Key Takeaways
- GEO work spans at least six skills: technical SEO, content, structured data, digital PR, analytics and prompt testing. One person rarely covers all of them well.
- Agencies fit broad scope with no internal specialist. In-house fits a large, constant workload with a manager who can direct it. Freelancers fit a narrow job or a specific skill gap.
- Promptwatch Data shows about 39% of ChatGPT citations go to product and landing pages, which are pages you own. Another big slice goes to listicles, comparisons and reviews on third-party sites, which is PR work.
- Google says optimizing for generative AI search is "still SEO," so any hire needs solid SEO fundamentals first.
- The models combine well. An in-house owner plus an agency for execution is a common setup.
What GEO work actually involves
GEO (generative engine optimization) is getting your business described accurately and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot and similar tools. AEO is the close cousin: making your content the direct answer to a question. Most practitioners use the terms interchangeably, and so do I.
Nobody controls what an AI system says. So no hiring model gets you a guaranteed result, and anyone who promises one is selling something. What you can control is the quality of the work and how well you can tell whether it is moving anything.
The skills break down like this:
| Skill | What it covers | Who usually does it |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Crawling, indexing, site speed, robots.txt rules for AI bots, rendering | Technical SEO specialist or developer |
| Content and editing | Clear, factual pages that answer customer questions directly | Writer and editor, with a subject expert |
| Structured data and entities | Consistent business facts on the site and across profiles, schema where it fits | SEO specialist or developer |
| Digital PR | Earned coverage, reviews, listings and mentions on other sites | PR or outreach specialist |
| Analytics | Tracking AI referrals, crawler activity and citations | Analyst or SEO lead |
| Prompt testing | Checking what AI answers say about you, by market and persona | SEO specialist with tooling |
Look at that list and the hiring question gets clearer. You are not hiring "a GEO person." You are filling a stack of skills, and the real decision is how many of them you already have.
What the citation data says about who you need
The most useful input I found for this decision is not a salary survey. It is where AI engines actually pull citations from. Promptwatch Data's report on which content types ChatGPT cites most covers Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026:
- Product pages: 22.4% of classified citations
- Landing pages: 16.8%
- Listicles: 13.6%
- How-tos: 8.7%
- Documentation: 7.5%
- General articles: 6.1%
- Comparisons: 5.9%
- News: 5.7%
- FAQ pages: 3.3%
- Reviews: 1.7%
For commercial prompts the skew is stronger. Product pages hit 26.0%, landing pages 20.6%, listicles 15.0% and comparisons 7.9%, almost 70% of commercial citations between them.
Here is what that means for staffing:
- Product and landing pages are about 39% of citations, and you own them. Editing them takes someone with access to your CMS and product team. That favors in-house people or developers.
- Listicles, comparisons and reviews live on third-party sites. Getting into them is outreach and digital PR, which suits an agency or a PR specialist.
- Docs and FAQs favor a technical writer working closely with product, again closer to in-house.
Content also ages differently. Promptwatch's content half-life data found news pages lose half their citations in about five weeks, while landing pages and docs hold most of theirs for months. Evergreen owned pages are a slow, steady investment. News and PR-style content needs constant refreshing.
The three models at a glance
| Factor | Agency | In-house hire | Freelancer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best fit | Broad scope, no internal specialist | Large, constant workload and a clear manager | Narrow scope or a specific skill gap |
| Cost structure | Fixed monthly fee or project price | Salary plus employment costs, tools and management time | Hourly or project rate |
| Skill coverage | Wide, across technical, content and PR | Depends on the person, usually 2 to 3 of the six skills | Usually one or two deep skills |
| Speed to start | Fast, often within weeks | Slow: recruiting, onboarding | Fast, easy to start small |
| Risk if they leave | Process stays with the firm | Knowledge walks out the door | Project stalls, no backup |
| Access to PR and outreach | Strong | Weak unless you hire for it | Varies |
| Product and site access | Needs coordination | Native | Needs coordination |
Hiring in-house
You either employ a specialist or add GEO to an existing marketer's role. The second option is more common than job boards suggest. Kelly Stanze of Women in Tech SEO notes that in-house SEO, GEO and AEO roles are still less common than agency ones, but the range of companies bringing the work in-house keeps widening. An ecommerce in-house SEO has a very different day than a lead gen one.
Where in-house wins
- Deep product knowledge. Your own team knows which claims are true, which features shipped last week and which pricing page is out of date.
- Direct access to the CMS, developers and product managers, which matters because so much citation surface is your own pages.
- Continuity. The same person watches the data month after month.
Where in-house struggles
- One hire cannot cover technical SEO, editing, structured data, PR and analytics. You will end up buying some of it elsewhere.
- Cost. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a May 2025 median wage of $78,760 for market research analysts and marketing specialists. That is a broad category, not an SEO or GEO role, so treat it as a rough floor and not a quote. Add employment costs, tools and management time.
- Without a manager who understands the work, a specialist can drift. A hire needs someone to direct them.
In-house is a good fit when you have steady content volume, frequent product change and someone senior enough to set priorities. If you have one product page and a blog that updates twice a quarter, a full-time hire will run out of work.
Hiring a freelancer
Freelancers are the easiest way to start small. Scope is flexible, commitments are short, and you can buy exactly the skill you lack.
Strengths
- Flexible scope and low commitment.
- Deep skill in one area, such as technical audits, GEO-focused writing or schema implementation.
- Lower overhead than an agency for a well-defined job.
