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.
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.