Do you need an AEO agency, an SEO agency, or nobody?

For most B2B companies right now, nobody. The work that moves AI visibility is a rendering job for whoever owns your code and a writing job for whoever owns your content, and both of those are people you may already have. A smaller set of companies need outside help. This piece is about telling which one you are.

Desses sells this work. We run an AEO audit that leads into a monthly retainer at $4,500 or $7,500, which gives me an obvious reason to tell you the category is urgent. For a good share of the people here the answer is nobody, and I'd rather write it than sign a client who works out in month six that they paid us to file one ticket.

AEO is work done to get a page retrieved and cited inside an AI-generated answer. GEO is the same thing under a different acronym. SEO is work done to rank a page. The distance between the three is smaller than the invoices imply.

Hire nobody when one of these four things is true

Your site renders client-side. If your text arrives through JavaScript, no content plan fixes it, because no major AI crawler executes JavaScript on a live fetch. The fix is server rendering, and an agency is a strange way to buy a ticket for whoever owns your build.

You have no organic traffic to protect. The citation premium is a percentage of clicks you already get: 2.07% organic click-through when a brand is cited in an AI Overview against 0.94% when it isn't, on Seer Interactive's 5,471,127 queries. At zero, the multiplier does nothing.

You have no informational content. AI Overviews appear on 36% of informational queries and 8% of commercial ones in that same dataset. A four-page site with a demo form and a logo wall has no questions to answer, and starting a blog to become AI-visible is a bad reason to start writing.

You can run the four checks yourself. Most of what an entry-level audit finds is free.

1. Fetch your own page the way a crawler does with curl -A "OAI-SearchBot", then search the output for the sentence you'd want quoted.

2. Read your /robots.txt against the names that matter. OAI-SearchBot is the index ChatGPT cites from, Claude-SearchBot feeds Claude's search, PerplexityBot is Perplexity's index. Block one and you're out of that surface. GPTBot and ClaudeBot only train models, and Google-Extended is a training token that leaves you in AI Overviews. People charge for getting that last one wrong.

3. Grep a month of server logs for those same names, verified by IP against claude.com/crawling/bots.json.

4. Turn on the free reporting: GA4's AI Assistant channel group and Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, whose grounding queries are the only place a provider shows what was asked before your page got cited.

Four checks, one afternoon, no invoice. Clean results and no visibility puts the problem in what you publish, not in who you hire.

Hire an SEO agency when the problem is classical

You don't rank, the technical foundation is broken, nobody writes. Those are 2015 problems and still the ones most companies have.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in the Google Search index, through a mechanism Google calls query fan-out. Most pages an AI Overview cites rank somewhere in Google, on both large studies that have looked, and the two disagree in a way worth understanding before anyone quotes either at you.

So for the Google surfaces, ranking work is AI-visibility work. Standalone chatbots overlap far less, and that's not where your pipeline is. Nor does being talked about carry you: Semrush found only 6 to 27% of the most-mentioned brands also rank as top cited sources.

Most people asking for AEO need SEO. If a vendor doesn't say that on the first call, you've learned what they sell.

Hire an AEO specialist, or a studio that builds, when the gap is structural

The narrow case. You already rank, the writing is good, someone owns it, and what's left is rendering, schema, measurement, or a platform decision you can't unwind cheaply. Schema is where the honest job is smallest, because the one controlled study found citations going down, so anyone selling it as a growth lever hasn't read it.

Smaller group than the market implies, and smaller than the channel's own numbers suggest.

Hire in-house when you have the volume

Consistent publishing volume, an engineer who can own rendering, and someone who writes. With those three, this is usually the best answer available. Nothing here is proprietary. Bing added GEO to its Webmaster Guidelines in February 2026, the first search engine to do so, and as reported by Search Engine Journal all of it concerns content form: state facts directly, use consistent entity names, one topic per URL, put the important information near the top. Bing's own framing is that GEO guarantees citations about as much as SEO guarantees rankings.

Two weeks on the primary sources beats a retainer recycling a template across forty clients. The reason to hire out is capacity, or a build you can't staff.

Three questions to ask on a sales call

Ask these before you ask for a proposal. Each has a wrong answer currently being sold.

"What do you do with llms.txt?" Ahrefs checked 137,000 domains in June 2026 and found 97% of those with a valid file got zero requests in May 2026, in the most SEO-aware population anybody has measured. Google has declined the format three times, most recently John Mueller in January 2026: "to be direct, no." The right answer: it takes ten minutes, it's harmless, and it does nothing measurable. Article 02 has the file. A vendor selling it as a lever is charging you for something nobody requests.

"Where does the 40% number come from?" The GEO paper, KDD 2024, 10,000 queries. The paper's own claim is "up to 40%", for adding quotations. The one-decimal versions in circulation are derived from Table 1 rather than printed in the paper, and that same table puts keyword stuffing at minus 8.3%. Then the conditions: a custom pipeline feeding the top five Google results to GPT-3.5-turbo, with the one live-product test being 200 file uploads to Perplexity. A July 2026 survey puts it flatly, that the figure describes a relative visibility gain in a simulator where five documents have already been placed in context. Someone quoting 40% with the conditions attached has read the paper. Someone quoting "40% more visibility" as an outcome has read a LinkedIn post.

"How do you measure this, and what can't you see?" The wrong answer is a confident multiple. The only one with a real study under it is Semrush's 4.4x, based on conversion rate, across 500-plus digital marketing and SEO topics: one vertical, the one least like your business. The four-to-eleven-times range in decks traces to no primary source at all. Then the instrumentation: GA4's referrer list isn't published, referrer-less traffic lands in Direct, and AI Overview clicks arrive as ordinary Google organic, so every published AI referral figure undercounts by an unknown amount. And Schulte and colleagues measured a daily Jaccard around 0.35 inside a single engine, so seven or eight repetitions sit between you and a signal. A practitioner names all of that before you ask.

Three questions, three minutes. They separate the people reading primary sources from the people who repackaged a content retainer in March.

Who to hire, mapped

What we do, and what we turn down

The Desses AEO offer is a scoped, one-off audit that can lead into a retainer: crawlability and rendering, schema, content structure, measurement setup, quoted on the first call once I've looked at the site. The full breakdown is article 13.

We turn down Webflow builds, price-shoppers and projects under €3,000. We price disorganised clients at roughly 2x, because half the hours on a chaotic project go to doing things twice.

Design and build run in one flow here, and I'm on every call. Worth paying for when the gap is structural, and an expensive way to buy a robots.txt review. Our website design work is where most of it starts.

Send me your URL and I'll run those four checks and send back what came out. If they're all clean, I'll say so and tell you to spend the money elsewhere.