Can I do GEO myself or do I need to hire someone?

You can genuinely do the foundation yourself: the technical hygiene, the basic legibility work, the first llms.txt. I will give you that checklist in this article, free, no catch. The layer where most people stall is different: entity architecture, schema strategy, and above all the off-site authority work that decides who the AI actually trusts. Do the foundation yourself this week. Then decide about the rest with your eyes open, knowing exactly what it involves.

What you can absolutely do yourself

Here is the honest DIY checklist. Everything on it is free, requires no specialist, and moves your AI readiness for real:

• Unblock the AI crawlers. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot and Google-Extended are not disallowed. Five minutes, and it is the difference between existing and not existing to those AIs.
• Run the mirror test. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity about your business and category. Write down what comes back. That is your baseline.
• Write a first llms.txt. Plain text at your root: what you are, who you serve, your proof, where to verify. The guide is here, and a template lives in it.
• Fix your About page. One-sentence definition first, people, proof, verification links. The structure is here.
• Make your facts consistent. Same business name, same description, same details on your site, your profiles, your listings. Contradictions are the quiet killer.
• One H1 per page, phrased as the question buyers ask. Then answer it in the first sentence below.

Do this and you are ahead of most of your market. I mean that literally: most businesses have done none of it.

Where people stall, and why

The stall is rarely effort. It is that the next layer has invisible failure modes: you cannot see what is wrong, so you cannot fix it.

Schema strategy. Adding schema is easy; adding the right types, connected correctly, per page, is where it turns. Wrong or contradictory schema can hurt more than none, and nothing on the screen tells you it is wrong.

Entity architecture. Making the machine see one coherent thing across your site, profiles and mentions is a discipline of its own. DIY attempts usually produce fragments that look fine to a human and stay disconnected to a machine.

Off-site authority. The hardest and most decisive: third parties describing you, mentions, reviews, being present where the model forms its opinion. This is earned in the world, not edited in files, and it is the layer that most often separates cited from ignored. No checklist substitutes for it.

Measurement. Knowing whether any of it worked requires tracking citation share across engines and prompts over time. Doable by hand monthly; tedious to sustain; where a specialist's tooling earns its keep.

The honest decision rule

Do the DIY checklist first, regardless. It costs a week and makes everything after cheaper. Then apply the rule: if your category is uncontested in AI answers, the checklist alone may take the answer, enjoy it. If competitors are already being cited, or the checklist plateaus after a month or two, the game is being decided at the entity and authority layer, and that is when hiring pays, because you are no longer buying hygiene, you are buying the layer you cannot see. And whoever you consider hiring, agency or specialist, make them show you their own AI visibility first. If they cannot do it for themselves, keep your money.