How Much Does GEO Cost in Switzerland? Prices in CHF and Pricing Models (2026)

As of November 2026 · Prices collected on November 6, 2026 · Matthias Carigiet, founder of Carigiet GEO · publisher of the Schweizer KI-Empfehlungsindex

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting AI assistants such as ChatGPT to recommend a company. Based on the prices providers publish, GEO in Switzerland costs CHF 99 to CHF 3,000 and up per month for an ongoing GEO retainer, and CHF 99 to CHF 10,000 and up one-time for an audit or a project. Providers bill in five models: a monthly retainer (a fixed monthly fee), a one-time audit (an analysis of where you stand today), a project price, a package of search engine optimization (SEO) and GEO, and hourly billing or a custom quote. Where a price mentions VAT, the Swiss value added tax, it is quoted excluding VAT.

At Carigiet GEO, we collected the published prices of 46 providers on November 6, 2026: 38 have their own GEO service and a Swiss presence, and 30 of those publish at least one price. We left our own price, from CHF 1,800 per month plus VAT, out of the count; below, we compare it on the same criteria.

Key takeaways

What do Swiss GEO providers charge?

What GEO costs depends first on whether a provider only measures and advises or also does the work, so the table separates prices by service and by model. Implementation means the provider writes and publishes content, works on directory listings and sources (the websites AI assistants draw on when they put an answer together) and makes technical changes. Advisory means analysis and recommendations that you carry out yourself.

Where providers measure, they do it with buyer questions: the questions buyers put to an AI assistant, such as someone looking for a fiduciary firm (accounting and tax) in Zurich.

Service	Model	Range in CHF	VAT	What is included	Source
Free AI check	entry point, not a pricing model	0	not applicable	A sample with a few buyer questions, for example 6 questions to 4 AI assistants, each asked three times	Survey, 12 providers
Audit or analysis	one-time	99 to 10,000 and up, median 1,900	4 excluding, 19 not stated	Where you stand today plus an action plan, no implementation	Survey, 23 prices from 17 providers
Advisory without implementation	monthly	290 to 1,190, median 640	4 excluding	Measurement, report and recommendations; you or your agency do the implementation	Survey, 4 prices
Agency with partial implementation	monthly	99 to 1,800 and up, median 980	2 excluding, 4 not stated	Measurement plus limited work, for example on existing pages or one measure per month	Survey, 6 prices
Agency with implementation	monthly	490 to 1,900 and up, median 1,230	2 excluding, 4 not stated	Measurement plus content, technical changes and directory listings	Survey, 6 prices
SEO plus GEO package	monthly	390 to 11,200 and up, median 1,833	10 excluding, 7 not stated	Classic search engine optimization with a GEO component	Survey, 17 prices from 9 providers
Project	one-time	990 to 10,000 and up, median 2,890	5 excluding, 10 not stated	A defined piece of implementation, for example content or technical work, some with a follow-up measurement	Survey, 15 prices from 12 providers
Hourly rate, benchmark from traditional SEO	hourly	145 to 180 per hour	not stated	Typical rates for junior and senior SEO specialists; no GEO figures	Gryps, typical SEO rates (in German)

“Survey” stands for the Carigiet GEO survey: published prices of 38 Swiss GEO providers, read on November 6, 2026. Median: half of the prices are below it, half above. “And up” appears where the highest price is a starting price. Quarterly prices are converted to monthly.

The ranges are list prices that providers publish themselves, not a representative statistic of the fees clients actually pay. 8 of the 38 providers publish no GEO price and quote on request. How many providers do so across the whole Swiss market the survey cannot show, because 54 companies from our market monitoring have not been checked yet.

Four more monthly prices (from CHF 190, from CHF 750, from CHF 1,500 and from CHF 3,000) do not say whether the provider does the work; they count toward the 20 retainer prices but do not appear in any row of the table. We also kept three website offers with a GEO component out of the ranges (CHF 1,920 one-time, CHF 349 and CHF 649 per month in a website subscription), along with three package prices that do not say whether they are monthly or one-time, and one total of over CHF 10,000 for the first 6 to 12 months.

