One of the biggest myths in digital is that SEO “lives” in one silo. Companies have SEO teams. They hire SEO managers. They treat it like a line item.
📡 The Signal – SEO is the SEO Team
But in practice? SEO was always a team sport:
- Developers implemented fixes.
- PR earned authority.
- IT managed crawl rules and server access.
- Content teams created relevance signals.
Traffic let us pretend otherwise. As long as clicks came in, executives could believe SEO was “owned” by one team.
GEO ends the illusion. Dependencies are out in the open now:
- PR must deliver mentions in authoritative outlets to feed eligibility.
- IT must configure server access for AI crawlers and RAG systems.
- Product must design templates that structure answers.
Marketing must ensure narratives are complete, consistent, and credible.
⚙️ The Friction – Who owns GEO?
So where does GEO live?
- In Marketing, it risks being reduced to content.
- In IT, it risks being buried in infrastructure.
- In Product, it risks being too narrow.
- In SEO, it risks being seen as tactical.
- If it’s left unassigned, it risks being ignored entirely.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the only thing SEOs actually own is a KPI. We don’t own any of the infrastructure that creates or fixes SEO issues. Developers own the templates. IT owns the servers. PR owns the mentions. Content owns the workflows.
What SEOs spend the majority of their time doing is educating and lobbying those who do own the levers to make changes that improve performance.
In my earlier research, I found that 87% of the items on a typical SEO checklist are impacted (caused) by the CMS or broader website processes. This means if those systemic issues were eliminated, SEOs could finally focus on the small percentage of activities that are truly unique and capable of moving the needle.
🏢 Boardroom Moment
In one session, I outlined the cross-functional changes required for a company to appear in AI-generated answers: PR would need to secure placements in credible outlets, IT would need to adjust bot access rules, and the product team would need to adapt templates and reformat content for structured answers.
The room went quiet. Then the CMO turned to the SEO lead and said:
“Okay, can you handle this?”
But here’s the problem: no single person can. The SEO team can’t call editors at The Wall Street Journal. They can’t rewrite IT’s server rules. They can’t force the product to rebuild templates.
Yet, by default, everyone assumed GEO would be “owned” by SEO — the team with the least authority to make it happen.
Many organizations now hire a Digital Effectiveness Officer or similar role precisely because every digital activity intersects and can fail due to misalignment. GEO is the newest and most unforgiving domain inside that digital system — if it doesn’t integrate, it fails.
As my article on DEO puts it: “The DEO’s job is not to do more work. It’s to ensure the work already being done drives outcomes.” For GEO to succeed, it must be treated under the same umbrella of digital effectiveness — not just another SEO line item.
💥 The Realization
The answer isn’t to park GEO in one department. The solution is to establish a cross-functional mandate with executive sponsorship.
Think of it like a program office:
- Marketing owns narratives and structured content.
- PR owns citations and mentions.
- IT owns the infrastructure and bot accessibility.
- The product owns templates and workflows.
But GEO is the system that orchestrates them all.
Just as digital transformation requires a Chief Digital Officer or program office to ensure that marketing campaigns, martech, CMS, and analytics interoperate as a system, GEO requires a similar organizing function. Your GEO team must ensure search, content, infrastructure, and authority systems interconnect for AI visibility.
GEO is not a tactic; it’s an organizational capability and a true test of your organization’s digital effectiveness in an AI-first world.
➡️ Next in Part 3, we’ll tackle the natural follow-up: if GEO is a team sport, then who plays coach?
Originally posted on my Substack Signal & Friction
