Who owns GEO in marketing teams?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is becoming an increasingly important consideration for marketing teams, but as businesses start thinking more about including AI search in their marketing strategies, nailing down which team actually owns and is responsible for GEO performance can be difficult.

Is it the SEO team? The content team? PR? Brand? Digital marketing? Or should there be a dedicated GEO specialist?

The reality is that there isn’t a single department that can cover every aspect of GEO. Some of the work sits firmly within SEO. Some belongs to content. Some sits within digital PR. There are technical considerations, brand considerations and, increasingly, a need for data and competitor analysis.

And while that means GEO is a shared responsibility, it also creates an ownership challenge. If several teams are responsible for different parts of GEO, who decides what needs to happen, what should happen first and whether those activities are actually improving performance? That’s where having a clear GEO strategy becomes important.

It’s easy to assume that GEO is simply the next stage of SEO. There is certainly a significant overlap; SEO certainly needs good, quality content, great technical setup, and excellent external coverage; and these are many of the fundamentals that remain relevant to AI search, too.

At a basic level, GEO can be thought about in two broad areas:

On-site optimisation: improving the information and technical foundations on your own website. Ensuring AI can access and interpret your information easily.

Off-site optimisation:  improving how your brand, expertise and information are represented across the wider web. Ensuring AI understands the merits and expertise of your brand.

Both matter, and both can involve multiple marketing disciplines. However, the messaging used in LLMs to describe your brand, can be taken from multiple sources – many of which a single team simply won’t have control over.

On-site GEO is the area most likely to sit with content teams and technical SEO teams.

The objective is to make your website a useful, clear and authoritative source of information that AI systems can understand and actually use.

This can involve:

• Making important information accessible to an AI crawler
• Ensuring key messaging is easy to find and understand
• Providing clear answers to relevant customer questions
• Developing comprehensive coverage of important topics
• Ensuring product and service information is accurate and consistent
• Improving website structure and internal linking
• Using appropriate structured data
• Demonstrating relevant expertise and authority (E-E-A-T)
• Keeping important content up to date

None of this means creating content simply because it’s ‘good for AI’ – the same fundamentals that make a website useful to people can also make its information more useful to search engines and AI systems – and, you absolutely don’t want to alienate your human readers. The challenge is identifying which information matters most to generative AI.

A business could spend months producing new content and making technical improvements without significantly improving its AI visibility if it isn’t addressing the areas that are actually limiting its performance. That is where analysis and reporting becomes important. We’ll come to that later on.

The other side of GEO happens away from your own website.

AI systems can draw information from a range of sources when generating responses. This means the way your organisation is represented elsewhere online can influence how it is understood. This is where GEO starts to overlap with PR, digital PR, brand and reputation.

Off-site activity might include:

• Earning coverage in relevant and authoritative publications
• Building credible third-party mentions
• Developing expert commentary and thought leadership
• Strengthening your presence within relevant industry sources
• Ensuring important company information is consistent across external platforms
• Building recognition around areas of expertise
• User-generated content (such as reviews) aligning with your services and USPs

Again, much of this isn’t new – SEO and PR teams have been building reputation and authority through external coverage for years. In the world of GEO, however, we need to measure the success of off-site coverage differently. Instead of measuring whether a piece of coverage generated traffic or a link, we should now be asking, “is this helping AI systems recommend us as an authoritative source?”

This is where the organisational challenge begins. Different teams can contribute to GEO, but they don’t necessarily have the same responsibilities.

SEO

SEO will often be at the centre of GEO activity because of the overlap between search optimisation and AI visibility.

The SEO team may be responsible for:

• Technical accessibility and crawlability
• Website architecture
• Internal linking
• Search and query research
• Content optimisation
• Content gap analysis
• Structured data
• Competitor analysis
• Monitoring organic and AI visibility
• (and much more)

SEO teams are also well placed to understand the relationship between traditional search and AI search.

However, there are many things that an SEO team don’t necessarily have access to, or don’t have control over – such as off-site coverage or brand messaging.

So, while an SEO team might be best placed for strategising for GEO or understanding how people search on AI platforms, it’s likely that implementation might not be best placed with SEO. 

Content

Content teams are responsible for creating and maintaining the information that helps establish a brand’s expertise.

This can include:

• Maintaining brand tone of voice and messaging  within content
• Answering important customer questions
• Creating authoritative informational content
• Improving product and service information
• Developing topic coverage
• Demonstrating subject expertise
• Keeping information accurate and current
• Structuring content so that important information is clear

The objective isn’t to produce more content for the sake of it.

A strategic GEO approach should help identify where content can actually improve visibility or strengthen the way a brand is represented.

A content team can be hugely influential on GEO performance, but without data or direction, they can’t necessarily be held responsible for GEO success or failure.

