Whether to buy anything at all

Ask this before the price question, because most of the pressure to spend here arrives with a claim attached. UK search demand for buying SEO sits at a four-year high. "seo agency", "seo company" and "seo services" together averaged 32,442 monthly UK searches in the first seven months of 2026, against 2,721 for the AI search vocabulary said to be replacing it. That is a ratio of about twelve to one.

Both halves of the page are real. The older one is roughly twelve times the size of the newer one, while the newer one is the thing growing.The four-year UK demand series, plus the caveat that weakens the size of the risesets out the methodology problem in the 2025 data honestly rather than quoting the headline and moving on.

What it costs

Every published UK price we could verify sits on one page, read from each provider's own site on 10 August 2026 rather than from anyone's estimate of what the market charges. The paid ones run from £500 to £6,600. One provider publishes a free audit alongside a £2,950 one, which is the clearest available illustration of what a free audit is for.

The verified UK price table, plus the seven things that have to be inside an audit before any price is comparableis the piece to read before a proposal lands. The seven are the specification. Without them you are comparing two different products that share a name.

Who sells it

Ten UK agencies hold the first page of Google for the money term in this market. Four of those ten results are lists of GEO agencies. Both of the UK lists that rank the field put their own publisher first. So we ran a different test on all ten: how often AI systems cite the agency's own website.

The answers ranged from 438 citations across six platforms down to zero. Ranking position and citation count turned out to have nothing to do with each other. The agency at organic position two carried 17. The one at position nine carried 438.The full table, what each agency actually publishes about its method and the five questions to ask any of themincludes what the test does not prove, which is most of what a buyer cares about.

Or track it yourself

Five tools qualified for comparison by a stated counting method rather than by preference. Their entry prices run from $29 to $139 a month. Two publish no price at all. The cheapest entry tier covers four engines; the $99 one covers ChatGPT alone.

Every price read from the vendor's own page, normalised to cost per tracked promptalso carries the uncomfortable finding underneath the category: the four specialists hold 81 AI citations between them across six platforms, against 31,547 for Semrush. That says something about how citations accrue rather than about how good the products are, which is the distinction the piece spends its last section on.

Where measurement stops and delivery starts

An audit is a decision aid. It does not change anything on its own. That boundary is worth settling before you buy, because the most common way this goes wrong is a diagnostic quietly becoming a retainer nobody agreed to.

Our own version of the line: the Diagnostic is £500 and ends in a ranked list of what to fix first. Where the fix is ongoing paid search, that is sold separately onpublished limits and a published monthly price, with what each plan never does printed next to what it does.

What this pillar does not cover yet

Four pieces cover the comparison. They do not cover the decision that follows it.

  • Agency, in-house or a productised service. The three ways to buy this are compared nowhere on the site. It is the question most buyers are actually holding.
  • What GEO services cost as an ongoing engagement. The audit prices are verified. Monthly retainer pricing appears only as the two figures two agencies happen to publish.
  • What our own £500 Diagnostic contains, itemised to the check. Described in outline across several pieces. Not written down properly in one place.
  • Teardowns. The plan is a public teardown of a named UK business every fortnight, which would be the only evidence on this site of what the work looks like when it is done rather than described. None is published. There is no point pretending otherwise.

One limit runs through all four published pieces. Every price was read on 10 August 2026 and prices change. Every citation count came from a single pull on the same day. Citation sets have been observed to move within a day. Re-check anything you are about to spend against.