The short answerIn 2026, SEO audits cost $97 for TAMEYO's automated scan, $250 to $2,000 for productized and solo-expert audits priced in dollars, and $3,000 to $10,000 and up for agency strategic audits, on prices vendors publish. Illucrum sells a fixed $1000 technical audit for before or after a migration. Migration projects are quoted. LoudFace publishes no standalone SEO audit price.
| Audit band | Price as published | What it includes | Best for | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Automated scan | $97 for TAMEYO's product; TAMEYO's own band is $47 to $297 | Tool output with no human prioritisation | A quick health check before you talk to anyone | 5 minutes for TAMEYO's scan |
| Freelancer or productized audit | $250 to $2,000 (UK sellers: £99 to £2,000) | A recorded teardown or a written report, from one expert or an agency team, scope fixed in advance | A Series A site with one marketing domain and an in-house owner for the fixes | 3 days to 4 weeks; the Rock The Rankings Power Hour is a single 60-minute recorded session |
| Agency strategic audit | $3,000 to $10,000 and up | Technical, content, competitor and link review plus a roadmap | A team with docs, integrations or a JavaScript site, picking a direction before a retainer | 72 hours to 45 days; WebFX says a site with more than 100 pages can take longer |
| Enterprise or migration audit | $1000 for Illucrum's technical audit, sold for before or after a migration. Migration project work and agency large-site audits are quoted; sellers' estimates run from £2,500 to $30,000 and up | Large-site crawl, redirect mapping, pre and post migration checks | A replatform, a domain move or a site with tens of thousands of URLs | 3 to 5 days for Illucrum's audit; otherwise quoted per project |
Prices as published on each vendor's own site, read on 28 October 2026. In the enterprise row, Illucrum's technical audit is the only fixed price; the rest are sellers' published estimates.
Which vendors publish an SEO audit price in 2026?
Every price below was read on the vendor's own site on 28 October 2026, behind the pricing link rather than from a roundup. One audit price is shown crossed out: SEO Roast draws a bar through a $5,000 figure beside its $550 private roast. That card sits opposite one headed "The bad audit way", which reads "Pay $2k-$5k to get buried in a giant PDF", so read the $5,000 as the price of the PDF audit it argues against, rather than a former SEO Roast price. Currencies are left as each vendor publishes them.
| Vendor | Price as published | Unit | What it buys | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TAMEYO Group | $97 | One-time, automated | Automated Visibility Audit | 5 minutes |
| Web Pulse SEO (UK) | From £99 to £499 | One-time | Technical to full audit, "Best for: SMEs, growing businesses, and e-commerce stores" | 3 to 7 days |
| SEO Roast | From $250 public, $550 private | One-time | Recorded video teardown | 3-5 business days |
| Loganix | $500 Mini, $750 Full | One-time, white label | On-page, keywords, URL equity, competitors. Full adds backlink and keyword gaps, content, page speed and schema | 10 days |
| Rock The Rankings (B2B SaaS) | $500 Power Hour; AI Search Blueprint from $10,000 on its card, $15,000 in its FAQ | One-time | Recorded founder teardown with an action plan; a 30-day technical, content and AI-surface teardown with a 90-day roadmap | 60-minute recorded session / 30 days |
| Shiny Octopus | USD 500–1,000 | One-time | Typical institutional or service site. Complex sites get a quote | Not stated |
| SEOProfy | From $800; from $4,000 with strategy | One-time | Audit; complete audit with strategy and action plan | 2-4 weeks |
| Illucrum (solo consultant, six audits) | $2000 SaaS audit; $1000 technical audit | One-time | 54 points (6 on AI search) or 36 points for the technical audit, sold for before or after a migration. Written audit, fixes not included | 5 to 8 days / 3 to 5 days |
| Koozai (UK) | From £1,000 to £2,000; full digital audit from £5,000 to £8,000 | One-time | Technical, on-page and performance; the full audit covers every channel | 8–14 hours of audit time (35–56 for the full audit); no delivery date stated |
| Upgrow | Starting from: Setup: $3,000 | Setup fee on a monthly SEO management plan, shown under "Transparent Audit Pricing" | Audit and 90-day roadmap; the audit page's SEO Management card shows $6,000 a month, and the pricing page's SEO/AEO Management card shows the same setup at $5,000 a month on an initial 12-month agreement | 72 hours |
| DerivateX (B2B SaaS) | $3,500 | One-time diagnostic | Audit, query map and content strategy, Google and AI search | Two weeks |
| SEO.com / WebFX | Starting at $8,600 (SEO.com's FAQ says $8,500) | One-time | 360 audit, up to 70 pages, up to 3 competitors, up to 50 keywords. Link strategy $500 extra, link audit $1,200 extra | 45 days |
| Clio Websites (CAD) | No fixed audit price; from $100 CAD per hour | Hourly or monthly | Technical audits included in plans from $1,500 CAD a month | n/a |
SimpleTiger, OuterBox, Victorious, Embarque and Gripped, the five other agencies whose pricing or audit pages were checked, publish no standalone SEO audit price at all. SimpleTiger offers a free AI search audit, Gripped a free audit, and OuterBox describes its audit as the step "before choosing the right monthly package".
