Have AI set up your SEO

What SEO help costs

Most providers charge by the month, and the average sits far above the common price.

Ahrefs asked 439 SEO providers what they charge, and 78.2% of them said they sell monthly retainers. The most common answer in that Ahrefs survey was $501 to $1,000 a month, picked by 20.4% of respondents. The mean across all 439 was $2,917 a month in the same Ahrefs survey, because a few big agencies pull the average up. Ahrefs sells SEO software, not agency work, so it is not quoting its own rates.

Local SEO is the kind a contractor or a cleaning company buys, and it costs less. The Ahrefs survey put the mean local SEO retainer at $1,557 a month, with agencies at $1,819 and freelancers at $1,150. Hourly work in that same Ahrefs survey clustered at $75 to $100 an hour, and 1 in 10 providers charged over $150. One-off projects most often ran $2,501 to $5,000, again per Ahrefs.

Basis: every SEO row comes from the Ahrefs SEO pricing survey of 439 providers, and I multiplied the monthly figures by 12 and rounded.

The setup a machine does

A machine can write the sitemap, the tags and the submissions in an afternoon, and Google says most of it is only a hint.

A sitemap is a list of your pages. Google's sitemap documentation caps one file at 50 MB or 50,000 URLs, which a contractor site will never reach. That same Google documentation says a sitemap is merely a hint, with 0 guarantee that Google will download it or crawl the pages in it.

A canonical tag tells Google which copy of a page is the real one. Google's documentation on duplicate URLs counts 2 strong signals, a redirect and a rel=canonical tag, and 1 weak signal, which is being listed in the sitemap. The same Google documentation says most sites will do just fine without setting a canonical at all, and that Google already prefers HTTPS over HTTP on its own.

IndexNow is a way to tell search engines you changed a page. The IndexNow documentation says one HTTP POST can carry up to 10,000 URLs and that you need 1 key file hosted at your site root. The same IndexNow documentation says a 200 response means the engine received the URL, not that it will index it. IndexNow's home page lists 5 engines that use it, Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep, and Google is not on that list, so IndexNow does nothing for Google.

Skip the dead markup

The markup most tools still add no longer shows in Google.

Structured data is code that labels your page for search engines. Google's structured data gallery lists 29 supported types, counted on Google's Search Gallery page, and it covers Local business, Organization, Review snippet, Article and Job posting. FAQ and HowTo are not on that list of 29. Google's FAQPage documentation says the feature no longer appears in Google Search, and Google retired that documentation page.

So if a tool offers to add FAQ markup, that is busywork. Google's page on AI features and your website, as Google describes it, says there are 0 extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews beyond the normal Search Essentials. There is no secret file. The setup is the same setup.

Write what gets quoted

Numbers, sources and quotes are what make an answer engine cite a page.

A team from Princeton, Georgia Tech, Allen AI and IIT Delhi tested this on 10,000 queries in a paper called GEO. They found that rewriting a page to add sources, statistics and quotations raised how often the page was cited in AI answers by up to 40%, and they said the effect varied by domain. That is a lab number about citations, not about phone calls. But it points the same way this site points, which is to put real numbers and named sources on every page you own.

What stays human

The machine writes the code, and you supply the proof that you are real.

Google Business Profile costs $0 to list, per Google Business Profile Help, and Google's help page describes verifying by recording a video walkthrough of your business. A machine cannot stand in your shop and film. It cannot earn a review from the customer whose furnace you fixed last night. It cannot take a photo of your truck, and it cannot decide which towns you are willing to drive to.

It also cannot say what you know. The thing the GEO paper found gets quoted is a source, a number or a quote, and the quote has to come from a person who has done the work. Write that part yourself, badly if you must. Let the machine fix the spelling.

What we got wrong

I started this thinking setup was the whole job. Then I read Google's own pages. Google's sitemap documentation calls a sitemap merely a hint. Google's duplicate URL documentation says a canonical is optional. Google's FAQPage documentation says FAQ rich results are gone. IndexNow does not reach Google at all, by IndexNow's own participant list.

So the technical part a machine does in an hour matters less than I thought on a small site. The price table above is also what 439 providers told Ahrefs they charge, not what a small shop pays, and the mean is pulled up by big agencies. I still think you should do the setup. I now think it is the cheap part, and the human part is the whole game.

The prompt to copy

Paste this into any assistant and give it your site.

Here is my website address, my business name, my trade and the towns I serve. Check that every page has one title, one description and a heading that names the service and the town. Build a sitemap that lists every page. Add Local business and Organization structured data with my name, address, phone and hours. Do not add FAQ or HowTo markup. Then read each service page and tell me where I could add a real number, a named source, or a sentence in my own words that a machine could quote. List each change as a plain sentence I can approve.

Run that prompt yourself tonight and approve the changes one at a time. If you would rather not, VuseDesk does the website and SEO install for you, and the consult is $199 by VuseDesk's own price list.