The short answer
A UK professional services firm should pay for AI visibility work in hours, not as a package. Fixing crawler permission and indexing, and rewriting key pages so the answer is text, are ordinary jobs that can be priced at the supplier's stated day rate. A guaranteed place in an assistant's answer has no fair price, because the operator controls it and no check can prove it.
Key takeaways
- A proposal sold as AI visibility splits into five lines, and each needs its own price.
- Permission, indexing and page rewrites can be checked on the firm's own site, so price them in hours.
- A monthly log of what assistants say records one day, so treat it as a log and not a measurement.
- Google says its AI features need no additional technical requirements, so nothing extra is owed on that side.
- Ask for the hours behind every line. A single monthly number tells you nothing.
The myth is that AI visibility is a new service with a price of its own. Take any proposal for a UK practice and split it into five lines, and the picture changes. Two lines are the sort of work a web supplier has done for years: letting a crawler in, getting a page indexed and putting the answer on the page as text. One line is a log of what assistants say, which is only ever a record of the day it was taken. One line is mentions on other sites. The fifth is a promise of placement. A managing partner who is quoted one monthly figure for all five is not being shown which of them she is buying, and the fifth cannot be delivered by anyone except the operator. The sections below price each line on its own terms.
The bundle has five lines, and each has its own price logic
Treat the quote as five lines and ask the supplier to name the hours or deliverable behind each. The ledger shows what each line is and how it should be priced, and whether the firm can check it from its own site. No market range appears in it, because the ranges in circulation are published by sellers and none of them is drawn from UK professional services fees that we can verify.
| Line | What it is | Can the firm check it? | How to price it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Permission and indexing | Editing the robots file and getting service pages indexed | Yes, in the firm's own robots file and search results | Hours, once. The existing web supplier can scope it. |
| 2. Page rewrites | Putting the answer on the page as selectable text | Yes, by selecting and copying the sentence | Hours per page, plus partner time to supply the answer |
| 3. A log of what assistants say | Asking set questions and recording the answers | Partly. It shows one answer on one day. | A fee per dated log, with no retainer attached |
| 4. Mentions on other sites | Getting the firm described on pages it does not control | Partly. The page exists or it does not; its effect cannot be shown. | Per published item, never per promised effect |
| 5. Placement | A promise that an assistant will name the firm | No. The operator decides. | No fair price. Do not pay for it. |
Lines one and two are priced in hours
Technical permission and page text are ordinary work, and ordinary work is quoted as hours at a stated rate. Google's own guidance on AI features and your website says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, with no additional technical requirements. For Google, then, nothing extra is owed beyond what good search visibility already involves. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity each publish their own crawler descriptions, on its bots page, in a help article and in crawler documentation, and the settings they describe are lines in a plain text file.
The ten-minute check that tells a firm whether line one is broken is set out in what makes an assistant able to cite your firm at all. Do it before asking anyone for a quote. A supplier who is told that the service pages are missing from search results can scope the fix in an afternoon, and that is the figure to hold the larger proposal against.
Check the arithmetic against your own numbers
Multiply the hours by the day rate, then compare the total with the quote. The worksheet below uses invented numbers chosen for easy arithmetic. The day rate is not a market rate and describes no supplier. Replace each figure with the one in the quote in front of you.
| Step | Illustrative figure | Where yours comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Day rate | £500 | The supplier's stated rate, in writing |
| Line one, days | 1 day | The fix named by your own check |
| Line two, days | 4 pages at 1 day each | Pages that failed the copy test |
| One-off total | 5 days, £2,500 | Days multiplied by the day rate |
| A quoted retainer over twelve months | £2,000 a month, £24,000 | The monthly figure in the quote, times twelve |
| Left unexplained | £21,500 | The retainer minus the one-off total |
Before you sign a retainer
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Get a recommendationA log is worth paying for once, not monthly
A log of assistant answers records one wording on one day, so it should be bought as a dated document. Ask the same question two ways and the answers may differ. That is a reason to value the log as evidence of a starting position and not as a trend line. A UK practice can copy the answers itself in an hour. If a supplier does it, the fee should look like an hour's work and not a recurring commitment, and a monthly report that never changes a decision is a cost with nothing attached to it.
Mentions on other sites are paid per item
A supplier can deliver a published page elsewhere, and that is the whole of what can be promised. Whether the page changes anything an assistant says is not something the supplier can show. So the unit of payment is the published item with its address, which the firm can open and read. This is the same discipline we describe for a firm choosing between spend on reach and spend on direct contact, in whether a recruitment agency needs marketing or better outreach: pay for what is countable, and judge the rest by the firm's own enquiries.
