Hire AEO/GEO specialists
who make you legible to machines.
A dedicated specialist, or a pod, who works the specific layer that gets a brand quoted inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews: schema and entity consistency, answer-first content structure, verified AI-crawler access. Vetted on real sites before they touch yours, working inside your CMS alongside your existing SEO or content team, scaling monthly without a hiring cycle. You interview the specialist who'd actually do the schema and entity work before anything is signed.
Interview before signing · First working session inside 14 days · Scale monthly
Tell us about the role
Start Your Enquiry
Send a short brief; an itemised proposal follows within 48 hours.
Hiring an AEO/GEO specialist through PixelCrayons gets you a vetted answer-engine visibility specialist inside your team within 14 days. They work the layer classic SEO retainers often leave out: schema deployed and validated, one consistent entity story told identically everywhere machines read about you, pages reformatted to answer their own question first, AI-crawler access verified, and digital PR built to be citable rather than just linkable, in your CMS, alongside whoever already runs your SEO, with a named project manager and a weekly review in Prism tied to what moved. You interview the actual person first, scale monthly, and skip the recruiting cycle. 21 yrs of search delivery and 500+ SEO engagements stand behind the bench.
Judge the record,
not the adjectives.
Outcomes tied to real engagements, not averages.
Rates for brands and companies buying for themselves.
Answer-engine skills,
measured, not asserted.
Not a generalist who added "AI search" to a slide. An AI search optimization expert whose job is the specific layer engines read to decide who to quote: structure, entities and access, with the limits of what's measurable stated up front.
On-page answer engineering
- Answer-first content formatting: the question answered cleanly before the depth underneath
- Structured data deployed and validated across templates
- Entity consistency: one description of what you are, told identically everywhere
- Question-form headings and speakable structure
- AI-crawler access verified: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot confirmed able to reach and read
The wider corpus (GEO)
- Third-party profile and directory consistency, so the brand reads the same way everywhere
- Digital PR built to be citable, not just linkable
- sameAs graph connections tying site, profiles and coverage into one resolvable entity
- Retrieval-ready content structured for how generative engines actually fetch and summarise
- Question research: what buyers are actually asking assistants
The commercial layer
- Baseline visibility audits: what the engines say about you today, recorded and repeatable
- Measurement you can audit: AI referral sessions, tracked spot-checks and input-work verification kept separate from anything nobody outside the model companies can measure
- Working alongside your existing SEO or content team, not around them
- Fixes shipped and verifiable page by page, not left in a PDF
- Client-ready reporting agencies can drop straight into their own templates
What an AEO/GEO specialist
is actually fixing each week.
The answer-engine layer is mostly careful repair work, and knowing that makes the hire easier to judge.
A normal week, in plain terms
Most of the week goes on checks and fixes, not ideas. They run the same set of buyer questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, note what each one says about you, and compare it with the last run. They validate schema on the templates your developers touched, chase a directory listing that still carries your old company description, and rewrite the opening of a page so it answers its own question in the first two sentences. Expect small, specific changes logged one by one, not a big deliverable that arrives all at once.
What to ask in the interview
Hand them one of your own pages and ask what an assistant would struggle to extract from it. A strong candidate talks about the markup, the heading structure and whether your name and description match what third-party sites say, before they mention content volume. Ask how they would check whether GPTBot can reach the page; they should describe server logs or your robots file, not a tool screenshot. Ask which schema types they would add first on your site, and why. Then ask what they cannot measure. If they claim to track citations precisely, or promise placement in a named assistant, keep looking.
Have these ready before day one
Give them edit access to your CMS templates, not just the page editor, because most schema lives in the template. Add read access to server logs or your CDN dashboard so crawler access can be checked rather than assumed. Write down, once, the single sentence that describes what your organisation does, and get it agreed internally; entity work stalls when marketing, sales and the founder each describe the company differently. Finally, list the profiles you own on review sites, directories and social platforms, with logins, so nobody loses the first fortnight to password resets.
When this is the wrong hire
If the site cannot be crawled, loads slowly or has thin content across most of its pages, fix that first. Answer-engine work sits on top of basic search health; it does not replace it, and a technical SEO specialist is the better first hire. The same goes for a brand nobody writes about yet: without coverage elsewhere, there is little for the wider corpus work to tidy up. And if you need traffic this quarter to hit a target, paid search will move faster. This role pays off over months, on a foundation that already works.
Brief to embedded,
in two weeks.
Brief & shortlist
You describe the site, the stack and the gap; we propose the specialist, or pod, whose actual delivery history fits it. No generic CVs.
Interview them
You meet the real specialist who'd do the schema and entity work, not an account manager quoting citation numbers they didn't produce. Quiz them on schema choices and crawler checks; if they're not the right fit, we put forward someone else.
Inside your stack
CMS access granted, a visibility baseline run: what the assistants say about you today, schema and entity consistency audited, your stand-ups joined alongside your existing SEO or content team. Their first session in your CMS lands within fourteen days of the NDA, so the baseline isn't waiting on a quarter of onboarding.
Scale either way
Add a second specialist when a content push or a rebrand demands it; step down once the foundation holds. The answer-engine work resizes each month, so extra capacity never waits on a headcount decision.
Requests, approvals and the weekly review for this engagement live in your Prism workspace. Each decision is recorded against the outcome it expected. See how Prism runs an engagement →
Meet the actual people before anything is signed
The person,
plus the measurement discipline.
