Models charge what they want

Inquiries with the same model for the same task saw a 1.8x spread. We probed OpenAI's frontier model (gpt-5.6-sol) on four different grounded questions. For each of the 4 questions OpenAI chose to issue 3, 4, 5 and 6 web searches, so the four answers cost $0.208, $0.253, $0.311 and $0.371, respectively. Cost was monotone in the search count. There is no single "cost per answer" for that model; there's a band, and the model picks where in the band your question lands. Meanwhile gpt-4o-mini issued exactly one search on every probe and came in at about $0.0116 per answer, proving the stark difference in consumer model behavior. Keep in mind that we use frontier models for the $199 audit and every subscription so that we emulate the behavior of your consumers — the report names which model answered, per engine — but we can also tailor an audit to your needs.

Even more strangely, one model in a family can be an order of magnitude off its siblings. A grounded claude-sonnet-5 answer billed 109k–138k input tokens: the engine re-sends accumulated context each search round, and it compounds. Anthropic's own documentation spells out the mechanism: "Web search results retrieved throughout a conversation are counted as input tokens, in search iterations executed during a single turn and in subsequent conversation turns" (Anthropic, Web search tool). Claude Haiku 4.5, same job, used 9.2k–10k. That's an 11–14x cost difference inside one vendor, on one web search either way. It's the specific reason our free tier doesn't run Anthropic at all: Sonnet 5's grounded-answer cost doesn't fit a $0 report, and Claude coverage answering on the frontier model is part of what the paid tiers buy.

Most bizarrely, the older model is the expensive one. Google prices grounding by model family: on its price list Gemini 2.5 Flash pays "$35 / 1,000 grounded prompts" and the Gemini 3.x models pay "$14 per 1,000 requests" (Google, Gemini Developer API pricing). Measured per answer, gemini-2.5-flash cost $0.0365–$0.0368 against gemini-3.6-flash's $0.0211–$0.0217. "Downgrade the free tier to the older model" would have paid roughly 70% more for a staler measurement — so every tier, free included, answers on 3.6 Flash.

Because it is important for consumers to understand how quickly this technology is changing, and it is our job to stay ahead of the trends to solve your problems as efficiently as possible. Stanford's 2025 AI Index reports that "the inference cost for a system performing at the level of GPT-3.5 dropped over 280-fold between November 2022 and October 2024" (Stanford HAI, The 2025 AI Index Report). And yet a grounded answer from a frontier model still costs real money in 2026, because the model is doing more work per question, not less: the search calls, the retrieved pages, the re-sent context.

This is the honest answer to "why does the $199 audit cost $199?" A full paid audit is 180 grounded answer units across three engines, and the two dominant cost terms are bands driven by model behavior we don't control. And it is still the best value in the product category today: that $199 buys 180 frontier-model answers, every one stored and one shown verbatim per question, plus a 90-day action plan built from the questions you lost. We provide you with incalculable value for that $199, and we solve your problems directly if you choose to engage us to do so.

We are willing to use this technology on our own products to prove our capabilities, and we are in the process of doing so. We look forward to growing with you, and our agents are at your beck and call. Start with the free scorecard, or read why AEO is eating SEO first.