Two London agencies sell "SEO audits". One charges £495 and ships a 21-page PDF generated from a Screaming Frog crawl. The other charges £8,400 and ships a 90-page report with competitor benchmarking, content gap analysis, and a 12-week implementation plan. Same product name. Sixteen times the price. Both buyers will tell you they got "an SEO audit".
UK SEO and GEO audits in 2026 typically cost between £500 and £15,000. The spread is wide because audit depth is not a regulated unit of work, so the headline number on the price page tells you almost nothing without context. This post lays out the bands, what each band typically includes, and how Pulse audits compare.
The five bands
Audit pricing in the UK clusters into five rough bands. Below each, what is typically included.
- £0 to £200. Free or token-priced lead magnets. A score, a few observations, often automated. Useful as a yes/no signal that something is wrong. Rarely actionable on its own. Treat it as a smoke alarm: it tells you to look, not what to do.
- £500 to £1,500. Light SEO audits. A junior or mid-level analyst runs a Screaming Frog crawl, runs PageSpeed Insights, and writes a twenty to forty page report covering crawlability, on-page basics, performance, and schema. This is the most common band on UK agency price pages and it gets a small business out of obvious trouble.
- £1,500 to £4,000. Mid-tier SEO + content audits. Adds keyword research, content gap, internal linking, sometimes a backlink review. Some providers include an "AI readiness" layer at this band, although the depth varies considerably.
- £4,000 to £8,000. Senior-led audits. Run by an experienced consultant, often three to five days of work. Methodology is usually documented. Includes competitor benchmarking and an implementation plan. Standalone GEO-focused audits start appearing in this band.
- £8,000 to £15,000+. Enterprise audits. Multi-week engagements covering technical SEO, content, link profile, brand authority, and AI surface. Includes per-engine probing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews. Usually a PDF deliverable plus implementation backlog and a 12-week delivery plan.
Why the spread is so wide
"SEO audit" is not a regulated unit of work. Two audits at very different prices can carry the same name on a price page. Three real factors drive the cost difference, and once you know them, the spread becomes much easier to navigate.
- Surface scored. SEO only, or SEO plus GEO, or SEO plus GEO plus per-engine probing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Bing Copilot. Each layer adds tooling cost and analyst time.
- Reproducibility. A scored audit using a documented rubric can be re-run next quarter on the same site to measure progress. A bespoke consultant writeup typically cannot, because the grading is implicit. Reproducible audits cost more to set up; once set up, they cost less per re-run, which is what makes quarterly programmes viable.
- Implementation backlog. A list of findings is not a plan. Audits that include effort hours, time-to-see windows, and phase ordering on every fix typically cost more to produce than a flat list, because the effort estimate is the hard part. The list is easy.
Two audits at very different prices can carry the same name. The unit of work is what you should be comparing, not the headline.
The honest GEO market
Standalone priced GEO audits are still uncommon in the UK market as of 2026. Most retainers and audits package GEO inside SEO under labels like "AI readiness" or "answer engine optimisation", which can mean anything from a checklist of crawler allow-rules through to full per-engine citation probing. The Pulse audit catalogue is one of the published priced GEO products available with public starting prices on the page, which is what allowed us to write this post in the first place.
What Pulse audits cost
Starting prices, public on every SKU page. Higher tiers are quoted at proposal stage.
- Pulse SEO Essentials. From £695. Technical SEO foundations, on-page, schema, performance. Implementation-readable list of findings.
- Pulse AI Essentials. From £895. GEO surface, llms.txt, AI crawler access, citability scoring, brand authority probe.
- Pulse Complete Essentials. From £1,095. Both surfaces in one audit. The sample at /audit/latest.html is our own site at the Complete Dominance tier, scored on the same rubric we run for clients.
Full pricing for every SKU plus retainers at /pricing. Methodology, weights, and per-category scoring at /scoring.
Three questions that clarify the buy
Before you commit to anything in the £4,000-and-up bands, ask these three. The answers usually separate the productised audits from the bespoke ones in under five minutes.
- Is there a sample? An agency selling £4,000+ audits will typically have at least one published sample. If they don't, the methodology may still be in development and you'd be paying to be the first test case.
- Is the rubric documented? A scored audit names every category and weight on a public page. Reproducible scoring is easier to compare against next quarter than a bespoke writeup that scores you on the consultant's intuition.
- Is there a delivery plan? Findings without effort hours and phase ordering are a list, not a plan. Ask whether a delivery plan ships with the audit. If yes, ask how long the longest fix takes and what depends on it.
Free first read
For a free 60-second pulse on your own domain before committing to a priced audit, the Pulse Check returns a 0 to 100 score with bucket interpretation and three personalised insights. No credit card. Same scoring philosophy as the priced audits, with a narrower probing surface.