Prices in this guide are Australian dollars, exclude GST and reflect what we see in the market in 2026. Ranges are wide because the work varies.
What agencies charge today
A typical Australian SEO agency charges a monthly retainer. For a small business that runs from about $1,500 to $6,000 a month. For a mid sized business with several locations or product lines, $6,000 to $10,000. Enterprise programs sit above $10,000 a month, and the largest run to several times that.
The retainer usually buys a technical audit, a few blog posts a month, some link building and a report. The blog posts are the part AI changed.
How AI SEO pricing differs
AI SEO is a system, and the cost sits in building it. Once the ruleset, the pillar map, the templates and the data pipelines exist, each new page is cheap to produce. That is why we price it as a fixed setup and then a smaller monthly fee.
The setup covers the written ruleset and the map of which page targets which search. It also covers the templates with structured data, the first cluster of pages and any pages generated from public data. At Zinto that typically costs $8,000 to $25,000, quoted fixed after a 30 minute call and a look at your Search Console.
The monthly fee covers the production loop. AI drafts, checks against the ruleset and stages new pages. A person reviews them. We measure what published in Search Console and in an AI citation tool. That typically costs $2,000 to $6,000 a month and drops when your own team takes over the review step.
What moves the price
Four things. How many pillar topics you need, because each one is its own cluster. Whether public data exists for programmatic pages, and how clean it is. The state of your current site, since a slow or badly structured site needs fixing before content helps. And how fast you want pages published.
A trade business with one service line and one city sits at the bottom of the range. A distributor with five product categories, three states and a messy site sits at the top.
What a quote must include
A written ruleset you can read before you sign. A pillar and cluster map that names the target search for every page. The review step, with the name of the person who reads each page before it publishes. The measurement, including which tool counts AI citations. And fixed prices for the setup and the monthly fee.
If any of those is missing, ask why.
What not to pay for
Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google or ChatGPT, and Google’s own guidance for choosing an SEO warns against the promise. Link packages sold by the hundred. Reports that describe last month without changing what gets built next month. AI content with no human review.
Compared with an in-house writer
A content marketer in Australia costs about $80,000 to $120,000 a year before superannuation, and produces perhaps two to four pages a week. An AI SEO setup plus a year of the production loop typically costs less than half of that. It publishes several pages a day under the same rules.
The trade is control against volume. Many businesses do both. The writer owns the review step and the voice, and the system produces the pages.
What we charge
A free 30 minute call. A fixed setup price, typically $8,000 to $25,000. A monthly production fee, typically $2,000 to $6,000, that falls when your team takes over. The numbers behind the method are on our AI SEO agency page. Our Gridly case study shows what the first five months produced for a site we own.