What an AI visibility audit costs

An AI visibility audit from MoatWorks costs $800, charged once, with no commitment to anything afterwards. Delivery is seven business days. The scope is fixed before you pay, so the figure does not move once work starts.

The five engines are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Each prompt runs multiple times per engine in fresh logged-out sessions, because generation is non-deterministic and a single run proves nothing. A one-off screenshot of an engine naming you is not evidence that it happens reliably, and the point of paying for a baseline is to replace that screenshot with a rate.

The audit exists because most companies buying this work cannot describe their starting position. They have seen one screenshot of ChatGPT naming them and have no idea whether that happens 2 percent of the time or 40 percent. Without a baseline captured before any work begins, nothing you do afterwards is attributable to what you paid for.

The audit also records every domain the engines cited, not only whether you appeared. That is the part buyers tend not to ask for and the part that turns out to matter, because the list of pages an engine reaches for in your category is the target list for everything that follows.

The audit is sold without a retainer attached on purpose. If the finding is that your position is already strong, the correct outcome is that you do not buy anything else. The full scope sits on the Foundation page.

MoatWorks retainers are $2,999 and $4,999 per month, both on 90-day terms, with the audit included in either. There is no annual lock-in and no separate onboarding fee.

Both retainers include the audit, Reddit community seeding, and a monthly performance report with attribution. Domination adds two technical SEO fix cycles per quarter. Expansion adds schema and entity foundation work. What each one delivers month by month is set out on the services page.

The gap between $2,999 and $4,999 is placement volume, not consulting hours. Expansion buys 25 listicle placements against Domination's 15, four digital PR placements against two, and 15 cite-ready assets a month against 10.

That structure follows from where citations come from. Answer engines quote third-party pages heavily, and those are pages you do not control. Buying more of the work that operates on other people's pages is what the higher tier is for. Buying more blog posts on your own domain is not, which is why the asset count moves by five between tiers while the placement count moves by ten.

Two things push a given engagement toward the upper tier. The first is how many competitors are already entrenched, because displacing a vendor that appears in most answers for your category takes more placements than entering a category where nobody has been named consistently. The second is how much repair your entity data needs before placement work compounds, which covers inconsistent company descriptions, a thin Crunchbase entry and a missing Wikidata record.

The ARR bands attached to each tier are guidance rather than gates. Domination is built around companies at roughly $5M to $10M ARR and Expansion around $20M to $30M. The number that should decide it is how much off-site placement your category needs.

Buy the audit alone when you do not know your starting position. Buy a retainer when you already know you are absent from answers your competitors appear in and you have budget approved for at least a quarter. The audit is included in both retainers, so buying it first costs you nothing if you upgrade.

MoatWorks does not sell per-project pricing beyond the audit, and the reason is mechanical rather than commercial. Listicle placement, review velocity and community presence all run on a lag of roughly six to twelve weeks between the work and the citation. A one-month project ends before the thing you paid for has had time to appear in an answer. Selling that as a project would mean selling something nobody can evaluate inside its own term.

Standalone AI visibility audits with a published price run from $249 to roughly $2,500. Foundation sits at the cheap end of the agency band, and two products undercut it. Every figure below came from the seller's own page on 10 August 2026, and anything a seller did not publish is marked as not published rather than estimated.

Two of those are not really the same purchase. BizWhiz at $249 is a self-serve report rather than an agency engagement, and at that price it is the right answer for anyone who wants the numbers without a person attached to them. NBound credits its audit fee back if you start monitoring within 60 days, which makes the headline figure a deposit rather than a cost if you intend to continue.

The sticker price is still the wrong unit. An audit produces one observation per prompt per engine, so the thing you are buying is prompt-engine coverage, and dividing the fee by that count is the only way two of these compare. Nobody in this category publishes it, so here it is for the four above.

The monitoring tools in this category publish their rates, and the spread is wider than most buyers expect. These figures were taken from each vendor's own pricing page on 10 August 2026.

That gap is not a pricing anomaly. The tools count different things: prompt volume, model coverage, and credit systems that convert to wildly different numbers of actual queries. Two tools quoting the same monthly figure can be checking an order of magnitude apart in real coverage.

None of those numbers measure the same purchase as a retainer. Monitoring tools tell you whether you are named. They do not change whether you are named, and a $95 per month subscription and a $2,999 per month retainer are not competing offers. If a comparison puts them side by side as alternatives, it is comparing measurement to intervention.

Normalise before you compare. A tool's headline price tells you almost nothing on its own, so divide the monthly fee by the number of prompts the plan actually runs, then account for how many engines it covers. Peec AI at $95 for 50 prompts and Evertune at $800 for 100,000 prompts across 11 models are not the same product priced differently.

Credit systems make this harder. Rankscale sells 1,200 credits at $99 and 12,000 at $780, which is a better rate per credit at the top tier, but a credit is a query against an engine rather than a prompt you chose to track. Read what a credit buys before comparing two credit-based plans.

For agency quotes the equivalent unit is placement counts, not hours. Ask every vendor how many listicle placements, guest posts and digital PR placements are included per month, and quotes that looked comparable stop being comparable. Hours tell you what a vendor spends. Placements tell you what you get, and placement volume is what produces citations. The published rates from four agencies, and the same calculation run across them, are in what GEO agencies actually charge per month.

Ask the second question too: is the placement budget inside the retainer or outside it. Some agencies quote a retainer and bill PR and backlink placement separately on top, which is defensible because placement cost varies by target, but it means the published figure is not the price. Add the stated placement range to the retainer before putting two quotes side by side, and some of the cheaper-looking options move above the dearer ones. MoatWorks includes placements in the retainer, which is why the headline figure is lower and the ceiling on volume is fixed.

The last comparison worth running is against doing the work in-house. Twenty five listicle placements and four digital PR placements a quarter is a standing outreach workload rather than something absorbed alongside another job, so the question is whether you would rather hire for it.

Do not buy AI visibility work if you are pre-product-market fit, if your category has no meaningful prompt volume yet, or if you cannot commit to a full quarter. In each case the work gets executed properly and wasted commercially, because the lag between placement and citation outruns your ability to act on the result.

• You need pipeline this month. Paid search will do more for a quarter-end number than anything on this page, because off-site placement takes six to twelve weeks before it registers in an answer.
• Your category genuinely has no prompt volume. The audit will tell you for $800, which is the cheapest way to find out, and the correct response to that finding is to wait rather than to buy a retainer.
• You are already named in most answers for your core prompts. The marginal return on a retainer is small, so track it quarterly and put the budget somewhere else.
• What you want is a dashboard showing a visibility score. Buy one of the monitoring tools above for a tenth of the price, because it will do that job well.

There is also a case where a competitor is the better choice. If you need coverage across a dozen international markets at once, an agency with in-market teams will serve you better than a single operator, because placement volume from one source does not compensate for having no local-language presence. MoatWorks also works with one client per category, so if that slot is taken in your category, you should be talking to somebody else.