Build vs. Buy: The AI Search Capability Worksheet
This isn’t a pricing calculator, and it doesn’t spit out a dollar figure or an ROI projection. Those would require assumptions about your specific team and market that no generic tool can honestly make. It’s a structured set of questions to answer honestly about your own team before deciding whether SEO, AEO, or GEO work should stay in house, move to an agency, or split between both.
Work through each section honestly, ideally with whoever actually owns marketing execution at your company, not just leadership’s assumption of what the team can do. Where you find real gaps, that’s usually where outside help closes the distance fastest. Where you find real strength, that’s usually worth keeping in house rather than paying for work you already do well.
Section 1: Internal Team Capability
- Does anyone on the team have hands-on experience with technical SEO audits (crawlability, Core Web Vitals, structured data), not just content writing?
- Has anyone actually implemented and validated schema markup (FAQ, HowTo, Organization) on a live site, or only heard about it?
- Has anyone built or maintained a content cluster structure, or has content historically been published as standalone posts?
- Does anyone have real experience earning third-party press, podcast, or guest-content placements, not just publishing owned content?
Section 2: Subject-Matter and Publishing Capacity
- Who actually has the subject-matter expertise to write or review technically accurate, genuinely useful content, and how much of their time can realistically go to this?
- What’s the team’s honest current publishing cadence, and is that cadence enough to build real topical depth in a category with active competitors?
- Is there a process for keeping older content updated, or does published content tend to go stale once it’s live?
Section 3: Hiring and Ramp-Up Reality
- If a gap requires a new hire, how long does that role realistically take to recruit, hire, and onboard at your company, based on past hiring timelines, not a best-case guess?
- Does the budget support a full-time specialist salary, or would this need to be a fractional or part-time role?
- How much ramp-up time would a new hire realistically need before doing independent, reliable work in a discipline this specific?
Section 4: Specialist Coverage Gaps
Different disciplines need different specialist coverage. Be specific about which of these your team can genuinely cover today, not which ones sound learnable:
- For SEO: technical auditing, content strategy, analytics interpretation, and basic development capability.
- For AEO: answer-first content restructuring, schema implementation, and manual cross-platform citation testing.
- For GEO: entity and schema consistency work, and separately, genuine earned-media or digital PR relationships.
Section 5: Tool and Contractor Needs
- What tooling would an in-house effort need (technical auditing, citation tracking, schema validation), and is that budgeted separately from headcount?
- Would any of this realistically need a specialized contractor even in an otherwise in-house setup, and has that cost been accounted for?
Section 6: What You’d Actually Want an Agency to Cover
If the honest answer to several of the sections above points toward outside help, get specific about scope before a first call: which discipline needs the most outside support right now, whether that’s a full retainer or a narrower engagement, and what your team would keep ownership of regardless (brand voice, subject-matter review, final approval) versus what gets fully delegated.
Reading Your Results
There’s no scoring system here, and a tool that hands you a number without knowing your team, budget, and timeline would be guessing. A few honest patterns worth noticing:
- Strong across Sections 1, 2, and 4: a hybrid model, keeping strategy and content ownership in house while bringing in specialist help for specific technical or PR gaps, is usually the fastest path.
- Real gaps in Section 3 (hiring reality) regardless of other answers: an agency closes the timeline gap immediately in a way a new hire cannot.
- Strong across most sections with only Section 5 (tooling) as the gap: that’s often solvable with a smaller tooling investment rather than a full outside engagement.
For a fuller look at how this plays out discipline by discipline, see the three comparison guides linked below, each one applies this same honest framework specifically to SEO, AEO, or GEO.
Want a second opinion on where your gaps actually are?
One Build, With the Numbers Attached
An agency arguing for agencies should show its own work, so here is one build with the numbers attached rather than adjectives.
A destination race we designed and built from scratch as a content hub. Every figure below is a client result, pulled from that client’s own Google Search Console and Race Roster accounts, covering June 9 to September 8, 2026.
- 615 keywords ranking, across 72 pages, from a standing start.
- 36% of those keywords sit on page one of Google, and nearly 9% in the top 3.
- Impressions up 680%, clicks up 140%, comparing the first 30 days of that window to the most recent 30.
- 81% of impressions come from the United States, the audience the race actually sells to.
- 100 out of 100 on PageSpeed, for both SEO and Performance.
- Registration pace up 540% against the four months before the work, with the launch week burst stripped out of the math.
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity which marathons to run near St. Petersburg or Tampa and the race comes back in the answer on all five. That one is an internal observation from our own prompt testing, not a metric any platform reports.
On registrations we are claiming correlation and nothing more. Pricing, email, and the race’s own community move that number too, so we are not going to tell you search alone produced it.
Disclosure: Scott Fishman is Executive Director of the St. Pete Marathon as well as Director of Growth at Winsignia, which is how we have account level access to this data.
Scott Fishman is Director of Growth at Winsignia, where he leads the AI search optimization work behind every build on this site. Reach him on LinkedIn.
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