PR and Digital PR

PR has an important role because AI visibility isn’t determined solely by what a company says about itself on its own website.

What other credible sources say about the company matters too.

PR and digital PR teams can contribute through:

• Media coverage in key publications
• Expert commentary
• Thought leadership articles establishing credibility
• Relevant third-party mentions

This can help establish the external signals around a brand that support its credibility and expertise.

Again, while a PR team can help influence GEO performance, they are not likely to be the sole department contributing to GEO’s success.

Brand & communications

Brand and communications teams can also play an important role.

AI systems need to understand who a company is, what it does and how its products, services and people relate to one another.

Inconsistent information across different channels can make this more difficult.

Brand teams can therefore contribute by maintaining consistency around:

• Company descriptions
• Products and services
• Key messages
• Areas of expertise
• Executive profiles
• Corporate information
• Brand positioning

Again, this team contributes massively to performance in GEO – but, they are not likely to be the sole driver of GEO success.

Data & analytics

There is also an important analytical component to GEO.

Someone needs to understand what is actually happening in AI search – is the brand being seen in the places we want to be seen, and is our brand messaging aligned with what AI is saying about us?

That means monitoring things such as:

• Which prompts and topics produce brand mentions
• How frequently a brand is cited
• Which competitors are appearing
• Which sources are being cited
• How the brand is being represented
• Where visibility is increasing or declining
• Which areas present opportunities for improvement
• How are users using AI search in our industry

This data should not simply sit in a monthly report – it should inform what happens next – and while a data and analytics team is well positioned to gather information, they aren’t well placed to take action.

A business can have a GEO dashboard showing that its visibility has increased or decreased without actually understanding what it should do about it.

Reporting tells you what happened, whereas strategy helps you determine what to do next.

Your competitors might simply have a much stronger presence across the sources AI systems rely upon; or it could be a combination of several factors: content, authority or technical.

This is why GEO shouldn’t be reduced to a single visibility score, and success shouldn’t be measured at a broad ‘number of citations’ level. We need the granular detail to analyse the data and be strategic about our next steps – overall scores don’t help us to do that.

For a team like ours at Varn, the strategic direction behind success in online search is something we’re very familiar with. It’s not just in today’s world of GEO that search has been evolving; we’ve been helping clients for years to overcome the complicated hurdles of online search.

AI search is not static – the platforms are evolving almost every day. As such, the way they retrieve and interpret information can (and will) change. One day, ChatGPT might rely heavily on video content – but in the next update of their system, it might drop that reliance entirely.

User behaviour is changing too. As people become more familiar with the technology and how to use it effectively, their search habits and methods will change. This means GEO shouldn’t be approached as a ‘one and done’ optimisation project.

Marketing teams need to continually analyse:

• How AI systems are representing their brand
• Which competitors are gaining visibility
• Which sources are being cited
• What content appears to be influential
• Where the gaps and opportunities are
• How AI search behaviour is changing
• Which tactics are producing results
• Which tactics aren’t
• What should be prioritised next

This creates a continuous cycle:

1. Measure
2. Analyse
3. Prioritise
4. Optimise
5. Measure again

The optimisation itself is only one part of the process – you need the measurement and analysis behind it in order to know where to start. The real strategic value comes from knowing what to optimise and why.

The answer isn’t necessarily to create another department. GEO needs input from SEO, content, PR, brand, digital marketing and analytics; but someone needs to bring those different perspectives together and turn them into a coherent strategy.

That’s particularly important because the different teams may naturally optimise for different objectives, but all of them need steering from a marketing leader to bring everything together. Every business is different, and while for some teams, it might be a natural fit for their SEO team to take on the role and responsibility of managing GEO strategy and direction – for other businesses, their SEO team might not be as well-established to be able to do that.

Ultimately, GEO is a strategic discipline that must be owned by marketing leadership, because executing solid, holistic marketing is fundamentally what drives strong AI visibility.

If you’re responsible for marketing, you shouldn’t be following a tick box exercise of ‘GEO quick wins’, because they don’t exist.

You need to know:

• Where are we now?
• Where are our competitors outperforming us?
• What is preventing us from appearing more prominently in relevant AI-generated answers?
• Which activities should we prioritise?
• And how should SEO, content, PR and other teams work together to address those opportunities?

Those are strategic questions.

And they’re difficult to answer with a generic GEO checklist because the right approach depends on your market, your competitors, your existing digital presence and how AI systems are currently representing your brand.

At Varn, we help businesses answer those questions through strategic GEO services. We can assess your current AI-search visibility, analyse the competitive landscape, identify the opportunities and help establish which activities should be prioritised – giving your existing marketing teams a clearer direction for their GEO activity.

Because GEO isn’t about asking a department to ‘just do some GEO’, it’s a lot more nuanced and strategic than that. If we can help your brand with guidance and strategic direction with AI search, get in contact with us today.