Three rows need a second look. SEO.com's own page says "Starting at $8,600" in its opening and "start at $8,500" in its FAQ, so budget for the higher figure. Rock The Rankings prices its 30-day audit sprint "from $10,000" on the pricing card, while the FAQ on the same page names the "AI Search Audit ($15,000, a 30-day sprint)", so ask which figure applies. And Upgrow puts its $3,000 setup on an SEO Management card at $6,000 a month on its audit page, and on an SEO/AEO Management card at $5,000 a month on its pricing page, so ask which plan the audit belongs to.
What does each SEO audit price band buy?
Automated scan: $47 to $297
TAMEYO's own tier list puts automated audits at "$47-$297 one-time", and its own Visibility Audit costs $97 and arrives in 5 minutes. What you get is a crawler's opinion. NP Digital draws the line bluntly: "Under $500 usually means it's automated."
A scan is fine for spotting broken links and missing tags. It will not tell you which warning on a long list costs you pipeline, and that ranking of problems is the part you are paying a human for.
Freelancer or productized audit: $250 to $2,000
This band is crowded, and the deliverables differ more than the prices. Two of the cheapest products here are recordings. SEO Roast sells a video teardown from $250 (public) or $550 (private) with "No sales call.", and Rock The Rankings charges $500 for a recorded Power Hour with a "Prioritized action plan, yours to keep". Loganix sells a $500 Mini Audit and a $750 Full Audit, both with a 10-day turnaround. Shiny Octopus quotes USD 500–1,000 for a typical service site. SEOProfy is the slow one: it starts at $800 and says its audit process "spans 2-4 weeks". Two UK sellers sit at the edges in sterling: Web Pulse SEO from £99 to £499, and Koozai's SEO audit from £1,000 to £2,000.
The SaaS-specific product here is Illucrum's: $2000 for a SaaS SEO audit "For software sold through a trial, demo or freemium plan", 54 points with 6 on AI search, delivered in 5 to 8 days. Its $1000 technical audit is pitched at sites "after a migration or an unexplained drop." Both list "Implementing the fixes." under what is not included.
For a Series A team with one marketing site and someone in-house to ship the fixes, this band is usually enough.
Agency strategic audit: $3,000 to $10,000 and up
At this price you are buying a plan, so check first whether the plan comes without a retainer attached. DerivateX's does: "a standalone $3,500 diagnostic if you want the audit, query map, and content strategy before committing to a retainer", delivered in two weeks. If you then move to a retainer within 30 days, DerivateX credits the full $3,500 against your first month. Upgrow's audit page shows its price as "Setup: $3,000" under "Transparent Audit Pricing", on an SEO Management plan that also carries a monthly fee, and shows no price for the audit on its own. SEOProfy's complete audit with strategy and action planning starts at $4,000, and SEO.com, WebFX's site, starts at $8,600 for a 360 audit delivered in 45 days. The top of the band is the AI Search Blueprint from Rock The Rankings, a 30-day sprint with a "90-day roadmap with ROI scenarios", priced from $10,000 on the card and at $15,000 in the same page's FAQ.
Read the page cap before you compare. WebFX's $8,600 audit reviews "Up to 70 pages", roughly $123 a page. A SaaS marketing site with docs, integration pages and a blog will usually pass 70 pages, so ask what happens to the pages past the cap.
Enterprise or migration audit: one fixed price, then estimates
Illucrum is the one fixed price here. Its $1000 technical audit page says it fits "before or after a migration", the audit is "Checked from the outside, the way search engines see the site", and its price does not change with size, because "Large sites and catalogs are reviewed by page template and sample".
Past that, none of the vendors checked publishes a fixed price for the migration work itself, meaning the redirect map and the crawls before and after launch, or for an agency audit of a large site. What exists are estimates. NP Digital lists "$10K–$20K+: Enterprise-Level Audits", TAMEYO puts an enterprise technical audit at "$10,000-$30,000+.", and WebFX says "comprehensive audits of large sites can run $12,001 to $15,000", which is one answer band in its buyer survey, chosen by 2.59% of respondents. Web Pulse SEO, a UK seller, puts an enterprise agency at £2,500 to £5,000 and up. Treat the NP Digital, TAMEYO and Web Pulse SEO figures as sellers' estimates and the WebFX figure as a survey band, not a price list. If a quote lands in this band, ask for the URL count and the hours behind it.
What drives SEO audit cost on a SaaS site?