55 of 86 prices say nothing about VAT, the other 31 are quoted excluding VAT, and none includes it. The standard VAT rate in Switzerland is 8.1 percent (Swiss Federal Tax Administration, Swiss VAT rates) and has applied since January 1, 2024 (SME Portal of the Swiss Confederation, Increase in VAT as of January 1, 2024). Before you compare two proposals, put both on the same basis, excluding VAT.

Where do the figures come from?

Carigiet GEO is a consultancy in Uetikon am See, canton of Zurich, that gets Swiss B2B companies recommended by AI assistants such as ChatGPT. Every month, Carigiet GEO publishes the Schweizer KI-Empfehlungsindex (Swiss AI Recommendation Index), and it publishes its own price on its pricing page.

Our price survey has a cut-off date: November 6, 2026. The starting point was 93 companies that we monitor as GEO providers or that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews (the AI summaries above Google’s search results) named on November 4, 2026 when asked what GEO costs. We checked 39 of them and 7 more providers we found by searching for GEO prices, 46 in total.

• Counted: providers with their own GEO service and a Swiss presence, n = 38. For 37 of them, the legal notice or the website lists a registered office in Switzerland.
• Excluded: 8 providers, namely comparison and advice portals, companies without a registered office in Switzerland, one agency without its own GEO service and one website that could not be reached on the cut-off date. Also not counted: pure software subscriptions without advisory, packages that include Google advertising, and the Carigiet GEO retainer.
• Counted as a price: a fixed amount or a starting price on the provider’s website, each price tier separately. Free checks are counted separately; “price on request” counts as no price.
• Recorded for each price: model, amount, VAT, implementation, measurement scope, setup fee, contract term and statements about guarantees. That gives 86 prices in CHF, not counting the free checks.

If anything, the share of 30 out of 38 overstates how many providers publish a price: we found the 7 added providers by searching for prices, so they turned up precisely because they show one. We do not name providers, because the survey is meant to make proposals comparable, not to rate the companies behind them.

What pricing models do GEO agencies use?

GEO agencies work with five pricing models: monthly retainer, one-time audit, project price, SEO plus GEO package, and hourly billing or a custom quote. In initial calls with Carigiet GEO, prospects most often arrive with one assumption: GEO comes with the SEO package, and a one-time audit is enough because they will do the rest themselves. Two of the five models cater to exactly that assumption: the SEO plus GEO package and the one-time audit.

Monthly retainer

A retainer is a fixed monthly fee for ongoing measurement and work. It suits companies that want to get recommended by AI assistants over several months and have a budget for it. The 20 published retainer prices from 14 providers range from CHF 99 to CHF 3,000 and up per month; 6 of the 14 providers start at CHF 690 or less, 8 at CHF 750 or more.

Look at the setup fee and the contract term too. 2 of the 14 providers charge a setup fee or require a prior purchase (CHF 2,100 and CHF 1,400), 2 explicitly rule out such a fee, and 10 say nothing about it. 3 require a minimum term of 3, 6 or 12 months, 4 state that you can cancel monthly, and 7 do not state a term.

One-time audit

An audit analyzes where you stand and delivers an action plan. It suits companies that will do the work themselves or with their existing agency. 23 published prices from 17 providers range from CHF 99 for an automated report to CHF 10,000 and up; leaving out the automated offer at CHF 99, 9 of 22 audits cost CHF 1,500 or less.

An audit is a snapshot: one measurement, not a trend. At Carigiet GEO, we see that an audit on its own produces a task list that usually does not get done. Before you buy one, find out who will work through the list and whether anyone re-measures afterwards.

At least 12 of the 38 providers offer a free AI check as an entry point. It asks a few buyer questions and does not replace repeated measurement.

