What SEO and AEO Cost a Recruitment Agency in 2026: Every Published Price
Recruitment agency SEO in the UK costs £1,000 to £3,000 a month on a typical agency retainer, and answer engine optimisation (AEO) costs £1,500 to £3,000 a month for a small-agency programme. Those are the 2026 prices published by the firms that sell the work. Doing it through software costs £99 to £599 a month plus your own time. This page lists every price we could find with a name and a date on it, what the money buys, and what we charge ourselves.
The short answer
| Route | Monthly cost | Year one | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO agency retainer | £1,000 to £3,000 | £12,000 to £36,000 | Limivex; Kaizen SEO, September 2026 |
| AEO agency programme | £1,500 to £3,000, plus a £750 to £2,500 audit | £18,750 to £38,500 | Axiom, June 2026 |
| AI tracking tool, no service | £25 to £400 | £300 to £4,800 | Axiom, June 2026 |
| Software you run yourself | £99 to £599 | £1,188 to £7,188 | Redsun's published prices, below |
The year-one column is the monthly price multiplied by twelve, with the audit added where one is charged.
What recruitment SEO costs per month in the UK
Two firms publish a price for recruitment SEO specifically. Most UK SEO pricing guides cover every industry at once, so we have included one of those for comparison.
| Source | What it covers | Monthly price |
|---|---|---|
| Kaizen SEO, 19 September 2026 | Most recruitment agencies | £500 to £3,500 |
| Kaizen SEO | Small agency, one or two sectors | £1,000 to £3,000 |
| Kaizen SEO | Competitive, multi-location work | £2,500 to £7,500 |
| Limivex, read 2 October 2026 | Standalone SEO retainer for a recruitment firm | £1,000 to £3,000 |
| Limivex | SEO inside a full marketing function led by a fractional CMO | From £3,600 |
| Rubik Digital, updated 31 March 2026 | Any UK small business | £1,000 to £2,000 |
| Rubik Digital | Any UK growing business | £2,000 to £5,000 |
| Rubik Digital | What it calls low-cost SEO | £300 to £800 |
Recruitment sits in the upper half of the general ranges for three practical reasons. An agency site has two audiences, clients and candidates, and each needs its own pages. Job adverts expire, so a large share of the site is replaced every few weeks and has to be kept indexable. And the first page of Google for most job searches is held by Indeed, Reed and LinkedIn.
Be careful below £500 a month. Axiom puts a consultant's day at £400 to £1,200, so a £500 retainer buys about one day of somebody's time. Ask what that day is spent on before you sign.
What AEO costs for a recruitment agency
AEO is the work of getting your agency named and cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI answers a question. Nobody publishes a recruitment-specific AEO price yet. These are the UK prices for any business.
| Source | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Axiom, 30 June 2026 | AI visibility audit | £750 to £2,500 one-off |
| Axiom | SME programme | £1,500 to £3,000 a month |
| Axiom | Growth programme | £3,000 to £8,000 a month |
| Axiom | Tools only | £25 to £400 a month |
| MarGen, 29 April 2026 | Entry retainer | £1,500 to £2,500 a month |
| MarGen | Foundation retainer | £2,500 to £4,500 a month |
| MarGen | Authority retainer | £4,500 to £8,500 a month |
| MarGen | Setup fee most agencies add | £1,500 to £5,000 one-off |
The tracking tools are priced in dollars and by the number of questions they run. Peec AI lists $95 a month for 50 questions, $245 for 150 and $495 for 350, on its pricing page on 2 October 2026. Profound and AirOps showed no monthly price on theirs on the same day: Profound offers a free trial and a custom enterprise plan, and AirOps asks you to start free or talk to sales. A tracking tool reports where you stand and leaves the writing to you.