Page count is the number most quotes start from, and on a SaaS site it is the weakest predictor. Shiny Octopus says it directly: "Price is not determined by page count alone." Five things move the price more.
JavaScript rendering. Google says it "processes JavaScript web apps in three main phases", crawling, rendering and indexing, and that "not all bots can run JavaScript." A marketing site built on a JavaScript framework needs the rendered page checked against the raw HTML, which is extra audit time. Shiny Octopus lists JavaScript rendering among the items that "require additional checks", and Sitebulb lists JavaScript crawling on every one of its plans.
The app, the docs and the subdomains. Illucrum's SaaS audit scope covers "The public marketing site, docs and other public pages. The app behind the login is only checked to confirm it stays out of search." Its technical section names "JavaScript, app subdomains, login areas and docs." If your docs live on a separate subdomain or a different platform, it is a second site to audit, and you should see it in the scope line.
Programmatic and integration pages. Illucrum gives "Feature, Integration & Programmatic Pages" their own section. A few hundred integration pages change the crawl and the page cap. They rarely justify crawl-budget work, though. Google's crawl budget guide is written for sites with "1 million+ unique pages" changing weekly, or "10,000+ unique pages" changing daily, and Google adds that "These are not exact thresholds." If an agency sells you crawl-budget analysis for a small marketing site, ask why.
A migration or redesign. This is the one case where the enterprise band can be fair for a mid-size company. Google says a site move for "a small to medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move", and that "visibility of your content in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move." Its hiring advice says "a great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign (the earlier, the better)". A pre-migration audit means a redirect map and a crawl before and after, and that is project work. The SEO migration checklist covers the post-launch checks.
International pages. Google's own question list for hiring an SEO includes "What's your experience developing international sites?" Regional pricing pages and hreflang add a scope line you should price separately.
How that maps to your situation:
- One marketing site, under a few hundred pages, an in-house owner for the fixes. Productized or solo-expert, $250 to $2,000.
- Docs, integrations or a JavaScript framework, and no SEO lead. Agency strategic audit, $3,000 to $10,000 and up, with the scope line naming each surface.
- A replatform or domain move in the next two quarters. Get the audit before the move. A technical audit can be a fixed price (Illucrum's is $1000); the redirect map and launch crawls will be a project quote.
What do the SEO audit pricing surveys say, and why do they disagree?
The only two surveys found in this research with a published sample size point in opposite directions.
WebFX asked buyers. "250 U.S businesses share how much their companies spend on SEO audits", and the headline is "SEO audits cost between $101–$750 for most businesses (43%)". By size, startups paid "$50 – $750" and large businesses (251 to 500 employees) "$101 – $5,500".
Ahrefs asked sellers. "We polled 439 SEO service providers", in a post marked "Updated: August 15, 2024" that gives no fieldwork date. Under the heading "How much do one-off initiatives cost?", it found "$2,501–$5,000 is the most popular per-project fee, with 21.2% of respondents charging this rate." Its data also shows "50.6% charge $2,000 or less".
Neither fits a SaaS buyer, and you should know why before you quote either one in a budget meeting.
- They measure different things. WebFX asked about audits. Ahrefs asked about fees for one-off initiatives, and its pricing figures never mention audits.
- The samples differ. WebFX's buyer sample includes micro businesses, which pull the typical figure down, and it publishes no fieldwork date. Ahrefs gives none either; its post was last updated in August 2024.
- WebFX contradicts itself. Its enterprise band ("$501 – $4,000") tops out below its large-business band, and WebFX sells its own audit at $8,600, above every size band in its own survey.
- Neither is a SaaS sample.
The vendor prices in the table above sit between the two. That is the better guide, because most of them are prices a vendor will sell you at today, where a survey band is only what other buyers reported paying.
One more number if a freelancer quotes by the hour. Ahrefs found "The average hourly rate for SEO is $111." and "90% charge $150/hour or less". It names two different most common rates on the same page, "$100-$150" in its summary and "$75–$100 per hour" in its hourly section, so work from the average. Multiply by the hours on the quote and you can check it against the fixed-price products in the table.
What does it cost to run an SEO audit in-house?
The software is cheap. The judgment is what costs money.
| Tool | Published price | What the price covers |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Free | Google's own index, coverage and performance data for your site |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Free up to 500 URLs; £199 per licence, per year ($279 in the USD view) | Desktop crawler; the licence lifts the cap and adds advanced features |
| Sitebulb | Lite $18 a month, Pro $42 a month, Cloud from $125 a month | 10,000 URLs per audit on Lite, 500,000 on Pro; JavaScript crawling on all plans |
| Ahrefs | Lite $129 a month, Standard $249, Advanced $449, Enterprise $1,499 a month with an annual commitment required | Lite includes 100,000 crawl credits; annual billing saves up to 17% |
Semrush's entry SEO plan also lists "Site Audit". Its pricing page shows that plan at $139.95 a month billed monthly, or $117.33 a month billed annually, and the price changes with the billing toggle.
