What this costs

Most companies in this market do not publish a price. Of the fourteen scored on this site, one does. This page is built from what is actually published rather than from an industry average nobody can source.

Published prices only · read 12 September 2026

The one published figure

Forty-Second Street publishes $500 to $3,500 a month, month to month with no long-term contract, varying by trade, competition and how many cities you target, with ad spend billed separately. That is the only openly published range we found in the set, and publishing it at all is why they score three of five on falsifiability rather than zero.

Everyone else quotes privately. That is normal and it is not a criticism, but it does mean any figure you have been told the market rate is came from somewhere unverifiable.

What sits inside a retainer

Across the service descriptions we read, the deliverables cluster into four groups: crawler and technical configuration, structured data and identity consistency, content restructured so answers are extractable, and third-party mentions. A fifth appears in only four of the fourteen: an actual measurement apparatus with a prompt set and a cadence.

That fifth group is the one to price separately in your own head, because it is the only one that tells you whether the other four worked.

The questions that make quotes comparable

What is the prompt set?

How many questions, covering which services and which towns, and is it fixed in writing before we start.

Which engines, how often?

Named individually, with a run cadence. Four engines monthly is a different cost base from one engine quarterly.

What overlaps my existing retainer?

Strike out every line that appears in both scopes. See AEO and SEO.

What would count as this failing?

If there is no answer, there is no exit criterion, and a retainer with no exit criterion renews forever.

Is the contract monthly?

In a field this young, a twelve-month lock is asking you to bet on conditions nobody can forecast.

What a cheap version cannot include

Running fifty questions across four engines three times each is 600 answers to gather and read, monthly. That is real labour and it is why measurement is the thing quietly dropped from a low quote. If a price looks unusually low, the most likely missing component is the part that would have told you whether any of it worked.

The honest floor

If your service pages are thin, your listings disagree with each other and you have a handful of reviews, this work has nothing to build on and the money is better spent on those first. That is not our line, it is one an agency in this set publishes on its own sales page while presumably turning work away because of it.