AEO is quickly becoming one of the best-performing channels in B2B marketing. So why are so many CMOs understaffing it?
I see it again and again. AEO gets handed to the SEO lead. Someone buys a monitoring tool. Then everyone waits for results. That’s a big mistake. And it gets more expensive every month.
Any marketing team not practicing AEO in 2027 will be at a competitive disadvantage. Yet plenty of CMOs are still researching it. Or considering it. Meanwhile, prospects are learning about your competitors right now in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. They may even be finding information about your company that’s wrong or outdated.
The case for AEO is clear. I won’t restate all the studies on AI search behavior and conversion rates here. This article is about the part that gets less attention: having the team to run it.
AEO Is a Team Sport
AEO looks a lot like SEO at first glance. It isn’t. The scope is much broader. More content needs to be updated more often. And much of the work happens outside your website.
SEO was mostly a one-person job plus an agency. Product marketing and the web team pitched in now and then, usually to review content and fix technical issues, respectively.
AEO is different. AI engines don’t just rank your pages. They build answers from your website and your documentation. They also pull from review sites, YouTube, Reddit, and press coverage. To influence those answers, you have to influence all of those sources. That means work for teams that have never thought of themselves as part of search.
AEO is a team sport. Staff it like one.
Comparing SEO to AEO Staffing
Before we get to who does what, let’s start with the process. Figure 1 shows the five stages of an AEO program.
Figure 1. The AEO process starts with an audit and proceeds through production and monitoring. Strategy, content production, and monitoring are ongoing.
It starts with an AEO audit. How do you show up in answer engines today? What does your website content look like? Who is on the team, and what processes and tools do they use?
Next comes buyer journey alignment. Here you define your buyer personas, industry segments, products, and competitors. You also pick the prompts you want to own. This is a periodic step. Revisit it when your buyer segments or the market shift.
The last three stages run as an ongoing loop. Content strategy covers prompt research, content types, and buying-stage intent. It also sets a cadence and calendar for new content and updates. Content production runs from outline approval through writing, SME review, editing, and AEO quality control. Monitoring tracks mentions, citations, sentiment, and share of voice every month. What you learn there feeds right back into the strategy. You may go back to the buyer journey step occasionally when, for example, you launch a new product or enter a new market.
Now let’s look at how marketing teams are used to staff SEO and compare it to AEO.
Figure 2. AEO requires more team members and agencies, and more of their time.
In a typical SEO program, the SEO lead runs the program and the PMMs and the web team help as needed. The agency does the heavy lifting. In AEO, the lead role becomes a primary job: program owner plus project manager. The web team moves from occasional support to an ongoing role because of the volume of content, as we’ll expand on below.
Product marketing managers (PMMs) matter much more in AEO than they ever did in SEO. AEO content has to describe what your products do and who they’re for. It has to explain how you compare to alternatives. That’s PMM territory. Expect PMMs to help pick the prompts you want to own. They’ll approve outlines. They’ll also review content as subject-matter experts, as they did with SEO.
You will also need to bring in new teams:
- Customer marketing, to put more emphasis on customer reviews. AI engines lean on review sites. A steady flow of fresh reviews matters.
- PR, to focus on mentions. Third-party coverage shapes how AI engines describe you. Earned media is now an AEO lever, not just an awareness play.
- Developer relations or documentation, to rethink how your docs or developer portal are written. For technical products, docs are often where AI engines go to answer “how does it work” questions.
- Social media, to publish the right kind of content for AI search. And to monitor sentiment.
The Volume of Work in AEO
The process and the org chart only tell part of the story. The bigger surprise for most teams is the sheer volume of work: producing content and keeping an eye on what AI engines say about you.
Staffing for Content Volume
First, determine the content types you need. AEO goes well beyond the blog. Product pages, knowledge centers, product reviews, YouTube videos, and Reddit posts all feed AI answers. Each has a different owner and a different production process. Importantly, AI is a tool that can help in content production, but human oversight and review is critical to assure quality and effectiveness.
Second, set your refresh frequency. Existing content needs regular updates. New content alone won’t cut it. How often you refresh depends on competition and difficulty. A hotly contested category prompt needs more attention than a niche one.
Third, decide how much content production you can outsource. Agencies and freelancers can cost less than a new headcount. They also give you dedicated weekly hours. Those hours don’t disappear when a product launch or trade show comes along.
Fourth, map your workflows and find the bottlenecks. Trace the path from outline to published piece. Where does work stall? Then answer the big question. Who will own the process and coordinate across the team?
Finally, plan for third-party outreach to bloggers, listicle publishers, and review sites. You probably need it. And at most companies, no one owns it today.
Staffing for Monitoring and Listening
Monitoring is the other half of the volume problem. AI engines are non-deterministic. They also crawl daily. Answers vary widely by engine and by day. So someone probably needs to check at least weekly, even if you report monthly.
Aggregate numbers aren’t enough. A drop in sentiment tells you something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you what. For that, you need to read individual responses. How are you being described? What’s the problem? Where is it coming from?
That brings us back to third-party outreach. Fixing what you find might mean correcting a mistake on someone else’s site. It might mean calming down an angry blogger. Or getting a friendly customer to reply to a post on a subreddit. This is relationship work. It takes time from someone who knows the product and the market.