Hiring a specialist gets you their skills. Hiring through a delivery organisation gets you their skills inside a structure that keeps working when life happens, and that says plainly what it can't yet measure.
Vetted on real sites, not puzzles
Every specialist on the bench has run live AEO/GEO work before yours. That work ran under our own delivery standards, reviewed weekly and held to the same measurement bar you'll see. Vetting by delivery history beats vetting by interview performance: a citation claim that held up on a live site is worth more than one made in an interview.
A named second specialist, briefed from day one
Every AEO/GEO hire comes with a named project manager, a clear escalation route and a second answer-engine specialist you know by name. Briefed on your engagement from day one: the schema notes and entity map the first one keeps are theirs to read as they're written. If the first specialist is on leave or moves on, the second picks up the schema backlog without a ramp-up. A lone freelancer can't offer that, and an in-house hire needs a whole team behind them to get it. You get the specialist and the coverage that keeps the answer-engine work moving.
Team integration, not a portal
Your CMS, your Slack, your stand-ups. Working alongside the SEO or content team you already have. Dedicated means embedded in how you already publish, not a ticket queue handed to a stranger.
No citation guarantee, and no one pretending otherwise
Which sources an assistant cites is decided inside systems nobody outside the model companies controls, and we say so plainly rather than sell a dashboard of guesses. What's contractual is the work: schema validated, entities consistent, pages reformatted, crawler access verified, with every report separating what's measured from what genuinely can't be yet.
How you typically hire,
versus through us.
If your current SEO programme already ships schema, entity hygiene and answer-first content, a standalone AEO/GEO hire would duplicate effort, and we'll say so rather than sell you a second specialist for one job.
| Hiring it yourself | Through PixelCrayons | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to a working specialist | A full recruiting cycle: sourcing, interviews, notice periods, then a learning curve on schema and citations | Inside 14 days of a signed NDA, interview included |
| Vetting | CV screening and a buzzword-heavy interview, a discipline this new is easy to talk about and hard to verify secondhand | Delivery history on real sites under our own standards, reviewed weekly |
| Management overhead | Yours entirely: recruiting, then coaching them through their first citation report | A named PM and escalation path included; you direct the citation strategy, not the admin around it |
| Scaling | A new hiring cycle each direction: months up, severance down | Resize monthly: add a specialist ahead of a rebrand or content push, step down after |
| Risk when it doesn't work | A mis-hire spends its tenure chasing citations nobody can prove or measure | Propose-again is built in; leaving takes a handover call with the entity map documented, not a negotiation |
Cited by AI Overviews, not just ranked underneath them.
A UK B2B SaaS platform arrived with organic contributing almost nothing to pipeline and enough inconsistent naming that answer engines couldn't confidently say what the product was. A topical authority map, answer-first content, and site-wide schema and entity cleanup got the product cited in Google AI Overviews as well as ranked. Organic traffic is up +127% in five months. The full write-up keeps the numbers, the timeline and the measurement caveats in.
Read the case study →Frequently
asked.
A written proposal with roles, rates and availability arrives within 48 hours of the brief and the shortlist follows within days; you interview the specialist the same week (ask to see real schema work they've shipped, under NDA, if you want to), and the first working session inside your CMS happens within 14 days of a signed NDA. Expect the first fortnight to prioritise a visibility baseline and an entity audit. Most sites have naming inconsistencies worth fixing before any new content ships.
No, and we'd encourage you to walk away from anyone who says yes. Which sources an assistant cites is decided inside systems nobody outside OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity or Google controls, and the same question can return different answers for different users, sessions and model versions. What we commit to contractually is the work that makes citation possible: schema deployed and validated, entity consistency established, answer-first pages shipped, crawler access verified, all reported weekly. That's the version of this role we sell, and the only version worth hiring for.
Depends what they already ship. If your current SEO programme already covers structured data, entity hygiene and answer-first content, a standalone AEO/GEO hire duplicates effort. We'll say so in the first audit rather than sell you a second specialist for one job. This role fits when SEO is handled elsewhere and the answer-engine layer specifically is the gap: we audit what exists, fix what machines can't parse or reach, and work alongside whoever already owns search.
With the measured and the unmeasurable kept in separate columns. What we track: AI referral sessions arriving in your analytics, AI Overview appearances on tracked queries, scheduled spot-checks of the major assistants recorded over time, and every piece of input work: schema validity, crawler access, entity consistency, answer-first coverage. What nobody can track yet: the assistants publish no impression or citation logs, and answers vary between users. Every report says which claims rest on data and which don't.
Most sites only need one: a single AEO/GEO specialist covers schema, entity work and content reformatting comfortably on their own. A digital-PR specialist joins for the wider corpus work once scope genuinely justifies it, and the monthly resize runs both directions. If one person can carry your schema and entity work, that's what we propose, not a pod sized for PR work you haven't got yet. Your proposal names the backup AEO/GEO specialist and says plainly whether their cover sits inside the monthly rate.
On this page, one hire covers both layers. The AEO side is on-page: answer-first formatting, structured data and verified crawler access. The GEO side is the wider corpus: consistent third-party profiles, sameAs connections and digital PR built to be citable. Most sites need one specialist for both, with a digital-PR specialist joining once scope justifies it.
Interview the person,
not the pitch deck.
Brief us on the site and the gap, get a written proposal within 48 hours and a shortlist within days, and meet the actual specialist before anything is signed. If the answer is that your existing SEO programme already covers this, we'll say so on the first call.
Proposal in 48 hours · Interview before signing · Scale monthly
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