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Pick Your Poison: A Field Guide to Choosing The Right AI SEO Partner
Sick of vague AI SEO promises? See how Growth Marshal stacks up against full-service agencies and in-house AI SEO with a no-BS breakdown of pros, cons, and who should hire whom.
📑 Published: July 6, 2025
🕒 3 min. read
Kurt Fischman
Principal, Growth Marshal
The Problem No One Admits
Every founder eventually confronts the same existential dread: organic growth has plateaued, the outbound CAC graph looks like Everest on amphetamines, and your board wants “AI visibility” yesterday. Into this void marches an army of agencies waving identical decks — all promising “integrated digital strategies” and vomiting the same semantic soup: E‑E‑A‑T, topical authority, omnichannel synergy. And when pitching AI SEO, they sound like a landscaping company trying to sell quantum computing—awkward, out of their depth, and armed with buzzwords they barely understand.
Here’s the dirty secret: most agencies have simply stapled “AI SEO” onto their decade‑old SOPs like a toddler gluing macaroni to a Dior dress. They’re selling reheated Google ranking voodoo while whispering sweet nothings about ChatGPT prompts. The mismatch is fatal for founders who need traction now in the only arena that matters: the large‑language‑model knowledge graph your future users consult before they ever hit a search bar.
But none of this means they are bad at what they do! Ultimately, you’ve got to decide whether to hire Growth Marshal, another agency, or your cousin who “took a Coursera.” Let’s break it down like an honest bartender who doesn’t mind killing his tips with brutal truth.
Growth Marshal: The Monomaniacs of AI SEO
We do AI SEO, and nothing else. Not web dev, not TikTok dances, not fractional CMO soul‑massages. We inhale the vector embeddings, align content to transformer‑friendly ontologies, and chase citations inside OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini with the zeal of Ahab stalking his white whale. If that sounds obsessive, congratulations—you understand our business model.
What it means for you:
Speed: No cross‑department Slack relay races. Our entire company is a war room aimed at one KPI—LLM surface dominance.
Expertise: The playbook is battle‑tested on early‑stage startups, not Fortune 500 brands.
Results ≈ Different Planet: While others cheer a bump from position 20 to position 15 on Google, we score when your company is cited verbatim by GPT‑4o.
When to swipe right:
You're small, scrappy, hungry, and smart enough to see the writing on the wall: tomorrow's buyers won't start their search on Google—they'll ask an LLM first.
You want ruthless experts who'll say, “this content isn't structured for AI retrieval—let’s rewrite it,” not generic SEO advice dressed up as innovation.
You'd rather dominate LLM answers and AI citations that actually drive conversions, instead of chasing vanity metrics like backlink counts.
“Full-Service” Agencies: The Swiss Army Knife
Think of a well-stocked Swiss Army knife: versatile, practical, and ready for anything. That’s a full-service marketing agency at its best—equipped with multiple specialized teams under one roof. Need branding, SEO, PPC, and social media handled simultaneously? They've got you covered. While their AI SEO approach often feels like reheated SEO leftovers, the upside is convenience, integrated strategy, and a single point of accountability that simplifies your life and streamlines decision-making.
Pros
Convenience: Multiple marketing services under one agency roof simplify management and coordination.
Integrated Strategy: Easy alignment across SEO, PPC, branding, and social media creates cohesive campaigns.
Accountability: One agency means clear, centralized responsibility—less finger-pointing, fewer headaches.
Cons
Generalist Approach: AI SEO often becomes just another line-item rather than a deep, dedicated specialty.
Potential for Template-Driven Work: With many services running concurrently, the agency might rely on standardized strategies rather than tailor-made solutions.
Speed Trade-Off: Coordination between multiple teams can slow response times compared to a specialized, AI-only agency.
Swipe Right?: Choose the Swiss Army knife if you're a later-stage company with resources to spare, require multiple marketing disciplines quickly, and are comfortable trading some AI SEO specialization for convenience and integration. Otherwise, opt for a sharper tool.