How to Budget for AEO
As I write this, I’m still surprised by how many CMOs I know are not investing in AEO. To me, it’s a no-brainer. Several studies show that website visitors who have already done their research are at least 30% more likely to buy. And yet…
Let’s make the business case for your CEO or CFO. First, let’s assume that your competitors are getting mentioned by the LLMs and you are not. You are losing potential pipeline every week. Some simple math. Let’s assume you could be getting 2 deals from AI referrals every month, and each deal is worth $50,000 in pipeline.
12 months x 2 deals x $50,000 = $1.2 million in pipeline.
Now, what will it cost? Let’s assume you have no in-house AEO experience, so you hire an agency. A retainer should cost in the neighborhood of $10,000 per month, including monitoring and reporting, so you don’t need to invest in a new tool. Subtract a year of fees:
$1.2 million – $120,000 = $1,080,000
A nice 10x ROI. I’m guessing you could move $10,000 from your paid advertising program and no one would be the wiser. But what if the agency fails? Let’s build in a 30% chance of failure. Your risk-adjusted return would be:
($1.2 million x 70%) – $120,000 = $720,000
Not bad at all. But what about doing it in-house? If you have a savvy SEO, chances are good that he or she can get your AEO program going. If not, build in some ramp time and assume your team will not be as effective as an agency for a while. We’ll assume an agency will be 50% more effective, and both and agency and an internal team have the same 30% chance of failure, even though it’s likely the agency success rate will be higher. The 50% effectiveness advantage is shown as 3 deals instead of 2 per month.
| Metric | Staff | Agency |
|---|---|---|
| Deals per productive month | 2 | 3 |
| Pipeline per deal | $50,000 | $50,000 |
| Gross monthly pipeline | $100,000 | $150,000 |
| Risk-adjusted monthly pipeline | $70,000 | $105,000 |
| Incremental monthly pipeline | — | +$35,000 |
Six- and twelve-month comparison
| Metric | 6 months | 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Staff risk-adjusted pipeline | $420,000 | $840,000 |
| Agency risk-adjusted pipeline | $630,000 | $1,260,000 |
| Agency fees | −$60,000 | −$120,000 |
| Incremental net pipeline value | +$150,000 | +$300,000 |
Table 1: Hiring an agency is a net gain over using in-house staff with no AEO experience.
Hiring an agency for even six months is ROI positive. You can decide at this point if you want to hire an FTE to run the program or stay with an agency. My preference when starting from scratch is to hire an agency. A fixed $10K per month retainer gives me steady service from an expert, and it’s less than I would spend on many other programs. I can also flex up or down if I want to add digital PR or need a big content push to support a new product line. Which brings us to scaling.
How to Scale AEO in the Org
Most CMOs don’t grasp the full scope of AEO. So they underinvest. $10K per month gets you started. But a fully scaled AEO program touches much more, as covered in the staffing section. Look at Figures 1 and 2 together. There’s a defined set of activities to cover. And a refresh cycle that never really ends. The question isn’t whether the work gets done. It’s who does it.
Figure 3 below shows the on-site and off-site tasks involved in AEO. When you scale, you will need someone to manage the whole program. Doing digital PR and monitoring sentiment in reviews and on Reddit and LinkedIn. {more}
Figure 3: An AEO agency can cover a lot of your program needs. How much work you give them decides whether you spend $10K or $20K per month.
How to Get Your PR Agency Involved
If you have a PR agency, bring them in early. Your press coverage now shapes how AI engines describe you.
Share your target prompts with them. Share your monitoring results too. That way they can focus on the outlets and topics that matter most. Have an AEO agency as well? Then someone on your team needs to coordinate the two.
In my experience, traditional PR agencies are not skilled at digital PR, which typically requires running surveys or conducting studies. Most good AEO agencies offer digital PR services, though it may add to your monthly retainer or be charged as an additional project fee in the range of $15-30K per project.
Lessons Learned
Educate your sales and executive teams. People think they understand AEO. Most don’t. Explain what AI can and can’t do for content creation.
Make someone own AEO. There’s more cross-functional work here than in most marketing programs. You may have an AEO agency working with your PR agency. Add PMMs, web, customer marketing, and social. Someone has to project manage all of it.
Put AEO in everyone’s objectives. Make it part of your team’s MBOs. It avoids finger-pointing. And it sets the program up to succeed.
Don’t sweat the small losses. Fix the issues. AEO is a long game. Your position will drop. Sentiment will dip. Outdated information will show up. Have a process to fix it.
Make It Part of Your 2027 Budget
Is AEO in your 2027 plan yet? If not, now is the time. Don’t make the costly mistake of understaffing or underfunding it. The investment is worth it.
Start by educating your CEO and board. The counterintuitive part is that AEO will take more people and more budget. And it lands at a time when CEOs think AI should be saving money. Expect that conversation.
Yes, AI tools will make your team more efficient. But the scope of AEO is big. More content types. Faster refresh cycles. More teams involved. Ongoing monitoring and outreach. The work grows faster than the efficiency gains.
Your competitors are already showing up in AI answers. Staff AEO properly, and your company will too.
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