# SEO & AEO Cost UK | Published Prices

> Published UK SEO and AEO retainers: Starter, Growth and Enterprise from our price list (12 August 2026). Who should skip a programme. No ranking guarantees.

Source: https://elitedigitalagency.io/guides/seo-aeo-cost-uk/
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SEO · AEO · Cost

# How much does SEO and AEO cost in the UK?

Our published retainers — not a survey of “typical agency fees”. Capture date 12 August 2026. Same amounts as pricing and open data.

  By Kaiser Khan · Updated 12 August 2026 · 11 min read

       Quick answer Our published SEO retainers on 12 August 2026 are Starter from £995 a month, Growth at £1,995 a month and Enterprise at £4,995 a month — the same figures as /pricing/. AEO is inside Growth and Enterprise, not a hidden extra SKU. Skip this if you want a ranking guarantee or a one-off SEO package with no monthly work.

## Who should skip this?

- Anyone shopping for a guaranteed page-one ranking or a promised ChatGPT citation — we will not sell that.
- Businesses that only want a one-off ‘SEO package’ PDF with no monthly crawl, content or IndexNow work.
- Teams that already have a senior in-house SEO and only need a plugin list; start with the free GEO audit instead.

## What do you actually pay?

You pay a monthly retainer. Starter is from £995/month: technical audit cadence, four optimised articles, on-page work, a ranking report, up to ten target keywords. Growth is £1,995/month: fuller technical programme, eight long-form articles, link acquisition, AEO integration, weekly updates, up to thirty keywords. Enterprise is £4,995/month: full-service SEO, twenty-plus articles, aggressive links, a dedicated lead, AI citation monitoring, unlimited keyword targets. VAT extra. Registered UK charities get 20% off retainers — that discount is on pricing, not invented here.

| Plan | Published amount | What it is for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Starter | from £995/month | Focused SEO on a small keyword set; AEO is not the centre of this tier. |
| Growth | £1,995/month | SEO plus AEO integration — schema, extractable answers, Bing/IndexNow hygiene. |
| Enterprise | £4,995/month | Programme scale plus citation monitoring. Still not a placement guarantee. |

Hosting, ads and website builds are separate. Ongoing Care from £99/month is website care, not SEO. If a quote mixes those numbers into one “digital marketing” blob, ask them to split it.

## Is AEO billed as an extra?

Not on our list. Answer Engine Optimisation is the work of making pages extractable — question headings, 40–60 word answers, FAQPage, a named Person author, one JSON-LD @graph, crawler access. Growth lists AEO integration. Enterprise lists AI citation monitoring. Starter is SEO-first; you can still run the unpaid tools. We do not add a surprise “AEO setup fee” after you sign.

If another agency prices AEO as a £10,000 workshop with no monthly crawl, treat it as a slide deck. The durable work is the same pages staying fresh, allowed in robots.txt, and corroborated off-site. Read what AEO is before you buy a label.

## When is Starter enough?

Starter is enough when you have a clear local or niche keyword set, a site that already loads and indexes, and someone inside the business who can approve copy quickly. It is not enough when you have eighty near-duplicate blogs, a blocked GPTBot, or a brand that AI engines already attribute to a directory. Those are programme problems.

Do the unpaid path first: GEO audit, schema checker, robots checker. If three FAQ blocks and a Person author close the gap, you do not need Growth yet. If the audit says “entity confusion” and “crawler blocked”, Starter will not magic that away in a month.

## When should you not buy a retainer?

Do not buy if the website cannot take a new enquiry — broken forms, no phone, no trust. SEO that lands on a dead end wastes the fee. Do not buy if you need a new site first; published web design starts from £3,495 one-off. Do not buy if you will not give access to Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and analytics. We will not “just send a report” from a login we do not have.

Do not buy Enterprise because the number looks serious. Enterprise is for volume: more URLs, more content, citation monitoring. A five-page brochure site on Enterprise is a mismatch. Growth is the default for most UK SMEs that actually need AEO.

## How should you compare quotes?

Ask for the monthly deliverable list in writing, who does the work, whether they publish their own prices, and whether they guarantee rankings. Compare apples: articles per month, link claims (and how they are earned), schema ownership, Bing/IndexNow, and what happens to your accounts if you leave. Our comparison object is public — how to choose an agency and in-house vs freelancer vs agency.

Related: SEO · AEO · prompt panel (no invented citation rate) · get a proposal.

   In this guide

   Want extractable pages, not more blogs?

 See AEO service →

## What are the common questions about SEO and AEO cost — frequently asked questions?

**Is AEO a separate line item from SEO?**

   On our published price list, Starter is SEO-led at from £995/month. Growth at £1,995/month and Enterprise at £4,995/month include AEO work (schema, extractable answers, citation monitoring on Enterprise). We do not sell a secret fourth SKU called “AEO only”.

**Can I buy a one-off SEO package instead of a retainer?**

   You can buy a website or a one-off audit-shaped project, but ranking and citation work is monthly. A one-off ‘SEO package’ with no ongoing crawl, content or Bing/IndexNow work is usually a PDF, not a programme.

**Do you guarantee page-one rankings or AI citations?**

   No. Anyone who does is selling a promise engines do not offer. We publish prices, method and case studies with sourced outcomes — not guaranteed positions.

**What is the cheapest honest next step?**

   Run the free GEO audit and the schema checker on your homepage. If the gaps are structural, a retainer may be justified. If they are three missing FAQ blocks, fix those first.

      Want a retainer that matches a published tier?

 We quote Starter, Growth or Enterprise — or we tell you to run the free tools first.

  Get in touch