Project price

A project price is a fixed amount for a defined piece of work, for example new content, technical changes to the website or directory listings. It suits companies with a clearly defined gap. 15 published project prices from 12 providers range from CHF 990 to CHF 10,000 and up, with a median of CHF 2,890. Some projects include a follow-up measurement after four weeks to three months; without one, you do not learn whether the work had an effect.

SEO plus GEO package

In a package, GEO is one part of a retainer for traditional search engine optimization. It suits companies that buy SEO anyway and want one provider for both. 17 package prices from 9 providers range from CHF 390 to CHF 11,200 and up per month, with a median of CHF 1,833.

13 of the 17 package prices describe a measurement in AI assistants; one names only tools for Google Search as its data source. Ask anyway which part of the fee goes to GEO, which assistants the provider measures and how often.

Hourly billing or custom quote

With hourly billing, providers charge for hours, days or sessions; with a custom quote, they price the work after an initial call. That suits workshops, one-off consultations and projects whose scope is still open. 4 such prices from 3 providers are published: CHF 190 per hour, CHF 400 per session, from CHF 1,200 per day and from CHF 3,000 for a half-day training session.

Carigiet GEO found no neutral benchmark for GEO hourly rates in the survey. The procurement platform Gryps lists CHF 145 per hour for junior and CHF 180 for senior specialists in traditional search engine optimization, without saying how many agencies it asked or when (Gryps, Kosten für SEO-Agentur, in German).

What determines the price of GEO?

Scope determines the price: how much the provider measures and how much of the work it does itself. Seven drivers make the difference:

• Number of buyer questions. In the industry, they are called prompts. Where providers put a number on the scope, it runs from 10 buyer questions in a one-time sample to 350 questions a day; only a minority of the prices state a number at all.
• Number of AI assistants. Paid offers name two to five assistants, most often ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
• Measurement frequency. One-time, monthly or daily. Questions times assistants times measurements gives how many answers a provider evaluates per month.
• Number of languages. One provider charges an extra CHF 390 per month for each additional language.
• Number of service areas. A service area is one service with its own buyer questions and its own competitors.
• Scope of implementation. Content, technical work, sources and directories. Retainers without implementation have a median of CHF 640, those with implementation CHF 1,230, based on only 4 and 6 prices.
• Term, setup and third-party costs. Ask whether directory listings and memberships are included in the price or billed separately.

A SparkToro study conducted with Gumshoe.ai, a company that sells tools for measuring AI visibility, shows why frequency matters. 600 volunteers put 12 recommendation questions to ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI a total of 2,961 times (November to December 2025). The chance that two answers named the same list of brands was below 1 in 100 (SparkToro, January 2026). Individual brands still appeared reliably: for questions about headphones, the big headphone brands each appeared in 55 to 77 out of 100 of the 994 answers. Repeated measurement makes the results reliable; a moderate scope can be enough for that.

For service areas and languages, Carigiet GEO works with a simple rule of thumb. A company needs a second service area when the service has its own competitors and matters to the business. Language matters less to AI assistants, because they handle several languages well; a second language pays off when you want to reach, for example, English-speaking buyers in Switzerland. That does not mean translating every buyer question. It means adding the questions buyers ask differently in that language, because they use other terms, come from another culture or use their own business vocabulary.

What low monthly prices leave out

The four lowest monthly prices in the survey (CHF 99, 190, 290 and 300) cut back mostly on implementation:

• 2 of the 4 cap the number of questions measured, at 20 or 50.
• 1 does no implementation at all; that stays with you or your agency.
• 1 works only on existing pages, explicitly excludes new pages, additional languages, link building (getting other websites to link to yours) and paid listings, and bills advisory-only work separately by the hour.
• 2 require another product first, for example an active SEO retainer or a prior website check at CHF 1,200.

A low price does not automatically mean less measurement. The cheapest offer without implementation (CHF 290) measures 50 questions a day across four assistants and delivers a monthly report, while several more expensive retainers between CHF 750 and CHF 3,000 state no measurement scope at all.

