Why We Publish Pricing Guidance
Most SEO agencies treat audit pricing as a closely guarded secret — “contact us for a quote” with no indication of the range. That approach wastes everyone’s time. If your budget is £500 and our minimum engagement is five times that, neither of us benefits from a 30-minute discovery call to find that out. Equally, if you are evaluating three proposals, understanding the typical range and what drives cost differences helps you compare like with like rather than choosing on price alone.
The figures below are guidance ranges, not fixed prices. Every audit is scoped individually because site complexity, competitive landscape and business context vary significantly. But the ranges are genuine — we are not publishing low figures to get you on a call and then upselling. The discovery call is free, and the proposal you receive will include a specific figure with a clear breakdown of what is included.
The Three Tiers and Indicative UK Pricing
Our audits follow three tiers, each building on the previous one. Our what to expect guide explains the deliverables for each tier in full detail. Here is the pricing context.
Tier 1: Technical and Content Audit
A thorough assessment of your organic search performance — technical health, on-page quality, off-page authority and analytics validation. Includes a prioritised report, executive summary, action plan spreadsheet and walkthrough call. Typically a 2–3 day engagement for a mid-sized business site (100–500 pages).
Indicative range: £1,200–£2,400. Smaller sites at the lower end, larger or more complex sites (e-commerce, multiple subdomains, complex CMS) at the higher end. Sites over 1,000 pages or with international configurations may exceed this range.
Tier 2: Search Visibility Audit
Everything in Tier 1 plus the full AI visibility assessment — AI crawler access, entity recognition testing, content citability analysis, structured data evaluation, competitive AI citation analysis and the AI Brand Narrative Scorecard. Typically a 3–5 day engagement.
Indicative range: £2,400–£4,200. The AI visibility assessment adds depth rather than complexity — the additional cost reflects the manual testing across five AI platforms, the competitive citation matrix build and the scorecard analysis. For most businesses in competitive markets, this is the tier that delivers the best balance of insight to investment.
Tier 3: Strategic Visibility Assessment
Everything in Tier 2 plus the Revenue Exposure Model, competitive strategy deep-dive and 90-day implementation roadmap. Typically a 5–8 day engagement for businesses in competitive markets that need to build an internal business case or understand exactly how competitors achieve their visibility.
Indicative range: £4,200–£6,600. The premium reflects the Revenue Exposure Model build (which requires calibrating query volumes, citation rates and conversion data to your specific business metrics) and the competitive deep-dive (which goes beyond citation tracking to analyse competitor content strategies, entity architectures and structured data implementations). This tier is most valuable for businesses where the decision to invest in search visibility requires board-level or executive approval with a clear ROI case.
What Affects Cost
Four factors move the price within each tier’s range.
Site size and complexity. A 50-page brochure site is faster to audit than a 5,000-page e-commerce site with faceted navigation, multiple language versions and a complex CMS. More pages means more crawl data to analyse, more content to assess, and more potential for technical issues that require investigation. International sites with hreflang configurations, enterprise sites with subdomain architectures, and e-commerce sites with product schema all add complexity.
Competitive landscape. The competitive analysis component scales with the number and sophistication of your competitors. In a market with three direct competitors, the analysis is straightforward. In a market with twenty competitors across multiple segments, the citation matrix and competitive gap analysis require significantly more work.
Industry and regulatory context. Some industries require additional care — YMYL (your money, your life) sectors like healthcare, finance and legal have specific quality and compliance considerations that affect both SEO recommendations and AI visibility strategy. Our experience in healthcare IT and legal sectors means we understand these nuances without needing to learn them on your engagement.
Existing data availability. If you already have active Ahrefs or Semrush accounts, historical Search Console data and clean analytics, the data-gathering phase is faster. If we need to set up tracking from scratch or work with incomplete historical data, the engagement takes longer.
How to Think About Audit ROI
An audit is not a cost — it is a diagnostic investment that determines where your marketing budget will deliver the highest return. The right framing is not “is £2,400 a lot of money?” but “will knowing exactly where to invest my SEO budget save me more than £2,400 in wasted effort?”
The answer, in our experience, is almost always yes. We routinely find that clients are investing significant time and budget in activities that have minimal impact while ignoring issues that are actively suppressing their performance. A single cannibalisation fix — consolidating two pages competing for the same keyword — can deliver more ranking improvement than six months of content production aimed at the wrong topics. An indexation issue identified and resolved can unlock traffic that was being suppressed invisibly.
The AI visibility dimension adds a new layer to this ROI calculation. If the Tier 2 audit identifies that you are absent from AI answers for queries that represent £50,000 in annual revenue opportunity, the audit has quantified a problem you did not know existed — and the remediation plan gives you a clear path to capturing that revenue. The audit cost is a fraction of the potential upside. For Tier 3, the Revenue Exposure Model makes this calculation explicit, giving you the figures to present to budget holders with confidence.
AI Visibility: Added Value, Not Added Cost
A common concern we hear is “am I paying extra for the AI assessment, or is this just an upsell?” It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the AI visibility assessment does require additional work — manual testing across five platforms, citation matrix construction, brand narrative analysis. That work takes time and expertise, which is reflected in the tier pricing.
But the value framing is important. AI-powered discovery is not a future possibility — it is a current reality affecting lead generation for businesses in every sector. The AI assessment is not an optional add-on. It is a necessary dimension of understanding where your customers find you and where they do not. An audit that evaluates your Google rankings but ignores the fact that you are invisible to ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews is giving you an incomplete picture. In 2026, that incomplete picture carries real commercial risk.
The work that improves AI visibility — entity authority building, structured data implementation, content restructuring for citability — also improves organic rankings. It is not a separate line of work; it is an extension of the same visibility system. The Tier 2 investment gets you both dimensions assessed together, which is more efficient than addressing them separately.
Comparing Audit Proposals
If you are evaluating multiple audit proposals, here are the questions that distinguish a valuable audit from a report-factory product.
Does the proposal specify who will conduct the audit? If it is a junior analyst running automated tools, the output will reflect that. Our audits are conducted by the same senior consultant who leads strategy and implementation — 19+ years of SEO experience applied directly to your analysis, not filtered through an account manager.
Does the proposal include AI visibility assessment? In 2026, any audit that ignores AI platforms is incomplete. If the proposal only mentions Google rankings and backlinks, you are getting a 2020 audit at 2026 prices.
Does the proposal explain what happens after delivery? An audit that lands in your inbox with no walkthrough, no prioritisation framework and no implementation path is a document, not a strategy. Ensure the proposal includes a findings discussion and clear next-step options.
Is the pricing transparent? If the proposal says “from £X” without specifying what moves the price or what is included at each level, treat that as a red flag. You should know exactly what you are paying and exactly what you will receive before committing.
Does the proposal distinguish between automated tool output and expert analysis? A report that is primarily Screaming Frog exports and Ahrefs screenshots with a cover page is not a professional audit — it is a data dump. The value of a professional audit is in the interpretation, prioritisation and strategic context that an experienced practitioner adds on top of the raw data. Ask what percentage of the audit involves manual analysis versus automated tool runs.
Ready to discuss which tier is right for your business? Get in touch for a free discovery call — no obligation, no hard sell. Or start with our free search visibility score tool for a quick baseline.
