Should you do GEO in-house or hire an agency?

Start by asking which parts of GEO your team has time to handle. Generative engine optimization helps your company appear in AI recommendations. The work has three parts: crawler access, including redirects and readable page text; content and consistent company information; and coverage on independent sites. Access changes can take effect in days to weeks, content work in weeks to a quarter, and independent coverage over several quarters.

Before choosing a provider, list the work your company needs this month: fixing access, publishing an answer page, checking company profiles or repeating a measurement. For each task, name who can do it and when it can go live. The gaps in that list give you a concrete scope to discuss with an agency. Below, we work through five steps you can take this week, the four areas where an agency earns its fee, a task-by-task table with a DIY verdict, and three questions that decide.

Five steps, in order. The first four fit in roughly one working day and cost nothing but the hours; the fifth is the first thing to spend the weekly hours on. Each step ends with a check you can tick off before moving on, and everything you produce is reused whoever does the later work.

The proof that a day is enough is our own site. Our guide on how we do GEO ourselves is the log of one half-day on get-geo.ai: a redirect loop between the bare domain and www that burned AI fetchers, a Search Console property on the wrong host, a sitemap that did not list the machine-readable files. Not one new page was written that day. If half a day finds that much on a site built by a GEO studio, a day on yours is a fair bet.

An agency can be useful in four areas that require sustained time or specialist skills; in the task table further down, these are the rows marked With help or No.

What an agency should not be charging for is the working day in the previous section. Our guide on questions to ask a GEO agency and our guide on GEO agency red flags cover how to read a proposal; the short version here is that if the first month of a proposal is your free week, ask what the second month contains.

Your SEO team can usually handle crawler access and content after adjusting its methods. Work on independent coverage in languages the team does not speak requires additional help.

The unit of work changes from a keyword to a prompt. Google’s own guide to generative AI features says that optimizing for its AI surfaces is SEO and lists nothing extra to buy; in our run of 14 September 2026 (ChatGPT, logged out, four in-house prompts, three repeats each) developers.google.com was cited in 12 of 12 answers and no agency site in any, so the assistant itself points an SEO team at the platform documentation. That holds for Google’s surfaces; ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve with their own crawlers and their own search, which is why Step 1 above checks OAI-SearchBot separately. Whichever assistant fetches your page, it has to find the answer stated plainly, in the words the buyer used. An SEO team that already writes answer-first pages is most of the way there.

The measurement changes from a rank to a sample. Rank trackers report one number per keyword; assistants give a different answer on the second run, so the team needs the clean-session habit from Step 2 above and the patience to repeat it before reading anything into a change. One screenshot is an anecdote, not a result.

What an SEO team rarely has is a native writer for a second language and time for outreach in it. If your buyers ask in one language, in-house GEO run by an SEO team with four to six protected hours a week covers the first two layers. If they ask in three languages, that is where a contractor enters.

The table below assigns each task to the cheapest option that actually completes it, and the second column is the verdict. Yes means one person with the weekly hours completes the task. With help means the task splits: part stays in-house, part is bought (a native writer, outreach, a developer). No means it needs a skill nobody picks up in a week. Hours are our estimates for a company with one site and one language, from running the same work on our own site and in audits; treat them as a starting point rather than a quote.

Share of voice, used in the baseline row, is how often you are named against the competitors an assistant names on the same prompts. The tool column exists because AI visibility trackers are real products, with entry tiers such as Otterly at $29 a month for 15 prompts and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month for 25 prompts (prices as listed in September 2026), and they cover the two rows that are about counting. If a tracker is a serious third option for you, our guide on agency vs AI visibility tool vs in-house compares the three by cost and adds a six-step decision flow; this page is about the split between your hours and an agency’s.

Check three things: who has the hours, whether they can ship a change within a week, and whether your buyers ask in one language. The three lists at the end of this section turn those into a verdict; count how many items describe your company.

Whichever way it goes, one person on your side stays responsible. They provide information, approve changes and read the reports even when an agency does the work; delays on your side cost time that never appears on an agency invoice.

Scoring. All four reasons and none of the four signs: do it in-house, spend the free week above, and use an outside audit as a check rather than a contract. One sign: hire a GEO agency for that part only, on a fixed-scope pilot that starts from the baseline you already built, and keep the rest. If the only thing missing is the numbers, a tracker is cheaper than either, provided someone acts on what it shows; our guide on agency vs AI visibility tool vs in-house has the cost table for that case. If you chose in-house and the numbers have not moved after a quarter, our checklist for AI visibility that has not improved is the next read. Our pricing page lists what each of our tiers contains; the decision is the same whoever you end up asking.

The free AI visibility audit is the check: ten buyer prompts in one language where you are invisible today, the current answers, the specific changes that would put you in them, and a crawler access check. It is the same artefact whether you then do the work yourselves or hand it to us. Email hello@get-geo.ai with your domain and the language your buyers ask in.