One simple yardstick comes from the eight verifiable criteria for choosing a GEO agency: divide the monthly price by an hourly rate. At the Gryps benchmark of CHF 180 per hour, CHF 300 buys about 1.7 hours of specialist work per month, and CHF 1,800 about 10 hours.

What does GEO cost at Carigiet GEO?

The Carigiet GEO monthly retainer costs from CHF 1,800 per month plus VAT for the first service area. The terms, as read on our pricing page on November 6, 2026:

• Each additional service area costs CHF 1,000 per month, and so does each additional language.
• The add-on modules AI reputation protection and Recommended as an employer cost CHF 500 per month each, available only with an active retainer.
• There is no setup fee and no minimum term. You can cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current retainer month; the monthly fee is invoiced in advance.
• There is no paid audit; the upfront analysis of your website is free.
• Your agency or your IT team implements the technical specifications. If you have neither, we take this on as website operations for CHF 250 per month, plus a one-time CHF 500 to migrate a website of up to 25 pages.

The retainer includes up to 20 buyer questions per service area, put daily to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, which makes up to 120 answers per service area per day. It also includes four pieces of content per month per service area, the work on sources and directories, and a weekly call with the lead partner, your dedicated point of contact. You pay for directory listings and memberships directly, within a cooperation budget: the amount for such spending that we set together at the start.

Two worked examples:

• Fiduciary firm in Zurich, one service area, German: CHF 1,800 per month plus VAT.
• IT service provider in Zug whose buyers ask in German and in English, one service area in both languages: CHF 1,800 plus CHF 1,000 for the second language, for a total of CHF 2,800 per month plus VAT.

In the table above, the retainer falls in the row “Agency with implementation”, monthly. Of the 14 retainer starting prices in the survey, 12 are lower than CHF 1,800, one is the same and one is higher.

Carigiet GEO sells no paid audit and no packages and charges no setup fee, because being recommended is not a switch you flip. A company that wants to see results after six months has to clear every blocker by then: the audit, the content, the technical fixes and the talks with potential partners outside its own website. We tried to put together a smaller package, but none of the smaller versions would have produced results within a useful time frame. Ongoing measurement comes on top, because AI assistants keep changing and because, in the end, a company is measured only against its competitors.

Beyond the retainer fee, in our experience we need three things from you: a weekly call of up to 30 minutes in which we go through what is done and what is blocked, expert input for better content, and the review and approval of each piece of content. We cannot guarantee recommendations either. The risk is covered by cancellability: monthly, and everything created stays with you.

How do you compare two GEO proposals?

Two proposals become comparable when you ask both providers the same five questions:

1. Is it only an audit, or does someone do the work, and who? An audit without implementation delivers a task list, and the work stays with you.
2. Is a baseline measurement taken first and then repeated daily in every assistant, always with the same buyer questions, the same assistants and the same market? Only then can a change over several weeks be shown. Work out how many answers are evaluated per month.
3. How are the buyer questions chosen? The questions that count are the ones with revenue behind them, not the most popular ones.
4. How does the provider measure success? Meaningful goals are recommendations in the answers, your website as a cited source, your share of the answers and inquiries from this channel, not “number 1 in AI”.
5. What costs extra, and what term applies? Setup, additional languages, additional content and third-party costs change the monthly price; 10 of the 14 retainer providers say nothing about setup.

These warning signs in a proposal deserve a follow-up question:

• Structured data (machine-readable company details in the website’s code), an llms.txt (a text file meant to describe the website to AI systems) or other files made only for AI are sold as the main lever.
• A content mill: “We’ll write 50 GEO articles”, with no plan for how anything is measured.
• A dashboard that never changes what gets done the following week.
• No connection to the fundamentals of traditional search engine optimization.
• A score from a black box that you cannot trace yourself.

