AI SEO Month by Month: What the Work Is and What It Costs (2026)

Generative Engine Optimization is sold by the month and bought by the quarter, which is the mismatch most quotes hide. Our AI search optimization page publishes two tiers, Foundations at Rs.40,000 a month and Authority at Rs.75,000, both with a 3-month minimum and month-to-month after that. It also publishes the honest timeline: AI-engine visibility often moves at 3 to 6 months, and months 4 to 9 are where the curve bends. Those two facts do not sit comfortably together, and this post is about what happens in the gap.

So here is the calendar rather than the price list. What ships in month one, what changes in months two and three, what the minimum term actually delivers, and what the nine-month version costs and produces. Every figure is from our own published cards, and every total is our arithmetic on them, before 18 percent GST.

What does month one of an AI SEO programme actually produce?

Almost no content, and that is the correct answer rather than an excuse. Month one is the foundation work published in our process: the technical audit, explicit AI crawler access, the schema and entity graph, and a sweep of every profile and directory where your business facts disagree with each other. The baseline prompt panel is run in this month too, because without it there is nothing to measure month twelve against.

• The audit, baseline prompt panel and a prioritised 90-day roadmap, delivered within 7 working days. Our page states you keep that roadmap even if you do not hire us.
• Technical SEO fixes: crawlability, indexing, Core Web Vitals and rendering, plus explicit access for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended in robots.txt. Engines cannot cite what they cannot fetch.
• Schema and the entity graph: Organization, Person, Service, FAQ, Article and Product markup, and a sameAs graph so the engines resolve your brand as one known entity instead of a string of text.
• The directory sweep: name, description, category, founder and pricing facts aligned across Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Justdial and the industry directories, because engines cross-check sources before they trust one.
• Publishing begins from week three, which is why month one still delivers its 4 articles on Foundations but delivers them late in the month.

What happens in months two and three?

The rhythm turns editorial. Four answer-first articles a month on Foundations or 8 or more on Authority, each opening with a 40 to 60 word direct answer, question-phrased headings, sourced statistics and a FAQ block, plus existing pages restructured one at a time. At month end the prompt panel is re-run across all five engines. You are reading the format now: every post on this blog opens with that same 40 to 60 word block, which is the answer-first structure we sell because we ship it here first.

Month three is the end of the minimum term and the first honest decision point. On Foundations you have paid Rs.1,20,000 before GST and received 12 articles, the technical and entity foundation, three directory and profile passes and three prompt panels. Our page publishes long-tail rankings landing at 2 to 4 months, so month three is where the earliest movement is visible, and it is usually thin. That is the point at which a programme is either continued on evidence or stopped cheaply.

When does AI visibility actually move?

Our own page gives three windows, and they are worth separating because they are not the same thing. Long-tail Google rankings at 2 to 4 months. AI-engine visibility often at 3 to 6 months, faster than Google because directory and entity work gets picked up quickly. Meaningful traffic and leads at 4 to 9 months. Nobody can promise a specific mention in a specific engine, and our page says so in those words.

Read the third and fifth columns together, because that pairing is the whole cost question. The minimum term ends at Rs.1,20,000, in the window where our own page expects only long-tail movement. The results the programme is actually bought for sit at Rs.2,40,000 to Rs.3,60,000. Anyone deciding on a GEO retainer should be deciding about the nine-month number, and anyone selling one on a three-month promise is selling the wrong horizon.

What does the Authority tier add for Rs.35,000 more?

The per-article rows are worth explaining because they are deliberately unfair to us. They assume the entire retainer pays for articles and that the technical work, schema, entity graph, directory consistency, reporting and prompt panel are worth nothing. On that assumption Foundations tops out at Rs.10,000 an article and Authority at Rs.9,375, so the larger tier is the cheaper one per piece.

Run the step on its own and it goes further. The Rs.35,000 difference buys at least 4 more articles, which is Rs.8,750 each, below the Foundations ceiling. In that reading the digital PR, the quarterly original data piece and the quarterly deep-dive cost nothing at all, which is obviously not true in labour and is exactly why we would rather you read the deliverable list than the per-unit maths. The outreach half is what our page says the engines actually lean on when asked to recommend a vendor.

How does that compare with what the market charges?

Our page describes two common shapes for GEO pricing in India. The add-on: Rs.10,000 to Rs.30,000 bolted onto an SEO retainer that itself runs Rs.15,000 to Rs.2,00,000, so a combined Rs.25,000 to Rs.2,30,000 with no clear line between the two kinds of work. And the standalone premium programme that repackages content and PR. Foundations at Rs.40,000 sits inside that combined band, and our SEO cost breakdown covers the classic-SEO half of the comparison in detail.

The international comparison on the same page is blunter: US and UK agencies typically charge $2,000 to $5,000 a month for comparable scope, against $750 for Foundations and $1,400 for Authority. The difference is cost structure rather than effort, which is the reason international clients hire Indian agencies at all.

What is not included in the retainer?

• Paid placements or sponsored listicle slots. Any mention a publisher charges for is outside this programme by policy.
• Google Ads, Meta ads and every other kind of paid media spend.
• A website rebuild, if the platform blocks the technical fixes. The audit says so plainly and quotes it separately.
• Video, photography and custom illustration for articles and reports.
• Review generation and reputation repair, which are scoped under reputation management instead.
• GST at 18 percent, which is added to the retainer for Indian clients and is not in any figure above.

If you are costing this now, budget for month nine and treat the three-month minimum as the exit you hope not to take. Every figure here is on our published pricing page and repeated in the scope document before any payment, so the calendar above can be checked against the card rather than against a proposal.