How much does a marketing audit cost?
A marketing audit in the United States runs from free to well over $25,000. Solo consultants and small practices charge roughly $1,000 to $5,000 for a fixed-fee diagnosis in one to three weeks; boutique agencies charge $7,500 to $20,000 over a month or more; large consultancies start near $25,000. Binary Glyph’s audit is $3,500, fixed, in two weeks. The free tier is usually a sales document, and the price of a real one is set by who does the judging.
The spread is the cost of judgment, not of the crawl. Every audit starts with a tool pass that takes an hour and finds the same twenty issues on every site. What you are paying for is the senior reading that follows: which of the twenty matter for this business, what is missing that no tool flags, and what order a repair should take. A consultant charging $3,000 and an agency charging $12,000 often run the same tools. The difference is who reads the output, and whether the person who reads it is the person who signs the findings.
Where this matters
Free audits are worth taking as a sample of how a firm thinks, and worth doubting when the same one is offered to every business, because a report built to sell an engagement measures the wrong thing. A narrow audit, of the website or a single channel, sits at the low end of the range and answers a narrow question. A full audit should read your real accounts, analytics, search console, advertising, email, and the site itself, with read-only access; one assembled from screenshots is a conversation, not a diagnosis. Ask whether the fee is credited against work that follows. Ours is, in full, against a Foundation Engagement started within 90 days, and the findings are yours to keep whether or not anything follows. One specific question, whether an AI assistant can read your site, is free to answer with our check.
For what a real audit covers and when a business is better off not buying one, see the marketing audit; the practice’s own terms are on the audit page, and the free question is answered by the AI visibility check.