We run an agency, so you should read this with that in mind. But we have also watched in-house teams do this work well, and watched agencies do it badly, and the honest answer to "agency or in-house" is that each is good at different parts of the job.
What the work actually involves
AEO breaks into four kinds of work, and they need different people:
- Measurement. Building a prompt set, running it across engines on a schedule, recording who gets named and what gets cited. This is tooling and discipline.
- Technical fixes. Crawler access, JavaScript rendering, schema, llms.txt, entity consistency across your site and third-party profiles. This is engineering plus attention to detail.
- Content. Writing pages that answer the questions buyers ask, in a form a model can quote. This is editorial work with subject expertise.
- Off-site presence. Getting into Reddit threads, review sites, YouTube, and roundup lists. This is PR and community work.
Few people are good at all four. Fewer teams have all four in one place.
What in-house gets right
Subject knowledge. Your team knows the product, the buyers, the objections, and the honest limitations. Content written by someone who has sat in sales calls tends to be more specific and more quotable than anything an outsider writes from a brief.
Speed on the site. When the fix is "change the first paragraph of 40 product pages" or "expose the spec table without JavaScript," a team with commit access does it this week. An agency files a ticket.
Continuity. Engines change behavior often. An in-house owner who checks the share of answer report every Monday notices a drop the week it happens. An agency on a monthly cadence notices three weeks later.
Authenticity off-site. Real employees answering real questions on Reddit under their own names is something an agency cannot do for you. It has to be your people.
Where in-house struggles
Measurement gets skipped. Maintaining a prompt tracker is unglamorous, and it is the first thing to lapse when the quarter gets busy. Without it the team is guessing.
Nobody owns it. AEO falls between SEO, content, PR, and engineering. When four teams each own a quarter, it rarely gets done.
Pattern blindness. A team sees one site. An agency sees the same rendering problem on its twentieth client and recognizes it in an hour.
What an agency gets right
Measurement as a product. A good agency has the tracker built, the prompt methodology refined, and a weekly report that does not depend on anyone remembering to run it.
Audit depth. An AI visibility audit covers crawler access, rendering, schema, entity consistency, source presence, and current share of answer. An agency that has done this many times tends to find the issue that an internal team has walked past for a year.
Pattern knowledge. Which schema engines actually parse, which page structures get quoted, which third-party sources matter in your category. This comes from volume.
Where agencies fail
Generic content. An agency writer working from a brief produces pages that are structurally correct and substantively thin. Engines tend to quote the specific, and specific requires knowing the subject.
Slow site changes. Every fix goes through the client's dev queue.
Bad incentives. Some agencies sell paid placements, buy reviews, or promise named rankings on engines nobody can guarantee. If an agency promises you a position in ChatGPT answers by a date, walk away.
Reporting theater. Thick monthly decks that hide a flat share of answer number behind vanity metrics.
The hybrid that tends to work
Agency owns measurement, the audit, the technical recommendations, and the off-site source map. In-house owns the site changes, the content drafts, and the authentic community presence. Both look at the same weekly share of answer report.
The handoff that matters is content: the agency says what questions to answer and what form to use, the in-house expert writes the substance, the agency edits for structure.
How to decide
If you have an engineer, a subject-matter writer, and someone who will run a tracker every week without being asked, in-house can work. If any of those three is missing, that gap is what you hire for.
At AEO GEO Labs we are happy to run the full program, but the engagements that produce the best results are the hybrid ones, where the client's people write and our people measure and fix. If you want to see where you stand before deciding, the free tools from AEO GEO Labs cover crawler access, rendering, and schema, which is most of the technical audit.