What the AI engines tell a buyer it costs
Plenty of agency owners will ask an AI engine this question before they ask a supplier. We track both questions daily across five engines. These are the answers from 2 October 2026.
| Engine | Recruitment SEO, per month | AEO for a recruitment agency, per month |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | £1,000 to £3,000 | £1,500 to £3,500 |
| Google AI Overview | £1,000 to £4,000 | £1,500 to £3,000 |
| Google AI Mode | £1,000 to £5,000 or more | $3,000 to $8,000 |
| Gemini | £1,000 to £4,000 or more | $3,000 to $8,000 |
| Perplexity | £500 to £3,500 | £3,000 to £15,000 for a UK standalone retainer |
The five agree on SEO because Kaizen, Limivex and a dozen general guides all publish similar numbers, and the engines are reading those pages. They disagree on AEO because fewer firms publish a price and half of those that do are American. A buyer who asks ChatGPT is told £1,500 to £3,500. The same buyer on Perplexity is told £3,000 to £15,000. If you are quoted for AEO, ask for the price list in writing and compare it with the two tables above.
What the money pays for
A retainer is mostly labour. On an SEO retainer the hours go on five jobs:
- Technical upkeep. Indexing, page speed, sitemaps, structured data on job adverts.
- Sector and location pages. One page per market you want to rank for.
- Content. Salary guides, market notes, answers to the questions clients and candidates search.
- Links and PR. Getting other sites to mention and link to you.
- Reporting. Rankings, traffic and enquiries each month.
An AEO programme adds the daily tracking of your questions across the engines, pages written so the answer comes first, and work on the third-party lists and directories the engines read. Our guide to AEO for recruitment agencies covers the method.
Software can take over the technical upkeep, the tracking, the reporting and most of the drafting. It cannot do the links and PR, and someone at the agency still has to decide what is worth publishing. That split is the real choice between a retainer and a platform. We set out which SEO and AEO jobs can be automated in a separate article.
How to work out what to spend
Price it in placements. Take an agency whose average permanent fee is £8,000, and swap in your own number. A £1,500 retainer costs £18,000 a year, so it has to produce three placements that would not have happened otherwise. A £599 platform costs £7,188 a year and has to produce one.
Then ask what one good page can do. At my own agency, AYM, clients kept asking what executive search in EV charging costs against a standard permanent fee. Between 17 August and 14 September 2026 the five engines answered that question 25 times and named AYM in none of them. We published a plain answer with our fee ranges on 11 September. On 21 September ChatGPT named AYM first and cited our executive search page. That is one question at one agency. It took one page and no retainer.
What Redsun charges
Our prices are published and there is no build fee. Annual billing takes 20% off each.
| Plan | Monthly | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Flare | £299 | The website, a job board synced from your CRM, candidate and client capture funnels, and the SEO toolkit: metadata, sitemap, structured data and llms.txt on every page |
| Fusion | £599 | Flare plus AEO scoring for every page, content gap analysis, AI-crawler reporting and visitor intelligence |
| Found Starter | £99 | 20 client and candidate questions asked daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, with the content to answer them |
| Found Plus | £249 | 40 questions |
| Found Pro | £549 | 60 questions |
Found is a separate subscription and works with any website. What none of these plans include is link building or digital PR, and nobody at Redsun decides your publishing plan for you. If you want that done for you, a retainer is the right purchase. Full details are on the pricing page and the Found page. If you want to see where your site stands before spending anything, the free audit scores it against the eight signals answer engines read.
Frequently asked questions
What does recruitment agency SEO cost per month in the UK?
£1,000 to £3,000 a month for a standalone agency retainer, according to Limivex and Kaizen SEO in 2026. Kaizen puts most recruitment agencies between £500 and £3,500, and competitive multi-location work at £2,500 to £7,500.
How much does answer engine optimisation cost for a recruitment agency?
UK agencies publish £1,500 to £3,000 a month for a small-business AEO programme, plus an audit at £750 to £2,500 (Axiom, June 2026). Tracking tools alone run from £25 to £400 a month.
Is AEO included in an SEO retainer?
Sometimes. MarGen and Axiom both price AEO as its own programme, and Limivex prices SEO on its own. Ask whether the quote includes tracking your questions across the AI engines, and how many questions.
Can a recruitment agency do SEO and AEO without an agency?
Yes, for everything except link building and PR. A platform handles the technical work, tracking and drafting for £99 to £599 a month. Someone in the business still has to choose what to publish and check it is true.
How many placements does SEO need to pay for itself?
Divide the annual cost by your average fee. At an £8,000 fee, a £1,500 monthly retainer needs three extra placements a year. A £599 platform needs one.