Hire an agency if you want speed, engineering capacity and proven methodology. Build in-house if you have a strong technical SEO team already and just need to expand their scope. The decision usually comes down to whether your team has the bandwidth and the AEO-specific expertise to ship llms.txt, AI Instructions pages, schema and citation harvesting without learning on the job.
Your in-house team is at capacity. Your team has SEO experience but not AEO-specific experience. You want results in 90 days rather than 9 months. You want proprietary tooling and benchmarks from across a broader client base.
You have a strong technical SEO team with bandwidth to learn AEO. You have a developer team that can ship structured data and llms.txt without external help. Your timeline is flexible. You want full control of the methodology.
Many brands hire a Spacemen Digital project engagement (one-time AI Instructions page + llms.txt setup + schema implementation) and then run ongoing measurement in-house. Pure project work is often the highest-ROI structure for resource-constrained teams.
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