TL;DR: An SEO agency sells judgement, at $2,500 to $5,000 a month for 2 to 4 pages. A $99 AI tool sells drafts and stops. An AI visibility team sells the loop: measure how AI answers your buyers, publish what is missing, fix what blocks it, measure again.
Pick by what is missing from your marketing, not by price. If you cannot decide what to do, pay for people. If you know what to do and cannot produce enough of it, pay for a system. This article compares the three categories plainly, including where an agency or a cheap tool is the better buy.
Key takeaways
- An AEO or SEO agency typically charges $2,500 to $5,000 a month for 2 to 4 pages, often with a 3 to 6 month minimum term.
- A low cost AI content tool, around $99 a month, writes articles. It does no tracking, no technical fixes and no measurement.
- An AI visibility team sits between them. The Visiby Growth Engine starts at $1,000 a month, no contract, covering tracking, writing, publishing, technical fixes and attribution.
- Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude who to hire. If a competitor is named and you are not, you never learn the question was asked.
- Compare on cost per published page and cost per buyer question monitored. Those two numbers make very different quotes comparable.
How much should SEO cost a month?
Monthly spend for a small or mid sized business falls into three bands. For a platform-by-platform view, see what AI visibility tools actually cost. Low cost AI content tools sit around $99 a month. Done for you services that include tracking, content and technical work run around $1,000 a month. Traditional AEO and SEO agencies typically charge $2,500 to $5,000 a month, often with a 3 to 6 month minimum term before anything is published.
Price alone tells you little. What matters is the unit you are buying. At $99 you are buying words. At $2,500 to $5,000 you are buying a person's time, usually a few hours a week spread across strategy, a couple of pages and reporting. At $1,000 with the Visiby Growth Engine you are buying a loop that runs continuously and produces 20 to 25 buyer focused pages a month on your own site, with the technical fixes and tracking around them.
The questions that set the real price
Write down four numbers before you compare quotes: pages published each month, buyer questions monitored across AI engines, who implements technical fixes once they are found, and how long you are tied in. Two quotes that look alike often differ enormously on those four lines.
What does an SEO agency actually do?
A good SEO agency does four things: research what your buyers search for, plan which pages should exist, produce a small number of those pages, and advise on technical and off site work such as digital PR and link building. Most of the value is human judgement applied to your market. Most of the cost is senior time.
The work arrives as a monthly retainer with a fixed scope. A typical package covers a keyword and competitor review, 2 to 4 new or rewritten pages, a technical audit with recommendations, some outreach, and a monthly report. Publishing to your CMS, implementing what the audit found, and measuring how AI assistants answer your buyers often sit outside it. Ask directly.
Where the money goes
Agency pricing reflects headcount. A strategist, a writer, a link builder and an account manager all touch your account. That is why output stays small even at $5,000 a month: the constraint is hours, not ideas. It is also why agencies are strong at the things only people do well, such as positioning and relationships with publications.
Is it worth hiring an SEO agency?
Yes, in specific situations. If you have a large site, a complicated product, a regulated market, or you need real digital PR, an agency earns its fee. Bespoke strategy, brand positioning and human negotiation are not things software does well, and you should pay people for them.
My honest view after watching a lot of these budgets: most owners of small and mid sized sites are not short of strategy. They are short of production and measurement. A retainer that buys four pages a month rarely fixes that.
When an agency is the right choice
- Your site has thousands of pages and needs architecture work, migrations or multiple languages.
- You want coverage in trade publications and analyst commentary, which takes human relationships.
- Your market is regulated and every claim needs legal review with a named accountable person.
- You already have in house writers and need direction rather than production.
When it is probably not
- You need volume: dozens of buyer questions answered properly, not four.
- You want technical fixes implemented, not documented.
- You cannot commit to 3 to 6 months before anything goes live.
Which AI tools are best for SEO?
Judge AI tools by category rather than brand. Three categories cover most of the market: content generators that write drafts, tracking dashboards that show how AI engines answer questions about your market, and technical, audit and keyword tools that crawl your site and supply raw numbers. Our roundup of the best AI visibility tools covers the tracking category in depth. Each solves one part of the problem. None closes a gap on its own.
Content generators
Around $99 a month. They produce article drafts quickly, in volume, from topics you choose. Output quality depends entirely on your brief and your editing. They do not tell you which topic matters, and they do not publish, fix or measure anything.
Tracking and monitoring dashboards
These run buyer questions through AI assistants and report who gets recommended. Genuinely useful, and far better than guessing. The limit is the one a report has always had. Seeing the gap is not closing it.
Technical, audit and keyword data tools
Crawlers flag blocked bots, missing structured data, slow pages and indexing problems. Keyword and SERP tools give you volumes, rankings and competitor positions. All of it is accurate, cheap and raw. Someone still has to make the changes, and that is usually where the list dies.
What no tool category does on its own
Tools hand you a task list. The work stays yours: choosing what matters, briefing it, writing it, reviewing it, publishing it, fixing the technical blockers, then checking next month whether the AI answer changed. If you have the hours, tools are excellent value. If you do not, you are paying for a to do list.
What an AI visibility team gives you instead
An AI visibility team is the middle option. Software does the repetitive work at agency level scope, and you approve the output. The Visiby Growth Engine starts at $1,000 a month, with no contract, and everything created stays yours. Six agents cover tracking, data, strategy, content, technical fixes and attribution.
