What counts as a "build vs buy" query for GEO purposes?

Any question where a buyer is weighing whether to develop a capability internally versus purchasing a ready-made product or service, including phrasings like "should we build this ourselves," "is there a tool for this," or "in-house team vs agency." These queries carry strong commercial intent because the person asking is already past the "what is this" stage and is trying to make a resourcing decision.

Do AI engines actually cite decision-framework blog posts, or only reviews and forums?

They cite both, but weighted differently by platform. Community sources like Reddit and review platforms tend to supply the raw signal on real-world experience, while structured, data-dense articles supply the framework and numbers a model uses to organize its answer. A well-built decision-framework article is often the source that shapes the actual structure of the AI's response even when a Reddit thread supplies supporting color.

How is winning an AI answer different from ranking a comparison page in Google?

Google ranking rewards a single page winning position one for a keyword. AI answers reward being one of several sources a model synthesizes into a single response, so a page can never appear in Google's top ten and still get quoted inside a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer if it is well-sourced, specific, and independently corroborated elsewhere. Ranking and citation are correlated but not the same outcome.

Should build vs buy content mention competitors or alternative approaches by name?

Yes, when it is accurate and specific. Vague references to "other solutions" read as evasive, while naming real alternatives and honestly describing when they are the better fit signals the kind of balanced analysis AI engines are trying to extract. Naming alternatives also increases the chance your page gets pulled into the exact comparison prompts buyers actually run.

How much does Reddit really matter for these specific queries?

Significantly. Reddit is the single most-cited domain across major AI engines, and build vs buy and in-house vs outsource questions are exactly the kind of judgment call people ask real practitioners about in relevant subreddits. If your category has no honest, non-promotional presence in those threads, you are missing one of the heaviest-weighted sources models pull from for this query type.

Does FAQ or HowTo schema still help this content get cited by AI engines?

Yes, even though Google removed the FAQ rich result from search results on May 7, 2026, following the earlier removal of the HowTo rich result in 2023. Both FAQPage and HowTo remain valid schema.org types, and the structured markup still helps AI crawlers and answer engines parse and extract your content accurately. Keep the schema alongside standard Article or BlogPosting markup; you are optimizing for machine extraction now, not for a visual search result feature.

What is the biggest mistake brands make with build vs buy content?

Writing a framework that only ever concludes "buy." AI engines and skeptical human readers both recognize a predetermined argument, and content that never acknowledges a legitimate case for the alternative path reads as an ad rather than a resource, which reduces both its citation rate and its credibility once it is cited.

How do I know if I'm actually winning these AI answers today?

Run your real buyer questions, phrased the way buyers phrase them, against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity on a recurring basis and track whether you're cited, what's said about you, and how you compare to the alternatives named in the same answer. A single manual check only tells you about that moment; these answers shift as competitors publish and as models update, so the useful version of this tracking is ongoing, not a one-time audit.

How to Win AI Answers for Build vs Buy and In-House vs Outsource Queries