Should you move budget from SEO to GEO? Dutch market prices

A disclosure before we start: we sell GEO. Weigh what follows accordingly; every figure has its source next to it so you can check it without us.

Why "moving" budget is the wrong frame

Because the two overlap so much that taking money from SEO usually weakens GEO too. Google says its AI features run on the same SEO foundations, independent testing points the same way, and the traffic data shows that search still carries the load. The part that is genuinely different is smaller than the market suggests.

What Google says

Google's own documentation for site owners is unusually blunt. "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary," it says, and "You can apply the same foundational SEO best practices for AI features as you do for Google Search overall." A page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet; beyond that, Google lists no requirement.

What independent testing found

C-SEO Bench (NeurIPS 2025), an independent benchmark of the original GEO techniques on more than 1,900 queries and 16,000 documents, found them largely ineffective and sometimes negative. With GPT-4o-mini as the answer engine, moving a document to the top of the list the model reads — which is what classic SEO does — improved its rank by 0.70 to 2.77 positions. On retail queries the best rewriting method, a new one the authors added, managed 0.36 against 2.77: about 7.7 times less. The best of the original GEO techniques reached 0.11. The authors do not state these multipliers themselves; they are our calculation from their tables.

What the traffic says

• Ahrefs, February 2026: across 76,000 sites, Google brings nearly 40% of traffic and ChatGPT 0.21%. The study does not state its time window.
• Conductor, published July 2026: across 1,215 enterprise customer domains in ten US industries (3.3 billion sessions, May to September 2025), AI referrals were 1.08% of traffic, and ChatGPT made up 87.4% of them.
• Alphabet, April 2026: "queries are at an all-time high." That is a company claim; the last absolute figure Google gave was more than 5 trillion searches a year (January 2025).

What SEO does not cover

The question it cannot answer is whether you are in the answer. Rankings tell you where you appear in a list of links. An AI assistant builds its answer from sources it picks through its own searches, and for ChatGPT those sources overlap only partly with what ranks on Google.

The overlap is smaller than people assume

• In Google's AI Overviews, 37.9% of cited URLs appear in the first 10 positions of the results page for that query, SERP features included, and 31.0% rank outside the top 100 (Ahrefs, 4 million cited URLs, March 2026).
• Across ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, only 12% of cited links appear in Google's top 10 (Ahrefs, 15,000 long-tail queries, August 2025).
• Seer Interactive found that 87% of SearchGPT's citations matched Bing's top results, against 56% for Google — on what the authors call a limited sample of 100 queries.

So for Google's own AI features the SEO foundations are the same, but ranking for the exact query is no longer enough. For ChatGPT, ranking on Google is not the same as being cited.

The spread between assistants is large

In our own measurement of a Dutch security company — 100 fixed buyer questions, asked three times a week on each system from 10 August to 11 September 2026 — its website was cited in 56% to 62% of Perplexity answers and in at most 3% of ChatGPT answers, on exactly the same questions in the same weeks. A single "AI visibility" figure would hide that completely. That is the gap a GEO budget is for: finding which systems and which questions you are missing, and why.

Dutch market prices

In the Netherlands, GEO is sold in three forms at very different prices: measurement software from €25 a month, automated or written content from €95 to about €700, and managed services from about €300 to €2,300. All prices below were read on the providers' own pages in September 2026. Where a page does not state whether VAT is included, the table says so; our own prices are excl. VAT.

