather than a status, the $2,000 CAD end-to-end audit covers GEO alongside every other channel and ends in a plan.
How long does GEO take to work?
Entity and technical corrections can change how a model describes you within weeks, because they fix facts the model is reading wrong today. Earning a citation where a competitor currently holds one takes longer, generally three to six months, and depends on corroboration you do not directly control.
How do I know I got what I paid for?
The prompt panel is the receipt. You should be able to compare the baseline answers recorded before work started against this week's, engine by engine, and see both whether your name appears more often and whether what the model says about you is more accurate. If a vendor cannot produce that comparison, there is nothing to audit.
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