AI SEO (ASEO) in the UK costs between £49 for a one-off audit and £5,000 per month for an enterprise retainer. Most small businesses pay £150–£500 for a first audit or £250–£500/month for an ongoing plan. But the range is wide for a reason, and the cheapest option isn't always the wrong one. This guide breaks down what's actually inside each tier and how to tell whether the price matches the work.
AI SEO (also called ASEO, or AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)) is the practice of getting your brand cited in AI-generated answers. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot. Those five platforms.
Traditional SEO measures keyword rankings in Google's blue links. AI SEO measures Share of Voice: how often your brand appears when AI platforms answer questions in your category. They're not the same thing. A brand can rank first on Google and be completely absent from every AI recommendation in its sector.
Pricing varies because scope varies. A quick automated scan of your homepage is a completely different product to a 22-module audit that queries five AI platforms with prompts mapped to your buyer journey. Both get marketed as "AI SEO." Knowing what each actually measures is the only way to compare prices honestly.
Pricing in the UK AI SEO market broadly follows four tiers based on business size and service scope:
Two businesses in the same sector can get very different quotes. Here's what's actually driving the difference.
Tracking one platform costs significantly less than tracking five. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot each cite content differently. What works on one doesn't automatically work on the others. Entry-level products typically cover one or two. A proper audit covers all five, plus Google AI Overviews as a separate surface.
An audit is only as good as its prompts. A 5-prompt run gives you a signal. A 40-prompt audit mapped across Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stage queries (with buyer persona variations) gives you something you can actually build a strategy from. Prompt depth is the main cost driver at the mid-market tier.
Knowing your own citation rate is useful. Knowing which competitor beats you on which prompt is what actually changes your content. Deeper competitive analysis costs more because it multiplies the query volume by the number of competitors you're tracking.
Many providers measure Share of Voice and stop there. The technical layer (schema markup, llms.txt deployment, AI crawler access across 15+ named bots, E-E-A-T assessment, Citation Probability Score® per page) is what produces sustainable improvement. It's also what most entry-level products skip entirely.
Some audits tell you what to fix. Others generate the content that fixes it: publish-ready, citability-scored blocks for each gap identified. That's a higher-cost deliverable, but it removes the gap between "insight" and "implementation."
Comparing monthly fees in isolation is the wrong frame. The number that matters is cost per new client attributed to AI-referred traffic.
Brands cited in AI answers get approximately 3x higher click-through rates than those appearing only in traditional search results. For a business where a single new client is worth £500, a £99/month plan that generates one extra AI-referred enquiry per month pays for itself in month one. The question isn't whether you can afford it. It's whether the provider can prove their work actually moves your citation rate.
| Dimension | Traditional SEO | AI SEO (ASEO) |
|---|---|---|
| Entry-level audit | £200–£500 | £49–£350 |
| Monthly retainer (small business) | £300–£800/mo | £250–£500/mo |
| Enterprise retainer | £2,000–£8,000/mo | £2,000–£5,000/mo |
| What it measures | Keyword rankings, organic traffic | AI citation frequency, Share of Voice |
| Platform coverage | Google (primarily) | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot |
| Time to first results | 3–6 months (typical) | 2–4 weeks (schema/technical); 60–90 days (full SOV lift) |
| Content requirements | Keyword-optimised pages | Direct-answer structured content, fact-dense, self-contained |
AI SEO retainers are broadly comparable in price to traditional SEO at each tier. The difference isn't cost. It's what's being measured. 65% of searches end with zero clicks. AI Overviews appear on 58% of Google queries. That's the share of discovery that's moved outside traditional search. AI SEO is built for that surface. Traditional SEO isn't.
At this price point, you're buying a snapshot. Not a strategy. A quick audit covers 3 platforms, 5–8 prompts, and delivers a short report with your top 3–5 gaps. Good for a proof-of-concept before committing to a plan. Not enough to build a content strategy from, and it won't show you funnel-stage coverage gaps.
This is where strategy starts. A proper audit at this tier covers 3–5 platforms, 15–40 prompts across funnel stages, a competitor comparison, entity review, and a technical readiness check (schema, llms.txt, crawler access). If your business has a real presence in its sector, this is where to begin.
Monthly plans at this tier start with setup (schema implementation, content restructuring, llms.txt deployment) then shift to monitoring and iteration. Citation rates change as platforms update their retrieval models and competitor content shifts. Automated daily monitoring tracks SOV movements across all five platforms and fires an email alert when citation share shifts by more than five points - so you know the moment something changes, not at the next monthly review.
At this tier: unlimited query tracking across all platforms, automated daily monitoring with SOV change alerts, dedicated strategy, full authority building (third-party citations, entity footprint expansion), and GA4 integration that ties citation improvements to actual traffic and conversion data.
Cited By AI® is a Gloucester-based ASEO consultancy. We start every engagement with a completely free AI Visibility Audit. No credit card, no sales call.
Paid plans run from a £49 quick audit for solo operators to £5,000/month enterprise retainers. Every tier delivers a proper report (not a dashboard) with human spot-checks on real devices alongside API analysis. It's the only ASEO audit that covers SOV by funnel stage, SOV by buyer persona, head-to-head competitive win rate, and hallucination detection in a single engagement.
The free audit covers AI citation across 3 platforms, your top competitor gaps, and your 5 highest-priority actions. Results in 48 hours. Enough to know whether a paid engagement makes sense.
AI citation snapshot across 3 platforms. Top competitor gaps. 5 priority actions. No cost, no commitment.
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