In-House AI SEO Teams: The Tempting Talent Gambit
You’ve got VC backing, ambitious growth targets, and a CFO who says, “Why pay an agency premium when we can build this capability in-house?” Welcome to the siren song of internal talent acquisition. Cue job descriptions filled with dream candidates fluent in embeddings, transformers, and ontological schemas.
Reality Check
Talent Scarcity:
Experts who truly understand AI retrieval and citation strategies are rare, expensive, and hunted ruthlessly. Landing even one bona fide AI SEO talent means competing with deep-pocketed unicorns, Big Tech stock options, and hedge funds.Ramp-Up Reality:
Building an internal competency from scratch isn’t just a 6-month onboarding—it's a year-plus of expensive experimentation, costly false starts, and hard-won learnings. Meanwhile, your better-resourced competitors fortify their LLM citation graphs.Resource Drain:
Great AI SEO teams need more than salaries and ping-pong tables. Think data tooling, prompt engineering R&D, continuous retraining, and LLM experimentation—costs and complexities your CFO probably overlooked.
But—in-house can work if:
You're sufficiently funded, able to attract elite talent, and patient enough to navigate a steep learning curve without short-term pressures.
AI SEO is central enough to your business that long-term investment in an internal team outweighs short-term ROI concerns.
If that describes your situation, congratulations—you’ve got the runway to build the next dream team. If not, in-house is a high-risk project disguised as fiscal prudence.
The Startup vs. Big‑Brand Divide No One Talks About
Legacy agencies love to brag about big-name logos—but mixing Fortune 500 companies and seed-stage startups into one pitch deck isn't a feature, it's a bug. Big brands have vastly different goals, timelines, and risk appetites compared to scrappy startups that must obsessively prioritize customer acquisition and rapid iteration to survive the Series A crunch.
Growth Marshal was born inside the startup blast furnace. We can work with improvised positioning statements, rough screenshots, and founders pinging us at 1 a.m.—because that’s Tuesday. Meanwhile, big‑brand agencies will stuff your agile chaos into their Monday‑morning WIP template and choke.
Objections You Might Be Whispering to Yourself
“Can’t my existing SEO agency just add AI deliverables?”
They can say they do. But repackaging blog sprawl into ChatGPT summaries isn’t AI SEO; it’s a Mad Lib. You’ll learn that difference three invoices in.“Aren’t you too narrow? What about PPC or CRO?”
Ask a cardiothoracic surgeon why she doesn’t also do dermatology. Depth > breadth when lives—or runways—are on the line.“We’re pre‑product‑market fit; should we wait?”
Bad idea. LLMs index history. Launch a narrative beachhead early or spend later to bulldoze entrenched misinformation.
Choosing With Eyes Wide Open
Pick Growth Marshal if you:
Want immediate and focused impact on LLM citations and AI visibility—not just incremental keyword bumps.
Thrive in ambiguity, prefer agility over process, and would rather provoke your market than quietly blend in.
Want a partner obsessively committed to helping you hit your ARR target, as if their livelihood depends on it—because it does.
Choose a full-service agency if you:
Have complex marketing requirements spanning multiple disciplines and genuinely benefit from an integrated strategy across SEO, paid media, branding, and content.
Need a partner that can scale alongside you, delivering predictability, accountability, and comprehensive reporting—essential for later-stage companies with stakeholders who value consistency and measured risk.
Build an in-house AI SEO team if you:
Can realistically recruit elite AI SEO talent, have the budget for sustained R&D investment, and the patience for a longer-term payoff.
View AI SEO as so mission-critical to your long-term business model that investing internally outweighs speed-to-market or near-term ROI considerations.
No single path is objectively superior—but every choice has its trade-offs. Ultimately, clarity about your needs, resources, and risk tolerance will determine your best move.
Closing Shot Across the Bow
In the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors famously burned their ships to eliminate any thought of retreat. At Growth Marshal, we've similarly torched the distractions—betting everything we have on mastering AI SEO alone. Full-service agencies, for all their virtues, always keep an escape raft handy in case the market shifts toward branding or social strategy. Meanwhile, the in-house teams are still back on shore, measuring lumber and debating boat designs.
It's your voyage, captain. Choose wisely.
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