Two AI SEO quotes are sitting on your desk. One is a modest monthly add-on. The other is several times the price. Both describe what looks like the same job.
AI SEO services are the work of getting a business named and quoted in AI answers, such as Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT. An AI Overview is the AI-written summary that sits above some Google results. Most of the work is an extension of good SEO. It covers accurate business details everywhere they appear, and pages written so a passage can be lifted and credited. It also covers crawler access, mentions on other trusted sites, and reporting on whether the business gets named.
On price there is no standard. In 2026 the work is folded into some SEO retainers with no separate line. It is also added to an existing retainer from about $1,000 a month plus GST, or sold on its own at anything from about $800 to $8,000 a month. What moves that number is how much real work sits behind the name.
If you run a business in Melbourne and you are looking at AI SEO services, you want two things. What is in it, and what it should cost.
AI SEO services are paid work to get a business named, quoted and credited in the answers AI assistants give.
The same work is sold under several names. You will see AI SEO, GEO, AEO and “AI search optimisation”. GEO and AEO are trade initials for one job, which is getting a business into the answers AI engines write. The names are mostly marketing. The work underneath them overlaps, so judge a quote by what it lists rather than by the label.
Google’s own position is worth knowing. It says the best practices for SEO “continue to be relevant” for its AI features, because they are “rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems”. Its guide for businesses hiring an SEO lists “Optimizing for generative AI” as one of the services an SEO provides. So you are buying an extension of SEO, not a separate trade.
Keep one balance in mind. Those are Google’s statements about Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot make their own retrieval decisions, and several of them are grounded on Bing.
A proposal worth paying for names the work in five areas. Each one should be something a person does, with an output you can see.
Those five are a buyer’s list, not a set of instructions. If you would rather do the groundwork yourself, how to show up when your customers search with AI covers the foundations on your own site.
One line in the market sorts the cheap offers from the expensive ones. An Australian agency pricing guide updated in September 2026 puts it plainly. Tracking a brand’s visibility is not the same deliverable as producing content, making technical changes or running outreach. Some offers include only the tracking.
There is no standard price. The same three words cover four different products. These are the shapes the market sells here, each with the month its figure was published.
Now the part the pricing pages skip. A “from” price is the floor of an advertised offer, not what a typical business pays. The September 2026 guide says in those words that there is no standard AI SEO surcharge. So the spread is not noise. It is the distance between tracking a handful of questions and doing the work every month.
None of those figures is a Melbourne price. The work costs the same here as anywhere else in Australia. What you are buying is hours and skill.
Put four questions to the quotes in front of you. The answers usually explain the gap.
If the quote in front of you reads like your old SEO retainer under a new heading, that is its own question. A separate article on telling new work from old deals with it.
This is the hardest part of the category. Measurement comes in three tiers, and they are not equally solid.
Then there is the test that settles it. The measure that matters is enquiries. Ask new customers where they heard of you. Add an AI assistant like ChatGPT as an option on your enquiry form. Those answers tell you more than any dashboard.
A place in an AI answer is not for sale, and the platforms say so themselves. Google states that “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”, and that Google “never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results”. Its guide to AI features adds that indexing and serving “aren’t guaranteed”, even for a page that meets every requirement.
OpenAI is testing ads in ChatGPT. They appear below the end of a response, and they are labelled as sponsored. OpenAI says advertisers “have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses”. An ad is a separate product, not a place inside the answer.
So read any quote that prices “getting you into” an AI answer as paying for work and a hope. The work can be good. The placement is not on the menu.
Before you buy anything, run the five-minute test in should a small Melbourne business pay for AI SEO services yet. It tells you whether competitors are already being named in your category. That is the fact that decides whether a $1,000 add-on or an $8,000 programme is even the right size of question.
CJ Digital, like many agencies, does not publish an AI SEO price, because scope drives it. Expect to be asked about your current site and your current SEO before anyone gives you a number. Compare what comes back by what it includes, rather than by the figure. Our AI SEO service page sets out how the work is scoped.
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the retainer. Some Australian agencies fold the groundwork into a mid-tier plan with nothing shown as a separate line. Others bill it as its own service. Ask your provider which of the two you are on.
Yes, and several offers are exactly that. Tracking tells you whether you are being named, but it changes nothing by itself. It earns its keep as a baseline before you spend more, and it is poor value when it is sold as the whole service.
It can be, if you want a picture of where you stand before committing to a monthly fee. An audit is a project with an end date, so treat it as research rather than as the work itself. The value sits in what gets done with the findings.
Not always, because much of the groundwork overlaps with what good SEO already does. The genuinely new part is narrow: the assistants beyond Google, crawler access for AI search, and reporting on whether you are named. Ask your current provider to show you which of those they cover.
