SEO is a product, AEO is brand
The organizational structure of SEO as marketing leaves the team without the authority to get things done
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Every CEO I know has done the same thing in the last two years. They opened ChatGPT, typed in their company name, didn’t like what came back, and then emailed the SEO team or agency to fix it. For the leaders I have had this conversation with, I have been able to redirect their efforts. This post is for everyone else.
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That instant reaction makes sense on the surface. SEO is about visibility in search, LLMs are the new search, voila, the SEO team owns the problem. The logic checks out. It is also completely wrong, and this thinking risks making things worse.
Marketing has always owned SEO
This isn’t just an AI issue; it begins with putting SEO in a marketing org. One of the many reasons a company leaves its SEO potential unfulfilled is that it inadvertently silos the person responsible for SEO, leaving the SEO manager as a marketing individual contributor who must go through their marketing lead to get anything done.
The marketing lead then needs to negotiate for bandwidth on the product and engineering teams to get anything done. This organizational placement about where SEO even sits, especially at a time when the industry is being rewritten, pollutes every resourcing decision and budget conversation.
The organizational structure of SEO as marketing leaves the team without the authority to get things done. An SEO team that can write code has always been rare. Therefore, the best an SEO team can do is make requests of other teams, and those requests are not requirements.
This structural mistake compounds with AEO. A team without authority to execute SEO correctly has no chance of executing AEO at all. This means a company that can't define SEO organizationally will never be able to define AEO either.
When SEO is viewed organizationally as a marketing function, it leads to tasks being structured as campaigns that rely on other marketing contributions, such as content and design. Technical tasks happen elsewhere in another divisional structure because, in most companies, marketers don’t own technical resources.
SEO is a product
The fix is to view SEO as a product and have the SEO manager operate like a product manager rather than a marketing manager. Product managers are akin to entertainment directors. You rarely see them on screen, but they manage everything in the background. Similarly, product managers always rely on other teams and are inherently cross-functional. When planning SEO efforts, their skill lies not in implementation but in aligning on the required resources and commitments with their team leads. For product managers and, by extension, SEO product managers, success comes from soft skills rather than hard skills.
Every SEO plan dies in committee without alignment and collaboration. I once worked with a client who had spent a million dollars on externally sourced content but never published it because no one had set up a CMS. My favorite miss in this genre was the client who hired me to develop a strategy but had never allocated engineering time to implement it. It’s been many years, and they have yet to launch a single SEO project.
Org charts lead to budgets
When budgeting for a marketing plan, SEO usually falls to the bottom because the investment-to-output story is harder to sell to a CFO. Traditionally, this means SEO gets the short end of the stick when it comes to hiring, software, and contractors, while paid marketing teams are flush with cash. Thinking of SEO as a product realigns those expectations.
Product teams aren’t resourced because they have a direct line to ROI, but because the product is a business necessity. When SEO is viewed as a product, it reaches its true potential and can operate on a long-term roadmap rather than just closing tickets and polishing others' work.
Now here is where the conversation about AEO begins, and why it has nothing to do with the SEO team’s job.
AEO is brand
LLMs don’t work with the logical flows that could be manipulated in traditional search. AI works more like a human brain, which learns by reading everything and forming connections between concepts. When someone asks an LLM for the best analytics tool, the AI doesn’t look up a database of meta tags pairing the word “analytics” with listicles that say “best”. The same is true when someone asks you, as a human, for the best burger in your neighborhood: you rely on past experiences, social media posts, and friends' reports to make your recommendation.
LLMs have the same thought process as humans. It extracts the intent of the question and understands the context personally. Based on this, it predicts the most probable answer from the billions of words it has read. It looks for content most frequently and positively associated with the requester's context, drawing on forum discussions, news articles, PR releases, social media conversations (not just Reddit), and expert reviews. When you think of AI as imitating human thought, you can see the wasted effort that comes from just using spam efforts on Reddit to promote LLM visibility.
Understand the difference between AEO and SEO
This is where the difference between SEO and AEO becomes critical. An SEO team can optimize the website so an AI can read it, but they can’t force the AI to care about it. The AI cares about what the collective internet says about you, not just what you say about yourself on your own domain. If your brand isn’t being discussed in the wider ecosystem, if you don’t have a distinct point of view that’s being quoted by others, and if you lack a strong presence, you won’t appear in the answer.
These aren’t problems you solve by tweaking a sitemap or title tags. Low visibility is a problem of brand strength, authority, and narrative. Those KPIs belong to the brand team.
Look at this example: two companies selling the same B2B tool. One has a clean technical foundation, great content, and a great portfolio of purchased backlinks. The other has mediocre content, but its founder speaks at conferences, its positioning gets cited in industry reports, and journalists quote its executives when covering the category. The second company decisively wins in LLMs. The first company's SEO team did everything right and still lost, because brand is the deciding factor.
The SEO team or agency can’t manufacture this external consensus. Only the brand team can do that through PR, partnerships, and creative campaigns. They’re the ones who can generate the volume of mentions required to teach the model who you are. In the last three years, I have met many startups with vast funds that they hoped to deploy to win AEO in their vertical. That is more than likely not possible because, unlike traditional SEO, money can’t buy visibility in LLMs. It needs to be earned.
Brands earn AEO
A brand team is responsible for the who and the why of the company. The SEO team is responsible for the where and the how. In the era of AI, the who matters way more. Brand teams spend weeks defining the corporate mission and values, only for it to end up in a PDF on an internal server. For LLMs, this information needs to be consistent and available everywhere.
The brand team should also pay for AEO. If the activities driving AEO success are owned by the brand team, the AEO budget should be allocated to the brand team. Currently, most organizations draw on the SEO budget to pay for AEO tools and consultants, leaving the brand budget for creative and media.
This can be a fatal mistake for organic acquisition. It starves SEO of the resources needed to continue driving acquisition in a changing market, and it tasks a team with change that it cannot drive. Winning in AEO comes at a cost: building a market-leading reputation that requires PR, partnerships, and community events. These have always been line items on the brand marketing budget.
Don’t steal SEO budget for AEO
The budget question is also a political one. Whoever pays for a thing tends to own it and then gets to claim the wins. Right now, SEO teams are absorbing the cost of AEO without the authority to actually move it. That is a setup for failure, and when the results disappoint, the blame will land on the SEO team anyway. Solving that political problem requires a CEO or CMO willing to explicitly reassign both responsibility and budget simultaneously.
This pressure is precisely why SEO teams are suddenly interested in owning Reddit, when really it should belong to another team. They are spamming low-quality content that will become the brand team’s problem to clean up. SEO teams treat Reddit like a backlink farm, while social media teams correctly view it as a two-way engagement platform. SEO teams are also building listicles that work with LLMs for now, but they are essentially very low-quality content that a human reader would not trust. When you do this, the brand is teaching the model that it produces spam, and that signal is very hard to reverse.
The expectation that SEOs should fix AEO isn’t just misdirected rage. It is dangerous because it misallocates resources, damaging both channels simultaneously. AEO is not SEO 2.0. It is an additional layer on top of SEO, with contributions from the SEO team, but the heavy lifting comes from brand efforts. Don’t let the brand team shirk this responsibility. As long as AEO is a line item on the SEO P&L, the brand team will treat it as tech stuff and ignore it.
The CEO who blamed the SEO team two years ago didn't know better. Today, there is no excuse. SEO is a product. AEO is brand. Your SEO team can make sure the AI knows your site exists. It has no idea how to make the AI care.
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