SEO audit prices span a huge range because the word covers two products. One is a crawler's output with an agency's logo on it. The other is a person reading your site, your Search Console data and your competitors, then writing down what to fix first.
I'm a freelance SEO and GEO consultant in Paris and I sell the second kind, so keep that in mind as you read. Every figure below comes from a named public source.
1. The published price ranges
Four public reference points, from three markets:
- United States. WebFX surveyed 250 US businesses on what they spend on SEO audits: 43% paid between $101 and $750. WebFX sells audits itself, starting at $8,600 for sites up to 70 pages, over 45 days.
- France. Codeur.com, a French freelance marketplace, puts an SEO audit between €500 and €10,000, the top of the range being large ecommerce sites with tens of thousands of pages.
- Germany. A 2026 German pricing guide from tech-now puts a one-off technical audit between €1,500 and €18,000, and between €1,500 and €8,000 for a small or mid-size site. Below that range, it says, expect a surface checklist rather than an audit.
- AI visibility (GEO) audits. GEO Toolbox, an AI visibility tool that also sells audits, reports one-off GEO audits between €1,500 and €5,000 excluding VAT in France.
Every one of these sources makes money from audits, me included. Read the figures as the market's own price tags, not as independent studies.
2. What each price buys
A tool export. An automated crawl turned into a PDF: a score out of 100, a list of missing tags, sometimes 200 "errors" in alphabetical order. It's fast and it can catch broken pages. It won't tell you which problem costs you clients, in what order to fix things, or how what you rank for compares with what your clients type. Three to five working days of a person's time cost more than a few hundred dollars at almost any rate per hour, so a low price can't buy much more than this.
A written audit for a small or mid-size site. A person crawls the site, reads your Search Console data, compares you with the competitors who rank where you want to be, tests your real questions in the AI engines, and writes the plan: each fix scored for effort and impact. The German guide puts this at €1,500 to €8,000 for a small or mid-size site, and agency prices go higher: WebFX's own audit starts at $8,600 for up to 70 pages. Mine is €1,500 for up to about 100 pages.
Large-site work. Big ecommerce catalogs, several languages or countries, tens of thousands of URLs, server log analysis, workshops with an in-house team. Codeur's €10,000 ceiling, for large ecommerce sites with tens of thousands of pages, belongs here.
3. What a real audit covers in 2026
Four parts. If a proposal lacks one, ask why.
Technical. Full crawl, indexing, Core Web Vitals and real mobile speed, URL structure, redirects, canonical tags, structured data. The parts of the site Google can read, and the parts it can't.
Semantic. Your rankings against the searches your clients make before they buy. Pages competing with each other for the same search, and commercial searches with no page behind them.
Authority. Your link profile next to your direct competitors', and what closing the gap would take.
AI visibility. Your real buyer questions put to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, with dated screenshots. AI crawler access to your pages, and whether your structured data is readable by a model.
The AI part belongs in the same audit, not on a second invoice. In its March 2026 update, on 4 million cited URLs, Ahrefs found that 38% of the pages cited in Google's AI Overviews ranked in the top 10, and another 31% between positions 11 and 100. Its July 2025 study had put the top 10 share at 76%, with an older method. Pages that rank still take most of the citations, so the SEO work and the AI work overlap, but ranking on its own no longer covers it.
4. How to tell an audit from an export before you pay
Ask for a sample page. A real report has sentences that name the client's pages and searches, not generic advice.
Look for the order. The plan should rank the fixes by effort and impact, so you know where to start on Monday.
Check that the AI tests can be repeated. The question asked, the engine, the date, the answer. You should be able to rerun them yourself in a private window, logged out.
Ask who owns the report. It should be yours, whoever does the work afterwards.
Watch for a quote in disguise. An audit written by someone who wants to sell you a rebuild can conclude that you need a rebuild. Ask whether the plan is written so your current developer can carry it out.
Walk away from a guarantee. Google tells businesses to avoid anyone who guarantees a ranking, and the same caution applies to anyone promising AI citations.
5. When an audit is money wasted
The site is under three months old. Google is still discovering it, and there's too little data to analyze.
There's no content yet. Nothing to audit. Build the pages first.
You want a rebuild quote, not a diagnosis. Ask for the quote, and check that it includes the page inventory and the redirect plan. My guide to what a web design quote should include lists those lines.
Nobody will act on it. An audit is a to-do list. If nobody has the hours to work through it in the next three months, wait.
An audit is worth it if the site is at least six months old, if you have traffic but few inquiries, if you're planning a rebuild, if you lost rankings, or if you want to know where you stand before committing to a monthly budget.
6. My audit, priced
€1,500 excluding VAT for sites up to about 100 pages; larger sites, ecommerce and multi-language audits get a separate quote. Invoiced in euros; I work with businesses in the United States and Europe by video call.
The process: a 30-minute scoping call, access to Search Console, analytics and the CMS (read access where possible), three to five working days of analysis, delivery within two weeks, then one hour on video to go through the plan.
You receive a report organized by area, which I write myself rather than export from a tool; a prioritized action plan, each item scored for effort and estimated impact; dated screenshots of the AI tests; and the hour of debrief. The report is yours, whether you work with me afterwards or with someone else.
The full scope is on my SEO and GEO audit page. If the audit shows you need ongoing work, what a monthly SEO and GEO retainer costs lays out the market and my two plans. If your traffic dropped after AI Overviews arrived, start with diagnosing a Google traffic drop.
Sources
- WebFX, "How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?", survey of 250 US businesses, updated October 2026.
- Codeur.com, "Quel est le prix d'un audit SEO en 2025 ?".
- tech-now, "Wie viel kostet SEO in Deutschland? (Preisübersicht 2026)", 8 August 2026.
- GEO Toolbox, "Meilleures agences GEO (2026) : le guide d'achat honnête", 20 August 2026, updated 30 September 2026.
- Ahrefs, "Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10", 2 March 2026.
- Ahrefs, "76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From the Top 10", July 2025.
- Google Search Central, "Do you need an SEO?" (avoid ranking guarantees).
Want to know what's holding your site back? Send me your URL and about how many pages it has. Within 24 hours on weekdays, you get your price: €1,500 excluding VAT up to about 100 pages, delivered within two weeks, or a written quote for a larger site. Get my price or see what the audit covers.
