The ad industry’s latest dernier cri is going in-house. Marketers at major advertisers, such as Pfizer, are pulling generative engine optimization (GEO) expertise inside the tent as their sense of urgency over search’s shifting landscape grows.
Pfizer officially transitioned its SEO and AI discoverability efforts to its in-house team this week, according to a LinkedIn post from Joshua Palau, the firm’s vp of performance media. It took about 60 days to build out the capability, complete with new hires, including Kinesso’s former director of SEO, per the post.
‘We have more experience’
Pfizer isn’t the only advertiser making SEO and AI search expertise an internal matter. Georgia Pacific and U.S. Bank have both stood up teams within their internal marketing units recently, while Adobe, Hertz, T-Mobile, Lowe’s and Skims are all currently advertising for managerial or directorial positions that include responsibility for SEO and AI discoverability.
“I don’t mean this in any sort of braggadocious way, but oftentimes, we have more experience than the consultants do because we’re practitioners and we’re living it day to day,” said Michael Lacorazza, CMO at U.S. Bank.
LLMs and AI chatbots have capsized the search landscape for brands and publishers. More than 26.4% of the U.S. population will turn to generative AI for search this year, a growth of 12.7%, according to eMarketer’s June 2025 forecast.
For some advertisers, that’s led to radical fluctuations in search traffic. Natasha Wallace, chief strategy officer at Jellyfish, said that the company’s clients had recorded a decrease in web traffic from unbranded searches of between 30% and 70%.
Such changes in search traffic have CMOs concerned.
In-housing uptick
Apparently, Pfizer saw the writing on the wall three months ago when it started hiring for SEO and AI discoverability roles. The team “saw the GEO opportunity coming, and recognized how it’s reshaping how our brands are discovered, understood and trusted,” Palau said in his post. The biopharmaceutical company declined to comment further.
Eight global clients have brought SEO and AI discoverability capabilities in-house in the last nine months, according to Ed Lee, global client partner at Brandtech Group, which is the parent company of in-housing and marketing services firm Oliver. British healthcare and wellness retailer Boots was among the clients which had in-housed SEO expertise recently.
Wallace told Digiday that the number of client requests for proposal (RFPs) relating to in-housing SEO and AI search had also risen.
“We’ve got millions in potential revenue sitting with four or five huge RFPs that we’ve received over the past two or three weeks,” she said.
She added, “The direction of travel for a lot of the services that clients have been paying for is in-housing.”
Among Brandtech and Oliver clients, central in-house SEO teams typically consisted of 5-10 staffers structured using a “hub and spoke” model across different markets or brand portfolios, Wallace said. The company offers a software tool for monitoring and evaluating AI search performance called Share of Model.
A sense of urgency
Advertisers’ interest in bringing such capabilities in-house is being driven by a sharp sense of urgency, according to Nick King, global practices lead at Overline, a marketing consultancy that works with blue-chip brands to set up in-house capabilities. At the same time, the AI search boom has led to a growing cottage industry of GEO vendors. In an era of fast-paced change, those vendors are flooding inboxes to promise publishers and brands better visibility in AI search. Some marketers are skeptical.
CMOs increasingly back their own teams to stay ahead of changing search behaviors and architecture over traditional agency partners, King argued. “They believe in their team’s ability to control the need for speed,” he said.
Setting up such a team might still take a significant amount of time, but once established, Lee said, in-house teams were typically better placed to react to changes in search algorithms or LLM behaviors than outside teams.
“You can’t afford to get stuck in a table tennis rally with your agency,” he said. “You need to be able to have the people who understand the rhythm of your business, the technical and product level expertise required to beat Google — and the technology to be able to deploy those updates to win.”