Provider	Price	What it is
Aivisualize	€25 / €49 per month, excl. VAT	Software, with a done-for-you option
Briljant	€49 / €99 per month, excl. VAT	Measurement software, no writing
SocraNext	€95 per month, excl. VAT per its terms, two weeks free	Automated content via a WordPress plugin
AIGeschikt (us)	€299 / €499 per month, excl. VAT; €899 agency plan (3 clients)	Managed: measurement plus writing and publishing
NEXTRIQ	€50 scan excl. VAT (updated 17 September 2026); €1,500 setup; €495 to €1,950 per month	Scan, setup project and retainer
Citeerbaar	€295 / €695 / €1,495 one-off, or €695 per month, excl. VAT	Scan, fix projects, monthly retainer
AEO Direct	€695 per month, €595 with a six-month commitment, VAT not stated	Content retainer: eight articles a month
OpsCode	€1,195 per month + €2,495 setup; Enterprise €2,295 + €3,995, excl. VAT	Full service, SEO included

What the spread means

The factor between the cheapest and the most expensive monthly price is roughly ninety. That is not a quality difference; it is a product difference. Software measures and leaves the work to you. A content service writes. A managed service measures, decides and publishes. Compare what has changed on your site at the end of the month, not the monthly fee.

How this compares internationally

For reference, the entry plans of international measurement tools, on their own pricing pages: Otterly.ai at $25 a month billed annually ($29 monthly) for 15 prompts, Peec AI at €85 a month for 50 prompts on three engines (updated 17 September 2026), the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit at €94.94 a month billed annually for 25 prompts, Profound, whose pricing page now lists only a free trial and custom Enterprise plans (updated 17 September 2026), and Evertune at $800 a month, which includes 25 AI-written articles. Dutch measurement software sits in the same range as the international entry level; Dutch managed services sit above the software-only plans because they include the writing.

Why this is hard to find in English

We searched for an English-language source that lists Dutch GEO or AEO agency prices and found none. The few English pages that quote euro prices belong to individual agencies whose Dutch base is unclear. Dutch providers publish in Dutch, on their own sites, and that is where the table above comes from.

How to size the slice

Start with a free measurement, then budget in proportion to the gap it shows — not in proportion to the hype. For most small and mid-sized companies that means keeping the SEO budget intact and adding a GEO line that is a fraction of it until the measurement justifies more.

A four-step way to decide

1. Measure for free first. Search Console now reports impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode per page. Ask your ten most important buyer questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google on three different days and note whether your site is among the sources.
2. Check the technical basics. If AI crawlers are blocked by your firewall or your text only appears after JavaScript runs, no GEO budget will help. That fix is cheap and belongs to your web developer.
3. Look at demand. In the Netherlands the category is still small: our keyword data shows about 1,300 monthly searches for "aeo" (a term shared with the customs certificate, so an upper bound) and 590 each for "generative engine optimization", "geo optimalisatie" and "geo seo". High click prices — €13.90 for "generative engine optimization" — suggest a market where buyers are few but valuable.
4. Buy the smallest form that closes your gap. If you only need to know where you stand, software. If you know what is missing and lack time to write, a content service. If you want it measured, decided and done, a managed service.

Our view

We think "moving budget from SEO to GEO" is the wrong question for almost every Dutch SMB we have seen. The better question is how much you are willing to spend to find out whether AI assistants recommend your competitors instead of you — and that first answer costs nothing but an afternoon.

Frequently asked questions

Will GEO replace SEO?

Not on current evidence. Google says its AI features use the same foundations as search, and AI assistants still send a small share of traffic. What is changing is where the answer is shown, not what makes a page worth citing.

How much do Dutch companies spend on GEO?

We know of no survey that measures it. What we can show is what providers charge: from €25 a month for software to €2,295 a month plus a setup fee for full service.

Is it cheaper to do GEO in-house?

The measurement part can be, if you have the time: a spreadsheet, a fixed list of questions, and three checks a week. The writing is the expensive part in any setup, in-house or outsourced.

Why are Dutch prices lower than US agency prices?

We have not compared them systematically, so we do not claim that they are. The English-language price guides we found are US-focused and quote agency retainers, not the software and managed-service mix that dominates the Dutch market.

Where we stand

AIGeschikt measures 100 fixed buyer questions three times a week on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and writes and publishes content on the gaps it finds. Plans are on our pricing page. For the argument that GEO is largely SEO, read Is GEO just SEO?; for the Dutch-language cost guide this page pairs with, Wat kost GEO SEO voor mijn website?.