What a GEO retainer buys for B2B SaaS (and what it should cost)

What's inside a GEO retainer

The site column is mostly setup work. You do it once, then monitor for drift. The off-site column is a treadmill. You pay monthly because the work never stops.

What it costs, and what moves the price

A 2026 pricing study of more than 1,100 agency quotes, published by a firm that sells GEO itself, found a median GEO/AEO engagement of about $6,850 a month across industries. For B2B SaaS specifically, the median is about $8,640 a month, with a typical range of $4,500 to $20,000. About two-thirds of agencies sell GEO as a monthly retainer, and fewer than a quarter publish prices. Minimum terms commonly run 3 to 12 months.

Several variables push the monthly figure higher or lower:

• Prompts tracked. Broader prompt sets mean more reporting work. More reporting costs more.
• Content pieces per month. Volume writing is significantly more expensive than audit and setup work.
• Off-site placements. PR-style outreach requires relationships, patience, and time. Cheaper versions rarely deliver.
• SEO bundled in. Some retainers fold traditional SEO into the same invoice. That adds scope and raises the total.
• Contract length. Longer minimums sometimes lower the monthly rate. Sometimes they just extend the commitment.

Before you sign anything, ask which column you're actually buying. Most of the site work is a defined project. Paying retainer rates for light monitoring after that is a less efficient use of budget than a care plan designed for that phase.

The half that's website work

Your site may be invisible to AI assistants right now. The content isn't weak. The pages aren't structured for machines to parse and quote cleanly.

The fix is a cluster of concrete tasks. Rewriting pages to lead with the answer. Adding comparison and FAQ pages that match the phrasing real buyers use when they talk to AI tools (not how your product team describes the product, but how buyers describe the problem). Applying structured data so crawlers understand what each page covers. Making the technical signals clean: crawl access, page speed, internal links, no rules blocking AI agents.

Most of this work is finite. You do it, and it's done. What remains is lighter: checking that crawlers still reach your pages, confirming new content follows the same structure, fixing anything that slips.

Clearly publishes an llms.txt file so AI agents know what this site covers and where to look. There's also a machine-readable pricing file (pricing.md) for agents that need cost details, and an AGENTS.md guide for autonomous agents navigating the site. The robots file allows AI crawlers. Pages carry structured data covering organization, article, and FAQ schema. Resource pages can be served as plain Markdown to agents that request that format.

That's the blueprint. If your site doesn't do these things yet, start there. A 12-month retainer is a less efficient entry point than a defined project that finishes the site half first. If your team wants to make these edits through AI agents, see edit your website with AI agents.

What to check before you sign

Run this list yourself before any agency conversation. It takes less than an hour, and the results make you a sharper buyer.

1. Can AI crawlers reach the site? Check your robots.txt file. Look for directives that block AI agents by name or by agent group.
2. Do key pages answer the question in the first paragraph? Open your top landing pages. If the answer sits below a hero image and three vague bullets, that's a bigger problem than missing schema.
3. Is structured data present? Use a free schema checker (Google's Rich Results Test works fine). Look for FAQ, Article, and Organization markup.
4. Does llms.txt exist? Check yourdomain.com/llms.txt. A 404 means you don't have one.
5. Do comparison and FAQ pages exist? Search for "[your product] vs [category]" and "[your product] for [use case]". If your site doesn't appear, you likely lack the pages.
6. Do pages load fast? Run your top pages through a free speed test. Slow pages make every other fix work harder.
7. Who can actually ship CMS or code changes? This matters more than any deliverable list. If the team doing the work needs weeks of approvals to update a single page, the project will stall.

The half that needs a GEO or PR partner

We don't sell this half. That's not modesty. It's honest scope.

The off-site work, building citations, earning mentions, placing content, running PR outreach, requires volume and relationships that don't fit how we work. We don't do content production at volume, digital PR, or citation outreach, and we say so plainly rather than overpromise.

That said, the off-site half matters more when your category is contested. If better-funded competitors are already appearing in AI answers and you aren't, cleaner schema alone won't close that gap. You need more mentions, in more places, from sources that AI systems treat as credible. That's legitimate work. It just needs a different kind of partner.

Look for someone who publishes their approach to citation building, not just promises of "AI visibility." Ask to see a list of target placements before you commit.

Retainer, project, or monitoring plan?

Start with a fixed project.

Do the site half as a defined piece of work. Know what you get, what it costs, and when it ends. Then move to a care plan that watches the signals, checks for crawl issues, and flags when something degrades.

A full retainer makes more sense when three things are true: your category is actively contested, you sell to several distinct buyer types who ask different questions, and you have no internal team producing content regularly. If all three apply, the ongoing cost is probably worth it. If only one applies, start smaller.

The site half is easier to scope, faster to finish, and simpler to evaluate than the off-site half. Fix it first. Then you'll know more clearly what ongoing work is actually worth to you.

How we handle the site half

We offer two ways in.

Website care plans run month to month. No long-term contract.

• Reputation, $299/month. Adds search rankings and visibility in AI answers to your monthly Site Health Report, plus broken-link checks and Google Business Profile health.
• Growth, $599/month. Everything in Reputation, plus an agent-readiness scan covering DNS, schema, and llms.txt; CRO and UX advice; a monthly call or written teardown with the top three fixes identified; and one quick win shipped each month.

Both plans cancel anytime. There's a one-time $500 setup fee, waived for sites we built.

Hands-on fixes run as Hour Bundles or a focused two-week Sprint at $3,750, paid at booking. Good for teams that want the work done once, cleanly, without a monthly commitment. If the real blocker is a site builder your team can't change fast enough, the migration path is Webflow, Framer, or WordPress to custom.