AI search: advisory, agency or in-house?
Three ways to resource AI search work, what each is genuinely good at, and the honest case against each one, including the case against hiring us.
The short answer
Hire in-house if AI search is permanent and full-time. Use an agency if you need execution capacity. Use an advisory if you have a capable team but no senior judgement here. Many companies need none of the three yet.
The three models, honestly
| Dimension | In-house | Agency | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| You are buying | Capacity and context | Capacity and process | Judgement and direction |
| Best when | This is permanent and full-time | You lack hands, not direction | You have hands, not senior direction |
| Weakest at | Breadth across platforms early on | Saying you do not need the work | Doing the work themselves |
| Knowledge ends up | With you | With them | With you, by design |
| Ramp | Three to six months | Weeks | Weeks |
| Fails when | You cannot keep them busy | Scope becomes output volume | Your team has no capacity to act |
The case for in-house
One person who knows your product, your category and your buyers will out-perform any outside supplier on the judgement calls, because most of those calls are about your specific situation rather than about AI search.
It is the right answer when the work is genuinely permanent and full-time. That threshold is higher than people assume: monitoring a frozen prompt set and acting on it is perhaps two days a month once established. The rest of a role has to come from adjacent work.
The honest risk is breadth. One person learning eight platforms, five citation-source categories and a measurement discipline from scratch will take two quarters to reach competence, and will be your single point of failure afterwards.
The case for an agency
If the diagnosis is clear and you simply lack hands, an agency is the efficient answer. Content restructuring at volume, technical remediation across a large site, and review-platform hygiene are all execution problems, and execution is what agencies are built for. Google's own guidance on hiring a search supplier is a good starting checklist.
The structural weakness is that an agency's revenue is tied to doing work. This is not cynicism, it is incentive design, and it shows up most clearly in the answer to "should we stop?" A model that only earns while producing output is a poor source of advice about whether output is needed.
The practical test is whether they will scope the work down after a baseline. Ask before you sign.
The case for an advisory, and against
An advisory is right when you have a capable team that is executing well on things they understand, and no senior person who has done this specifically. The value is in the judgement: which prompts matter, whether an answer is materially wrong, which of four possible causes is producing your symptom, and when to stop.
This is what we are, so read the following with that in mind.
An advisory fails when your team has no capacity. Strategy handed to a team with no room to act produces a document and a slow-building resentment. If your marketing team is at capacity, buy execution, not direction.
It also fails when the problem is genuinely simple. If your crawler directives are blocking a retrieval bot and your G2 listing is two years stale, you do not need an advisory. You need an afternoon and a checklist, and we will tell you that on the call.
Our position
Roughly a third of the free audits we run end with us saying the problem is not AI visibility, or that the fix is small enough to do yourself. That is a cheaper outcome for us than a badly-scoped engagement, which is why we can afford to say it.
When you need none of them
You have not measured anything yet
Buy nothing until you have a baseline. The four possible causes of low AI visibility have wildly different remedies, and choosing a supplier before the diagnosis is choosing a treatment before the test.
Your organic search is weak
Google's AI surfaces are grounded in Google Search. Fix the foundation first; it is cheaper and better understood.
Your crawler directives are unchecked
An afternoon of work that is occasionally the entire problem. Do this before spending anything.
Your category has little assistant usage
Still true in some industrial and public-sector-adjacent niches. Measure once to confirm, then revisit in six months.
A hybrid that usually works
- Get a baseline, from anyone, including yourself, before committing budget.
- Fix the cheap, unambiguous things in-house: crawler directives, stale third-party listings, the opening passages of your best-ranking pages.
- Bring in senior judgement for the diagnosis and the sequencing, on a defined scope rather than an open retainer.
- Use execution capacity, agency or freelance, for the volume work that follows, briefed against that sequencing.
- Keep measurement in-house from the start. It is the part that compounds, and outsourcing it means never developing a feel for your own category.
Frequently asked questions
What should we ask an agency before signing?
Which crawler controls ChatGPT citations, whether their citation rate includes unlinked brand mentions, which domains currently carry citations in your category, whether they sell llms.txt, and what they would do if the answer is that you do not need them yet. The full list is here.
Can one person really cover all of this?
The measurement and on-site work, yes, once established. The off-site citation-sources programme is genuinely several disciplines, and expecting one hire to do review platforms, community, publisher relations and video is setting them up to fail.
Is advisory just consulting with a nicer name?
The distinction we hold to is that we sit in your pipeline reviews and brief your team before board meetings, rather than delivering a document and leaving. Whether that is worth a different word is fair to argue about; whether it is a different way of working is not.
Sources
- Google Search Central, hiring an SEO. Google's own questions to ask a prospective search supplier.
About Surge45 Team
AI Search & GEO Specialists
Surge45 is the digital discovery and growth strategic advisory for SaaS. We help software companies become the answer across Google, AI search and communities, then turn discovery into pipeline. We also build WriteWorks, our content engineering platform for AI search.
Related Articles
Get More SaaS Marketing Insights
Join 10,000+ SaaS marketing leaders who receive our weekly newsletter with actionable strategies.
Subscribe to Newsletter