SEMPITE Research · Census · August 2026 · By Jacob Gerrish
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.
How agencies structure a published price list
Most publishers do not post a single number. The median publishing agency lists three plans. Eleven of the 35 list only one, and the longest list we found had ten.
The spread inside a price list is wide. Among the 24 agencies with two or more plans, the top plan costs a median 9.3 times the entry plan. The median top tier is $1,999 a month, and seven agencies list a top plan at $5,000 or more.
Entry points skew low. 19 of the 35 publishers start under $500 a month, and only 10 start at $1,000 or more. So the first price a buyer sees is usually the cheapest tier of a ladder, not the price of the work most clients end up buying.
| Across all 124 published plans | Monthly price |
|---|---|
| Lowest 10% of plans | under $150 |
| 25th percentile | about $440 |
| Median | $1,000 |
| 75th percentile | about $2,400 |
| Highest 10% of plans | above $4,500 |
Round numbers win. 65 of the 124 plans are priced in round hundreds, and 34 end in a 7 or a 9 ($497, $1,999 and so on).
How this compares with the ranges pricing guides quote
Pricing guides usually put a small-business SEO retainer somewhere between $1,500 and $5,000 a month. On the price lists agencies actually publish, only 45 of 124 plans (36%) fall in that band. Half of all published plans cost less than $1,000.
That does not make the band wrong. It may well describe custom engagements, which are the ones that never show a price. It does mean the number an agency is willing to put in writing tends to sit lower than the number a guide tells you to expect, and a buyer comparing quotes should know which of the two they are looking at.
What this census does not measure
This is a count of monthly plan prices. We did not collect hourly rates, one-off project fees (audits, migrations, site rebuilds) or performance-based pricing, and we do not publish figures for any of them. If you have seen hourly or project ranges credited to this study, they came from somewhere else.
The figures this census does support are the ones on this page: 11.4% of ranking agencies publish verifiable prices, 19.2% have a pricing page, the median published plan is $1,000 a month, the median entry plan is $450, and the middle half of published plans runs from about $440 to about $2,400 a 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. Those numbers are there to anchor you, not to commit the agency.
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, drawn from the top 20 US organic results for 36 “SEO agency” queries across 30 metros on 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.
Frequently asked questions
How many SEO agencies publish their prices?
Only about 1 in 9. Of 307 US agencies ranking for SEO agency queries, 88.6% publish no verifiable prices anywhere on their site and 19.2% have a pricing page at all.
What do published SEO prices look like?
Across the 35 agencies with real published plans, 124 monthly price points were verified, ranging from $50 to $20,000 a month. The median published plan is $1,000 a month and the median cheapest plan is $450.
How many plans are under $500 a month?
37 of the 124 verified plans, about 30%. 24 are $500 to $999, 33 are $1,000 to $2,499, 21 are $2,500 to $4,999 and 9 are $5,000 or more.
Why did the count drop from 54 agencies to 35?
Manual review removed budget-selector dropdowns on contact forms and businesses-typically-spend copy, which are anchoring numbers rather than prices an agency commits to.
What should a buyer do with this?
Ask for the floor price in your first email. Pricing in the industry spans $50 to $20,000 a month and the 35 agencies that publish theirs manage fine, so whether you get an answer tells you most of what you need.
What is a typical monthly SEO retainer on published price lists?
The median published plan is $1,000 a month, and the middle half of plans falls between about $440 and $2,400. Only 36% of published plans sit in the $1,500 to $5,000 band that pricing guides often quote as typical.
How many pricing tiers do SEO agencies publish?
The median publishing agency lists three plans. Among agencies with more than one plan, the top tier costs a median 9.3 times the entry plan, and the median top tier is $1,999 a month.
Does this study include hourly or project SEO pricing?
No. It counts monthly plan prices only. Hourly rates, one-off project fees and performance-based pricing were not collected, so figures for those did not come from this census.
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%.