Affordable answer engine optimisation service for SMEs in Kuala Lumpur: what RM500 to RM2,000 a month buys

At Geo One, our entry-tier answer engine optimisation (AEO) service for SMEs in Kuala Lumpur ranges from RM500 to RM2,000 a month. That is our own pricing, not a survey of the Malaysian market, and other providers scope the same words differently. Compare scope, exclusions and contract length rather than the monthly fee alone.

This piece is written for owners and practice managers of Klang Valley professional services firms with 2 to 50 staff: clinics, dental and veterinary practices, law and accounting firms, tuition centres and property agencies. Disclosure: it comes from Geo One, a Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and AEO agency based in Kuala Lumpur. If the term AEO is new to you, read our plain explanation of AEO before reading any proposal, including ours.

The four workstreams you should get at any price in this range

Every tier at the bottom of this market should contain the same four pieces of work. What changes with price is volume, not kind.

1. Crawler access. Whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are allowed to reach your pages, and whether those pages render without JavaScript. Note that these are separate user-agents doing separate jobs: blocking OpenAI's training crawler does not block the one that fetches a page when a user asks about you, and a blanket Disallow copied from a template can catch all of them. This is the one check that can turn a firm from invisible to visible in a single afternoon, and it is the one most often skipped.
2. Structured data that is correct, not merely present. Organization or LocalBusiness markup, services, practitioners, opening hours. Plugins generate schema; very few generate schema that matches what the business actually does. A clinic running three specialities off one generic LocalBusiness block is technically valid and practically useless, we go through this in detail in our note on clinic schema markup in Malaysia.
3. Fact consistency. Business name, address, phone, hours, practitioner names and credentials agreeing across your website, your Google Business Profile and the directories that carry you. Assistants reconcile conflicting sources by picking one. You want them picking yours. If you would rather start on the profile side, our six-check Google Business Profile audit is a free way to do the first pass yourself.
4. Answer tracking. A fixed list of buyer questions, checked monthly across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, recorded so this month can be compared with last month.

Three things scale the price between RM500 and RM2,000: languages (English only, or English plus Bahasa Malaysia and Chinese), locations (one clinic or four branches), and the number of tracked questions. A single-branch dental practice tracking twelve English questions sits at the bottom. A two-branch accounting firm tracking twenty questions in English and Bahasa Malaysia sits in the middle, mostly because tracking in Bahasa Malaysia is a second full set of checks rather than a translation of the first. A three-branch tuition centre tracking questions in two languages, with separate service pages per branch, sits near the top.

What this money does not buy

We say this even though it costs us deals: at the bottom of this range you are buying diagnosis, correction and measurement. You are not buying a content programme.

• No guaranteed mention. No agency controls what ChatGPT or Gemini says. What can be improved are the inputs: access, accuracy, agreement between sources, and pages that answer the question a buyer actually typed.
• No paid placement. Google sells a labelled ad slot. Nobody currently sells a guaranteed mention inside an assistant's organic answer, and any proposal implying otherwise is describing something else.
• Very little new writing at RM500. Fixing markup, reconciling profiles and running four-engine checks consumes that budget on its own. New answer pages start to fit around the middle of the range.

So: if a RM500 proposal promises weekly blog posts and four-engine reporting and link building and a guarantee, at least one of those lines is not being delivered at the depth the words imply. Ask which.

Two checks you can run yourself before paying anyone

Neither of these needs an agency, and both tell you whether you have a cheap problem or an expensive one.

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. Look for the crawler names above and for any Disallow: / under a User-agent: * rule. If your site is blocking assistant crawlers, that is a one-line fix by whoever maintains the site, and no amount of content spend will substitute for it. Bear in mind robots.txt is a request rather than a lock, so this tells you what you are asking for, not what every bot does.

Ask two assistants a buyer's question, not your company name. "Best paediatric dentist in Bangsar" tells you more than "Geo One". Do it in both languages your buyers use. Write down the names that come back and whether the details attached to yours are right. That list is your baseline, and if a provider cannot show you a comparable one at the end of month one, you have nothing to judge month six against. If the answer is wrong rather than absent, that is a different job, see what to do when an AI assistant describes your business wrongly.

How long before anything changes

Two different clocks, and providers who blur them are doing you no favours.

The technical clock is short and verifiable by you. Crawler access, schema validity and profile consistency can be fixed within the first weeks, and you can confirm each one yourself without taking anyone's word for it.

The answer clock is not under anyone's control. How quickly an assistant reflects a corrected fact depends on how each engine retrieves and refreshes its sources, and those cycles differ by engine and are not published. Changes can surface quickly in a live-retrieval engine such as Perplexity; changes that depend on a model's training data may not surface for a long time, or at all. Any provider quoting a confident number of weeks for "getting into ChatGPT" is quoting a number they cannot know. This is why month-one tracking matters: it is the baseline that makes month six honest.

Three things to settle before you sign

• Contract length and exit. Monthly rolling, or a twelve-month lock? At this price point a lock is hard to justify, because the technical work is front-loaded and you should be able to see it inside the first month.
• Who owns the tracking record. If you leave, do you keep the question list and the month-by-month results? If not, you cannot take your baseline anywhere else.
• Who touches the website. Most of workstream one and two needs access to your CMS or your developer's time. A retainer that assumes a developer you do not have will quietly stall in week two.

What counts as affordable for a Malaysian SME

Affordable means a figure a firm with 2 to 50 staff can pay out of monthly cash flow without a board paper, alongside whatever it already spends on ads and a web developer. SME Corp Malaysia's official definition sets the outer boundary at annual sales turnover under RM50 million or no more than 200 full-time employees, a band wide enough that most firms inside it have no in-house marketing person at all.

That is the real constraint. The work has to survive being ignored for three weeks when the clinic is busy, which argues for a narrow, fixed scope reviewed monthly rather than a large retainer nobody has time to direct. Anything above this range needs a specific reason, more languages, more locations, more tracked questions, or a content programme, and the reason should appear in the proposal, not in the invoice. If you are trying to size a full twelve months rather than a monthly entry tier, our breakdown of what year one actually costs covers the larger number.

If you already know your details are wrong in an assistant's answer, that is a correction job and it starts at the bottom of this range. If you do not know what any of the four engines currently say about you, start with the tracking baseline and decide afterwards.