SEMPITE Research · Census · August 2026
Only 1 in 9 SEO Agencies Publishes Its Prices
“How much does SEO cost?” is one of the most-searched questions in the industry, and almost every answer online is a guess. So we checked the source: the 307 US agencies actually winning Google’s results for “SEO agency,” crawled for pricing pages and verifiable published prices. Most of the industry’s answer is: call us.
What published SEO pricing actually looks like
Across the 35 agencies that publish real plans, we verified 124 monthly price points:
Verified published plan prices only — budget-selector dropdowns, “typical industry spend” copy, and revenue claims were excluded by context review (see method). Range: $50 to $20,000/month.
What the census shows
1. Price opacity is the industry norm. Four of five ranking agencies have no pricing page; nearly nine in ten publish no number a buyer could hold them to. The dominant model is the discovery call, where the price is set after the agency has qualified you.
2. The “prices” you find are often not prices. Our first automated pass flagged 54 agencies as publishing prices. Manual review cut that to 35: the rest were budget-selector dropdowns on contact forms (“What is your monthly budget? $5,000–$10,000”) and “businesses typically spend” copy — numbers designed to anchor you, not commit them.
3. When prices are published, entry points are lower than the industry’s reputation. Thirty percent of verified plans are under $500/month, and the median cheapest plan is $450. The five-figure retainer exists, but on public price lists it is rare — it lives in the budget dropdowns instead.
4. Transparency correlates with productized services. The publishers overwhelmingly sell defined packages — fixed deliverables at fixed prices. Custom-engagement agencies almost never publish, which is defensible for genuinely custom work and convenient for everything else.
The buyer’s takeaway: an agency that won’t name any price before a call isn’t hiding a number too complex for you — pricing in this industry spans $50 to $20,000 a month, and the 35 agencies that publish theirs manage fine. Ask for the floor price in your first email. The answer, and whether you get one, tells you most of what you need.
Method
Sample: the same 307 agencies as our AI-readiness census — top-20 US organic results for 36 “SEO agency” queries across 30 metros, August 30, 2026, with directories and platforms removed. For each site we crawled the homepage, followed any pricing/plans/packages link, and extracted monthly price patterns. Every flagged site was then context-reviewed: prices inside budget dropdowns, lead forms, or “typical spend” editorial copy were excluded. “Publishes prices” means a verifiable plan or package price a buyer could screenshot. No agency is named.
Limitations
Single crawl date; pricing pages behind JavaScript rendering or unusual URLs may be missed, so the true publisher rate could be modestly higher — our automated-then-manual pipeline errs toward undercounting. Price points are plan prices as listed and say nothing about scope or quality. The sample is ranking agencies, which skews larger and more established than the industry at large. SEMPITE publishes its own pricing and that interest is disclosed; the counting rules above are mechanical and reproducible.
Our prices are on the site.
The Brand Audit is $199 flat, credited toward your first month. Retainers are listed, in public, like the other 11.4%.