Search Console plus a Screaming Frog licence costs $279 a year in software. The expensive part is the person who knows which findings matter, and if you don't have that person, you are back to the paid bands above.
Two cautions from Google apply to every tool. "Google doesn't evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and these tools don't have access to Google's internal ranking data." And "Before making significant changes to your site based on a third-party tool's audit, be sure to check their recommendations against official guidance from Google Search". A tool score is the tool's opinion. Treat it as a to-do list somebody still has to sort.
How is an SEO audit different from an AI visibility audit?
A Google SEO audit already covers Google's own AI features. Google says "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." Whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name you is a separate measurement, and plenty of SEO audits leave it out. WebFX warns buyers that "A standard SEO audit doesn't always check AI search visibility, so confirm it's in scope before you compare SEO audit quotes."
| Google SEO audit | AI visibility audit | |
|---|---|---|
| What it checks | Crawl, rendering, indexing, on-page content, links, against Google Search guidance | Whether AI engines name and cite your brand for the prompts your buyers ask |
| Engines covered | Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI features |
| Published one-time price | $97 to $10,000 and up in the table above | $990 to $3,500 for one-time paid audits among the 11 providers compared in LoudFace's AI visibility audit comparison |
| Deliverable | A prioritised fix list with effort estimates | Which engines cite your brand, and for which buyer prompts |
Some vendors bundle the two. The AI Search Blueprint from Rock The Rankings covers "Technical, content, and AI-surface teardown" in one price, and DerivateX's $3,500 diagnostic covers Google and AI search together. Koozai sells its AI Overview audit as a separate line. If a quote says "AI visibility" with no engine or prompt list behind it, ask for one.
For what each AI audit provider charges and checks, read the AI visibility audit guide.
How long does an SEO audit take, and what should you get?
Turnaround barely tracks price. Upgrow's audit sits in the agency band and "is typically completed within 72 hours", while SEOProfy's, from $800, "spans 2-4 weeks". At the slow end, WebFX puts a professional audit at "30 to 45 days" and says a site with "more than 100 pages" could need longer. Each vendor's stated turnaround is in the table above.
Speed matters less than what comes back.
Google sets the standard for the deliverable: "An SEO audit should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved." A good audit gives you a prioritised fix list, an effort estimate for each item, and the reasoning behind each recommendation. Google's interview list asks whether an SEO will "provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them", and whether they "cite official Google documentation as supporting evidence". TAMEYO's buyer question is the right test too: "Will the report be usable without hiring you?"
For a SaaS site, ask whether server logs are in scope. Logs show what Googlebot and the AI crawlers actually fetch, where a third-party crawler only shows what it could reach. And an audit is the start of the work. NP Digital puts it well: "It should drive your roadmap for the next 30 to 90 days." The foundation fixes an audit finds are the work most agencies skip, because nobody sees them on a dashboard. Don't let the PDF be the end of it.
Red flags, in order of how fast they should end the conversation:
- A ranking guarantee. Google: "If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else." And "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
- A request for write access to Search Console. Google says to "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)".
- No sample report. NP Digital: "No sample? Big red flag."
- A free audit that reads like a pitch deck. TAMEYO says "the findings were written before your URL was entered", and Web Pulse SEO warns some agencies use free audits "purely as lead generation tools". Shiny Octopus is upfront that its free check does "not include a full crawl, competitive benchmark, analytics access, a comprehensive report, or an implementation plan."
- Advice to delete indexed pages wholesale. Thin pages usually deserve a rewrite in place or a 301 into a stronger page. A blanket 410 throws away whatever those URLs had earned.
- A tool score presented as the finding. If the deliverable is a health score and a long list of warnings with no order, you paid for a scan.
Where does LoudFace sit on SEO audit pricing?
LoudFace publishes no standalone audit price. Engagements start from $5k a month, scoped on the intro call.
The audit happens inside the program, in week one. The SEO and AEO service lists a "Foundation audit, in week one": "In the first week we map technical health, content gaps, entity coverage, and where you stand inside AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, while the first fixes and calibration articles are already shipping." Kickoff is within 48 hours of signature. The first month is the busiest of the engagement, with technical fixes shipping in week one alongside the audit.
If you want a conversation before any of that, there are two free options. The free SEO/AEO audit is a 30-minute call on where your brand stands in search and AI answers, a call and not a written report. The free AI visibility audit measures whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity cite you.
Comparing a standalone audit against a retainer? Price both. What an AEO retainer buys covers the retainer side, link building pricing covers off-page budgets, and SEO for SaaS shows how the program runs for software companies. A $3,500 audit with nobody to ship the fixes is a $3,500 document. Buy the band that matches who will do the work afterwards.