Limits
- You become the project manager. Someone has to coordinate the freelancer, your developers and everyone else.
- Coverage is thin. A great GEO writer will not run digital PR, and a technical consultant will not write your comparison pages.
- Availability and continuity. If your one freelancer disappears mid-project, so does the context.
A freelancer fits a business that needs a few expert hours a month and can coordinate the rest. A typical example is a small company that needs a technical audit and a rewrite of ten key pages, then maintains them internally.
Hiring an SEO and GEO agency
An agency suits most companies that want technical, content and off-site work done without hiring several people. You get a team with different specialties under one contract, usually a fixed monthly fee or a project price.
Public pricing varies a lot. Published figures in the research I reviewed range from audits and roadmaps starting around $2,500 and ongoing advising from $3,000 a month at a B2B specialist like Optimist, up to roughly $10,000 a month at Omniscient Digital for full programs. Those are two data points from agencies' own marketing, not a market average, so confirm current pricing directly.
A caution on those "best GEO agencies" lists: most are written by one of the agencies on the list, and Optimist says so openly about its own. Use them for pricing signals and methodology ideas, not as neutral rankings.
What to look for
- Proof tied to commercial outcomes, such as referral revenue or conversions from AI traffic, not just a rising "visibility score."
- GEO and SEO treated as one program. Google's own line is that this is still SEO, so be wary of anyone selling GEO as a separate magic layer.
- A clear answer to "what will you change on my site each month?" A Reddit thread on r/seogrowth asks exactly this about GEO agencies, and vague answers are a red flag.
- Transparent reporting and no long lock-in contracts.
A GEO agency also checks whether AI answers mention, cite or recommend your brand, which a traditional SEO agency may not. That said, Onely's view that you may not need both separate vendors is reasonable: a good SEO agency with GEO capability covers most of it.
If you are specifically weighing an agency, 1001 SEO Media is one option. It combines technical SEO, content, digital PR and GEO, works without long-term contracts and uses senior specialists. Whichever firm you evaluate, ask for the monthly deliverables in writing.
Speed and risk compared
Speed to start is where the models differ most. A freelancer can begin within days. An agency usually starts within a few weeks after scoping. An in-house hire takes months once you count recruiting, notice periods and onboarding.
Risk follows a different pattern:
- Agency: the process and team survive any one person leaving, but you depend on the firm's quality, and results are hard to attribute if reporting is vague.
- In-house: the biggest risk is a single point of failure. If your one specialist leaves, so does the knowledge.
- Freelancer: the risk is continuity and coordination, and the work is only as good as your brief.
All three share one risk: promises. Nobody controls AI outputs, so judge any option on process, evidence and measurement, not on guaranteed rankings.
Which company fits which model
| Your situation | Likely fit |
|---|---|
| Small local business, simple site | Do much of it yourself (Google says a small local business can probably do much of the work itself), plus a freelancer for a one-off audit |
| B2B SaaS with no SEO specialist and a need for PR mentions | Agency |
| Large ecommerce site with constant product change and a manager in place | In-house owner, plus tooling |
| Enterprise with complex site architecture | In-house lead plus a specialist agency for technical depth |
| One narrow gap, such as schema or GEO writing | Freelancer |
| Multi-market brand needing PR, content and monitoring | Agency, or in-house with agency execution |
The hybrid models that usually work
Pure models are rarer than the articles imply. The setups I see work best:
- In-house owner plus agency. The employee sets priorities, owns product knowledge and approves content. The agency handles outreach, technical audits and volume.
- Agency plus freelance subject expert. The agency runs the program and a freelance specialist writer or technical editor adds depth in a niche.
- Freelancer plus internal marketer. A marketer gets a few expert hours a month to avoid mistakes while building skill.
The tooling question, regardless of who you hire
Whichever model you pick, someone needs to see what AI engines say about you and whether the work is paying off. That is a measurement problem, and it is the same whether you employ a person or an agency.
Promptwatch is an end-to-end AI visibility platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mention and cite your brand. It also logs AI crawler activity on your site, finds content gaps, and can draft and publish content to your CMS. That makes it useful to an in-house owner who needs a data layer, and to agencies running programs for clients. Its agency plans start at $199 a month, and the pricing page has current numbers.
Other options for AI visibility tracking exist at different price points, including Profound, Peec AI and Otterly.AI. Most of the mid-priced tools are monitoring-first, so check whether you also need crawler logs, traffic attribution or content tooling.
For a wider view of the category, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists many more.
A useful rule: if you hire an agency, ask what tooling they use and whether you get access to the data. If you hire in-house, budget for a tracking platform from day one, because a specialist without data is guessing.
A short decision checklist
Answer these honestly before you sign anything:
- Do you have someone senior who can direct GEO work? If not, an in-house hire alone is risky.
- Is your workload constant or project-shaped? Constant favors in-house. Project-shaped favors freelancers or agencies.
- Do you need off-site mentions, listicle placements or reviews? That is PR work, and it points toward an agency.
- How many of the six skills do you already have in the building? Hire for the gaps, not for a title.
- Can you measure the result? If not, fix measurement first, then pick the model.
The bottom line
An agency is the default for companies without an internal specialist and with broad needs. In-house makes sense when the workload is large and constant and you have a manager. A freelancer is the right answer for a narrow gap. And a lot of companies end up with two of the three.
If you want a quick outside read before deciding, run a free AI visibility check with Promptwatch's report and see which of the six skills your gaps actually point to. For more AI search research behind these numbers, the Promptwatch Data hub is free.