Why placement has no fair price
No operator page cited here describes a way to buy a place in an assistant's answer. They describe crawlers and what each is for. We read each of them in full on 22 October 2026 and found nothing a supplier could sell as a route to being named. A price needs a deliverable, and the only one available for line five is a promise. If a supplier does insist on one, ask for the method in writing and for the refund if the firm is not named. A supplier unwilling to put the second in the contract has told you which line they are really selling.
Questions that make the quote readable
Ask every supplier to put each pound on one of the five lines. For the lines that remain after one and two, ask what the firm will be able to open and read at the end of the month. Ask what happens to the fee if the firm is still not named after six months. These are ordinary contracting questions, and a UK practice that has them written down can compare two proposals on equal terms. To see which UK sectors we introduce firms in, see the professional services we cover, and for how we introduce one specialist and how the fee works, read how it works.
Reading a proposal that arrives as one number
A single monthly figure should be sent back with a request to split it across the five lines. Take an invented practice of twenty people whose proposal reads “AI visibility programme, monthly” and nothing else. The managing partner replies with the ledger and asks which line each part of the fee sits on. A supplier with a method answers in a paragraph. A supplier without one answers with a call to discuss the programme, and that difference is the first useful thing the exercise reveals. The practice and the proposal are made up to show the method and describe no real firm.
Keep the reply in writing and file it with the contract. If the supplier later reports success against line five, the earlier answer shows what was and was not promised. For a regulated firm the written split also gives the compliance function something to read, because it separates statements the supplier can evidence from statements it cannot.
Where the partner's own time goes
The rewrites in line two depend on a partner supplying the answer, and that time is not in any quote. A page that states what the firm does, for whom and in which part of the UK needs someone who knows the answer to say it plainly. Budget a short interview per page and a review of the draft, and count it as a cost of the work even though no invoice carries it. A cheaper quote that assumes the partner will write the pages herself has simply moved the cost onto the diary.
When not to buy yet
Do not buy any AI visibility work until the firm is visible in ordinary search and has run the four checks. A practice whose service pages do not appear in results has a fault before any assistant is involved, and paying a bundle to find that out is poor value. The same applies if the key sentences sit in images, or if no partner has time to supply the answers a rewrite needs. In those cases the right spend is the small one: the technical fix and a few rewritten pages.
Frequently asked questions
What UK firms ask about paying for AI visibility.
How much should a UK firm pay for AI visibility work?
No market range is quoted here, because the figures in circulation come from sellers. Price the technical fixes and the page rewrites as hours at the supplier's stated day rate, and pay for anything else only as a named deliverable. A guaranteed placement has no fair price, since nobody outside the operator controls it.
Is AI visibility work different from ordinary SEO?
For Google, barely. Its guidance on AI features says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, with no additional technical requirements. Other operators run their own crawlers with their own settings, so a UK firm should still check each one. Ordinary search visibility remains the entry condition for Google.
Should a firm pay a monthly fee for reports on what assistants say?
Only for the report itself, and not as a retainer. A report records one answer to one wording of a question on one day, so it works as a log rather than a measurement. Ask what decision a monthly log would change. If the answer is none, one dated copy a year is enough for most practices.
Can a supplier guarantee that an assistant will name my practice?
No. The operator decides what its assistant says, and the operator pages cited below describe crawlers, not a route to buy a place in an answer. A supplier can fix permission, indexing and the writing on the page. A promise about the outcome is a claim to ask for in writing, with the method behind it.
What should a firm do before asking for quotes?
Run the four checks in our companion piece on what lets an assistant cite a firm, and write the result down. If the firm is missing from ordinary search results, or its key sentences sit in images, the quote should cover that fix and nothing grander. A specific broken link makes quotes comparable.
Sources and useful reading
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website, for the statement that a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, with no additional technical requirements.
- OpenAI, overview of OpenAI crawlers, for the separate crawlers for training and for search.
- Anthropic, about Claude's web crawler, for the purposes of its named crawlers.
- Perplexity, crawler documentation, for PerplexityBot and the separate agent for user questions.
This article is commercial decision support and is not legal, financial or technical advice. It quotes no market price range and no statistic. Every figure in the worksheet is invented to show the arithmetic and describes no supplier or firm. It makes no claim about what any assistant will say about any firm. Each operator page was read in full on 22 October 2026, and operators change these pages, so check the current text before relying on it.