How much internal time does AEO require from a marketing team?

Minuttia's State of AEO collected 599 responses from people in SEO, content and growth roles. Of those, 52.8% said their existing SEO team handles AEO, and 9.2% reported a dedicated specialist or team.

If AEO goes to your existing team as well, the hours below come out of work that team already does. So the planning question has two parts: how many hours, and what they replace.

Suppose you're a B2B software company with one marketer. Each month you publish two new answer pages and update two older ones. Each new page starts with a one-hour interview with someone in product or sales. Every page, new or updated, gets a fact check from that expert before it goes live. Once a month, the marketer reads the prompt-tracking results and decides what to write next.

The table gives each task an allowance in hours. The first column of hours assumes your team does everything. The second assumes an agency handles production while your team supplies knowledge and approval.

Writing is the largest line, at 8 of the 20 hours. We've allowed four hours for each new page to cover the draft and the edit. For comparison, Orbit Media's 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers found the average blog post runs 1,312 words and takes 3 hours 20 minutes to write. That figure measures blog writing, so treat it as a reference point for this one line.

The interviews cost four hours because two people are in the room for each one. It's an easy line to leave out, since half of it isn't the marketing team's time.

Fact approval looks small at two hours, but in this example it controls the schedule. A page waits for the expert's sign-off before it goes live. Thirty minutes of approval that sits for a week holds up four hours of finished writing.

The monthly review is there because a tracking tool collects the data and a person decides what to do with it. Semrush's prompt tracking, for example, checks your chosen prompts every day on ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Gemini, and its exports can run daily, weekly or monthly. Someone still reads the report and chooses next month's two pages. We've allowed two hours for that.

Sixteen of the 20 hours are the marketer's. Treating a month as four weeks, that's four hours a week, or a tenth of a 40-hour week. The other four hours belong to your experts.

In the table's second column, we've given writing, updating and publishing to the agency. Those lines come to 12 hours in the in-house column. Your company keeps 8 hours: two for expert interviews, two for fact approval, two for reading drafts, and two for the monthly review. The marketer's share falls from 16 hours to 4, and the experts' share stays at 4.

Lean Labs' AEO programs show how a published offer divides the work. The monthly work listed for its off-site program is expert articles placed on other sites, brand mentions, progress reporting and citation tracking. Its full program adds on-site work, a dedicated strategist, monthly strategy sessions and a citation dashboard.

Most of those lines are agency work: writing, placement and tracking. The strategy sessions are different, because they need someone from your company in them.

That's why the agency column in our example doesn't reach zero. The agency drafts the page, and your team confirms that its facts are right. We've also kept two hours a month for going over results with the agency.

What that outside work costs is a separate question. We cover it in how much AEO services cost, and the startup case in how much a monthly AEO retainer costs for a startup.

One detail can move hours back to your side. Lean Labs says the answer content it builds lives in HubSpot so a client's team can update answers without a developer. If you plan to keep answers current yourself once the pages exist, put an hour per page back in your column. We describe that setup in how AEO works with existing HubSpot content.

The table describes a month once the work is running. The first month of this example also has setup in it: choosing the buyer questions to track, checking that crawlers can reach the site, and preparing the page template and markup. We'd set aside two extra working days for that, which is 16 hours at eight hours a day.

In this model, every line except the monthly review is tied to the number of pages. Double the output to four new pages and four updates, and the in-house figure goes from 20 hours to 38. The agency figure goes from 8 hours to 14.

Approval is the other line to watch. One approver at 30 minutes a page is two hours a month. If a second reviewer, such as legal, also takes 30 minutes a page, that line doubles to four hours, and each page has one more sign-off to wait for.

So start with the table, change the page count and the allowances to fit your company, and compare the total with what your team can give up. If the total is more than your marketer can spare, publish fewer pages or move production outside.