The tracking agent watches how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude answer your buyers, and logs every question where a competitor is recommended instead of you. The data agent works from your own Search Console and Analytics numbers. The strategy agent picks what to do first. The content agent writes and publishes 20 to 25 buyer focused pages a month to your site, and refreshes pages that slip. The technical agent fixes what stops AI reading your site. The attribution agent connects enquiries back to the page and the AI answer that drove them.
What you do
Approve content. That is the whole job. You connect Search Console and Analytics once in week one, give access to publish, then review pages as they arrive. There is a fuller breakdown in what an AI visibility team does each week.
Who this is not for
It does not replace a PR agency, a brand strategist, or a developer rebuilding your site. If your bottleneck is a rebuild, a funding round narrative, or press relationships, hire for those jobs instead. It also suits businesses that can review content promptly. If nobody will approve pages for three weeks, the loop stalls and you will not get your money's worth.
How the three options compare
[Table scrolls horizontally on mobile.]
| AI content tool (about $99 a month) | AEO or SEO agency | AI visibility team (Visiby Growth Engine) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical monthly cost | $99 | $2,500 to $5,000 | From $1,000 |
| Pages published to your site each month | Drafts only, you publish | 2 to 4 | 20 to 25 |
| Tracks how five AI engines answer your buyers | No | Sometimes, manually | Yes, continuously |
| Uses your Search Console and Analytics data | No | Yes | Yes |
| Decides what to write from measured gaps | No, you choose topics | Yes | Yes |
| Technical and AI crawler fixes | No | Often quoted extra | Included |
| Ties enquiries back to pages and AI answers | No | Rarely | Yes |
| Digital PR and human relationship building | No | Yes | No |
| Commitment | Monthly | Often 3 to 6 month minimum | None |
| Your time each week | High | Low | Low |
How to choose in five steps
- Run a free AI visibility check so you start from evidence rather than an opinion about how you are doing.
- Write down what is missing: strategy, production volume, technical implementation, or measurement. Most businesses are missing two of the four.
- Count the hours you can give it. A tool that needs six hours a week from you is not cheap if you have two.
- Price the unit, not the retainer. Cost per published page and cost per buyer question monitored make quotes comparable.
- Ask what happens when nothing improves: who changes course, on what evidence, and how quickly you can leave. Our buyer’s playbook for choosing an AI visibility company lists the questions to ask.
Can I do SEO myself?
Yes, and for a small local business it is often the right call in the first year. The basics are learnable: clear service pages, honest answers to the questions buyers ask, a fast site, correct structured data, an accurate Google Business Profile, and a habit of publishing something useful every week.
Most owners stop for one reason. The work never finishes, and it competes with running the business. Protect a fixed block of time each week and do it yourself. If you cannot protect it, the money is better spent on someone who will.
A realistic weekly minimum
About 4 to 6 hours. One hour reviewing Search Console, one hour checking how AI assistants answer two or three of your buyer questions, and the rest writing or improving one page. Our guide on how to get your business recommended by AI covers what to check.
Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
Yes, though the reason has changed. AI assistants build answers from pages they can find, read and trust, so the pages that rank well are largely the pages AI quotes. Search work and AI visibility work share one foundation, which is why running them as two budgets wastes money.
What has changed is the outcome you measure. A ranking is no longer the finish line, because a buyer can get their answer without clicking anything. The useful measures now: whether you are named in the answer, which sources the assistant cited, and whether enquiries followed. The differences between the disciplines are set out in AEO vs SEO vs GEO.
Questions people ask
Is a $99 AI content tool ever enough?
For a solo blogger or a founder who already knows what to write and wants faster drafts, yes. It becomes poor value the moment you need someone to decide what matters, publish it, fix the technical blockers, and tell you whether anything changed.
What is a fair price for 20 to 25 pages a month?
Compare on cost per published page. At agency rates of $2,500 to $5,000 for 2 to 4 pages, a page costs several hundred dollars or more. The Growth Engine covers 20 to 25 published pages, plus tracking, technical fixes and attribution, inside one monthly fee that starts at $1,000.
Does Google penalise AI written content?
Google's published guidance is about content quality, not about how a page was produced. Thin, generic pages perform badly whoever writes them. Every Growth Engine page is written to answer a specific buyer question better than the page currently winning it, reviewed separately, and approved by you before it goes live.
Can I use an agency and an AI visibility team together?
Yes, and it is a sensible split. Keep the agency for work that needs people, such as digital PR, brand positioning and complex site architecture. Use the team for continuous production, tracking and technical fixes.
How long before I see anything?
Technical fixes land in the first week. New pages start getting indexed within days of publishing. Meaningful growth in organic traffic and AI recommendations generally compounds over 2 to 3 months. Nobody can honestly promise specific rankings or lead numbers, and be careful with anyone who does.
What happens if I cancel?
There is no contract and you can cancel anytime. Everything created stays yours, published on your own domain, with nothing removed and no licence fee to keep it.
How do I read the results?
The monthly report shows what was published, what was fixed, how AI answers changed, and which enquiries came from which page. Our guide on how to read an AI visibility report walks through each section.
Decide with your own numbers
The right answer depends on your site, your market and the hours you have. Fifteen minutes is usually enough to work out which of the three categories fits, including the cases where it is not us.
Book 15 minutes and we will walk through what your free check found and what a first month would cover for your site.
Or run the free AI visibility check first and see where AI is missing you.
Last updated: 18 September 2026.
Arun Pandit
Arun Pandit is the founder of Visiby, an AI-visibility tracker by FNA Technology that measures how often ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite a brand. He writes about generative engine optimization from the data Visiby collects across the brands it tracks. Run the free AI visibility check →