How much does a GEO project cost in 2026?

In 2026, a serious GEO project starts at €2.5K (PROEMA Express Audit) and tops at €25K/month (Advanced GEO Optimisation retainer, 12-month minimum). Low-cost €500-600/month offers exist but rarely deliver more than a shallow audit; Enterprise retainers at the large consultancies start at €80-150K for strategic scoping.

How much does a GEO project cost in 2026, from a GEO angle?

The 2026 GEO market has not yet settled on a pricing standard. Three orders of magnitude coexist, each with a distinct service logic.

Tier 1, low-cost (€590 to €1,500 / month). A handful of traditional SEO agencies relabelled their service as « GEO ready » or « AI-SEO » from mid-2025. Typical scope: a light one-shot audit (10-15 questions), a checklist of fixes, a basic llms.txt file. Useful for a local SMB that hasn't touched the topic yet, but the lack of a verticalised panel, of monthly multi-LLM testing and of a technical roadmap limits depth. Citation rate, the North Star metric, is rarely measured.

Tier 2, GEO-native boutique (€2,500 to €12,000 / month). This is where PROEMA operates. Express Audit at €2,500 (30 questions × 5 engines, delivered in 5 days), In-Depth Audit at €10,000 (250 questions × 3 languages × 5 engines, 12-month roadmap), monthly retainer depending on scope. The logic: a versioned verticalised question panel, monthly multi-LLM testing, measurable technical deliverables (PGSM v1.0 standard, 35-point checklist), continuous monitoring via Cloudflare AI Crawl Control. Citation rate is versioned and tracked internally. The European agencies operating at this tier can be counted on one hand in 2026.

Tier 3, enterprise / strategy consulting (€50,000 to €250,000 per project). The large transformation consultancies launched dedicated « Generative AI Search » practices in 2025-2026 targeting CAC 40 and BEL 20 groups. Scope: executive workshops, multi-brand governance, MarTech integration, multi-country rollouts. Strength: strategic depth, 8-12-consultant teams. Limitation: little hands-on practice on FAQ writing or Schema.org tuning, often outsourced.

How to arbitrate? Three questions to ask. One: how many questions are in the test panel, and is it versioned? Under 30 questions, it's a demo, not a measurement. Two: how many LLMs are tested per cycle? Below three (ChatGPT + Perplexity + Claude as a minimum), coverage is anecdotal. Three: how often is the test re-run? Below monthly, you measure noise, not a trend. The fair price falls out of those three answers; everything else is packaging.

Counterintuitive finding. A Search Engine Journal industry survey published in March 2026 puts the median European advertiser GEO budget at EUR 4,200 net per month. By comparison, the median SEO budget on the same sample sits around EUR 3,800 net. "GEO is not a marginal line item: it lands as an additional layer of the same magnitude as SEO, because LLMs now absorb a measurable share of the discovery journey," argues Lorenzo Eeman, founder of PROEMA.