Checkpoint	Proposal A	Proposal B
Monthly price excluding VAT (standard rate 8.1 percent)	[CHF per month]	[CHF per month]
Setup fee and minimum term	[CHF one-time, months]	[CHF one-time, months]
Audit only or implementation, and who does the work?	[provider’s answer]	[provider’s answer]
Buyer questions times AI assistants times measurements	[answers evaluated per month]	[answers evaluated per month]
How are the buyer questions chosen?	[provider’s answer]	[provider’s answer]
How is success measured?	[recommendations, cited source, share, inquiries]	[recommendations, cited source, share, inquiries]
What costs extra?	[additional languages, content, third-party costs]	[additional languages, content, third-party costs]

Template to fill in: the same checkpoints for both proposals, prices excluding VAT.

No reputable provider sells guaranteed positions in AI answers, at any price, because AI assistants keep changing. None of the 38 providers in the survey promises one, although one advertises a visibility guarantee for ChatGPT that promises measurable visibility, not a particular position. 11 explicitly rule out guarantees, and one invoices its fee only once a first mention has been documented. The companies behind the assistants also keep advertising apart from the answer. According to OpenAI, ads run on separate systems, and advertisers cannot shape, rank or alter ChatGPT’s responses (OpenAI Help Center, Ads in ChatGPT). Google states that paid advertising does not influence the answers its AI generates in Search (Google Ads Help, About ads in AI-powered experiences in Google Search). Anthropic stated on February 4, 2026 that Claude’s responses will not be influenced by advertisers (Anthropic, Claude is a space to think).

Frequently asked questions about GEO costs

How much does a GEO audit cost in Switzerland?

A one-time GEO audit in Switzerland costs between CHF 99 and CHF 10,000 and up, with a median of CHF 1,900, according to 23 published prices from 17 providers. Leaving out the automated report at CHF 99, 9 of 22 audits cost CHF 1,500 or less.

Is GEO included in my SEO package?

With some providers, yes. Of 17 published prices for SEO plus GEO packages (CHF 390 to CHF 11,200 and up per month), 13 describe a measurement in AI assistants. Ask which part of the fee goes to GEO.

What do GEO consultants charge per hour?

Few publish an hourly price: 3 of 38 providers list hourly, daily or per-session prices, ranging from CHF 190 per hour to CHF 3,000 and up for a half-day training session. For traditional search engine optimization, Gryps lists CHF 145 to CHF 180 per hour.

Is a free AI visibility check worth it?

A free check shows whether an assistant names your company for a handful of buyer questions. Because the same question almost never returns the same list of brands twice, it is a snapshot, not a trend.

Do Swiss GEO prices include VAT?

Most prices do not say: 55 of 86 prices in the survey say nothing about VAT, and the other 31 exclude it. At the standard rate of 8.1 percent, CHF 1,000 excluding VAT is CHF 1,081 including VAT.

Does it cost extra to be measured in English as well as German?

Usually, yes. One provider in the survey charges CHF 390 per month for each additional language; at Carigiet GEO, each additional language counts as a separate service area at CHF 1,000 per month, because buyer questions and competitors differ by language. The English questions are not a translation of the German set, only the questions English-speaking buyers phrase differently.

How many months of GEO should I budget for?

Plan for several months. On the timeline Carigiet GEO works with, the first reliable movement typically shows between day 60 and day 90. A durable position follows after three to six months for established brands, and after six to twelve months or longer for young domains, meaning new websites.

Are ChatGPT ads the same as GEO?

No. Ads in ChatGPT are labeled, shown separately from the answer and, according to OpenAI, run on separate systems; GEO works on getting the answer itself to recommend your company. The ad is rented. The recommendation is earned.

Where do you stand today?

30 of 38 Swiss GEO providers show a price, but what makes a proposal comparable is what it measures and what work it includes. Whether ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews recommend your company today is what the free AI Recommendation Audit from Carigiet GEO shows: for which buyer questions you are recommended, who is recommended instead, and which first steps your website and your sources still need. The report usually arrives by email within 15 to 30 minutes, free and without obligation. It is a snapshot across two assistants and does not replace repeated measurement.

Nobody can promise you a guaranteed recommendation. Any provider can give you a price you can measure against its scope.