Price AI visibility work the way you price any service with uncertain outcomes: on the scope you control. Count prompts, engines, locations, competitors, and deliverables, add your costs, apply a margin, and package the result. Do not price or promise on being mentioned, because you cannot guarantee it.
What drives the work
Before you quote, list the variables that change how much work a client needs. These are the ones that matter most.
- Prompts tracked. The more questions you monitor, the more there is to review. A local business may need 30. A national brand with several product lines may need several hundred.
- Engines covered. Doily tracks 9 AI engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and DeepSeek. Not every client needs all of them in front of them every week, but each one adds review time.
- Locations. Answers can differ by place, so each city or region you report on is its own set of results.
- Competitors. Each one you compare adds analysis.
- Cadence. Daily tracking is automated and cheap to run. Weekly human review is not.
- Deliverables. Reporting only, or reporting plus page fixes, new content, technical work, and outreach.
Notice that the first 5 are monitoring and the last is action. Clients often assume tracking is the service. Tracking is the input. The action is where results come from, and it is where most of your hours go.
Start from a cost floor
Work out what delivering the service costs you, then set the price above it. The formula is simple:
Price = cost divided by (1 minus target margin)
For example, a cost of $525 and a target gross margin of 40% gives a price of $875, since 525 divided by 0.6 is 875.
Here is how to build the cost, using invented numbers for the staff side so you can swap in your own.
- Tool cost per client. On Doily’s Agency plan, $499 a month covers 20 client workspaces, which works out to roughly $25 per workspace per month if all 20 are used. Credits are pooled across workspaces, and extra levels add capacity. Your real figure depends on how many clients you carry and how heavily they use credits.
- Staff hours per month. Suppose a client takes 10 hours: 2 for review and reporting, 6 for page and content work, 2 for a call and account management.
- Staff cost. At an internal cost of $50 an hour, that is $500.
- Total cost. $500 plus $25 is $525.
- Price. At a 40% target margin, $875.
These hours and rates are examples, not benchmarks. Use your own time tracking. If you do not have it, track 2 or 3 clients for a month before you set a price list, because an estimate made from memory is usually low.
Three package shapes
Packages work better than hourly quotes because they let a client choose a scope. These are shapes, not price points. Set your own numbers from the cost floor.
Monitor. Tracking a fixed set of prompts and engines, a monthly report in the client’s language, and a short call. Fit for clients who have an SEO provider already and want to see the AI picture, or who are just starting out.
Improve. Everything in Monitor, plus a monthly allotment of work: fixes to the pages most likely to be cited, content updates, and technical changes such as crawl access. This is the shape most clients end up wanting, because it connects the numbers to action.
Lead. More prompts, more locations or competitors, a higher work allotment, and a faster cadence of review. Fit for multi-location businesses and brands in competitive categories.
Make the differences between tiers visible in a table, based on the scope drivers above, not on vague words like “advanced.” Each tier should list how many prompts, engines, locations, and competitors it includes, what is reported, and how many hours or deliverables of work are covered.
Add-ons and setup
Charge for the things that scale with the client:
- Additional locations or competitors.
- Extra prompt sets for a new product line.
- A one-time baseline audit and setup, which covers building the prompt set, recording the starting point, and checking crawl access. It takes real time and the client benefits from having it as a defined deliverable.
- Content production, priced separately from monitoring.
Retainer, project, or both
A monthly retainer fits ongoing monitoring and steady improvement work, because the value comes from watching a measure over weeks. A fixed-fee project fits the baseline audit and any one-time build, such as restructuring a set of pages. Most agencies end up with both: a project fee to start, then a retainer.
Set a minimum term, such as 3 months, because 1 month of data cannot show a trend and clients who leave early never see the point of the work. Then revisit your price after 6 months with real hours in hand, and adjust the tiers if the work is taking more or less time than you assumed.
What not to promise
Do not promise a rank, a mention count, or a share of voice number by a date. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so a single result says little and a target for one is a promise you cannot keep. Promise the work, the method, and the reporting.
In the contract, say plainly:
- Which prompts, engines, and locations are covered.
- How often you report.
- That results in AI answers vary between runs and are reported as rates over many checks.
- What counts as in scope and what is billed extra.
Putting that on paper protects you and sets the client’s expectations before the first report.
Talking about price
Anchor the conversation to what the client gets, not to your tools. A client does not need to hear about credits or workspaces. They need to hear: “We track 30 questions your customers ask across 9 AI engines, report monthly on how often you are named and cited compared with 3 competitors, and fix the pages that hold you back.” Then the price.
If a prospect compares you with a cheaper monitoring-only service, say so out loud. Monitoring is a fair product. The difference is whether anyone acts on what it finds.
If you do not want to hire
If you want to offer the service without adding staff, an agency can use Skyfield Digital as a white-label fulfillment partner through Wholesale with Skyfield Digital. Skyfield acts as your white-label fulfillment partner, so the work is delivered under your brand. That changes your cost line, so redo the floor calculation with what the arrangement costs you in place of staff hours.
Our guide on pricing AI visibility services covers the same ground as a reference, and the guide on monthly SEO reports covers what the reporting should contain.
