What does an AI visibility audit cost?

What is included in the $4,500 audit?

No setup fee and no upsell inside the deliverable. If the audit finds nothing much, you get that in writing and a documented baseline.

Why do you cost more than a $1,200 AEO audit?

Because it is a different deliverable, and comparing them on price alone is comparing a survey to a repair.

A typical AEO audit at that price reviews how your brand appears in AI answers, checks your schema and entities, and returns a prioritised list of recommendations. That is a real service and $1,200 is a fair price for it.

Ours runs 55 technical checks against the site itself and returns the code. Not a recommendation to add content negotiation — the middleware for your framework. Not a note that llms.txt is missing — the populated file, built from your own page inventory. Your developer reviews a diff rather than starting a project.

The comparison we would rather you make is against doing this in-house. A single AEO specialist costs $108,000–$121,000 a year and, by the industry’s own reporting, still leaves engineering gaps. Our audit is roughly two weeks of that salary.

What changes the retainer price?

Five things, and we will give you a number on the first call rather than the third.

Pages crawled per run

10 to 40,000 changes the cost materially

Query set size, Layer 4

15–25 prompts is typical

Engines monitored

1 to 3

Remediation included

advisory only, or we ship the fixes

Live agent testing

optional, adds engineering time

No minimum term beyond the first three months, no per-seat pricing on the MCP connection, and no annual lock-in. The reason we do not publish a single number is that a ten-page marketing site and a forty-thousand-page catalogue are not the same job, and quoting one figure would mean overcharging one of you.

Is there anything free?

The scan, permanently, with no email required. Eight of the 55 checks against any domain in about fifteen seconds, with a shareable result URL and evidence you can verify yourself.

Also free: the tools, every guide on this site, and the standards index. We would rather you fixed the easy things yourself and hired us for the parts that actually need an engineer.

Where this is contested

Fair challenge: fifty-five checks sounds impressive and check counts are easy to inflate. Ours is public — every dimension is listed with its scoring method, and fifteen of the fifty-five are advisory flags that carry no points, which we state rather than bury.

Second fair challenge: we have no client case studies yet, which makes $4,500 a bet on a firm without a track record. That is true. It is why we publish our own audit in full including failures, and why the first three clients get thirty per cent off in exchange for permission to publish real results.

How much does a Code4X AI visibility audit cost?

$4,500 as a one-off, covering all 55 checks across Layers 1-3 in five working days, including the generated remediation files and an MCP connection.

Why do you publish the audit price but not the retainer?

The audit is a fixed scope so it has a fixed price. Retainers vary with crawl volume, query set size, engine coverage and whether remediation is included. You get a retainer figure on the first call.

How does this compare to AEO agency pricing?

AEO retainers typically run $1,000-$3,500 per month for small businesses and $4,000-$12,000 mid-tier, with audits from around $1,200. Ours is a different deliverable: technical checks with the fix code, rather than content and citation recommendations.

Is there a free option?

Yes. The scan runs eight of the 55 checks against any domain in about fifteen seconds with no email required, and every guide and tool on this site is free.

Do you offer a discount?

The first three clients receive 30% off the audit and the first three months of any retainer, in exchange for permission to publish the before and after, named or anonymised by sector.