Should SEO budgets pay for LLM visibility?
The default is for everyone to immediately blame the SEO manager and task the SEO team with fixing it, but is that right?
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Semrush Enterprise
Paid subscribers of this newsletter can download the brand entity checklist
All subscribers can access my AEO responsibility matrix
The marketing world is collectively losing its mind over the shift from traditional SEO to Answer Engine Optimization. Leaders of enterprises and small businesses alike are freaking out at their marketing teams because they’re not showing up in ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or Google’s AI overviews.
[Sponsored by Semrush Enterprise]
Which brands are winning in AI visibility?
Our first-ever AI Visibility Awards reveal the brands that are leading their industries in AI visibility. We’re recognizing those with the highest visibility overall, the fastest risers, and the young names who are overachieving.
Get insights into what sets brands like Patagonia, Anthropic, and Nothing Technology apart from their industry competitors. Then dive into the complete AI Visibility Index for more learnings, refine your strategy, and power your climb up the rankings.
The default is for everyone to immediately blame the SEO manager and task the SEO team with fixing it. On the surface, this might make sense because if SEO shifts to LLM visibility, then the SEO team should own it. And this means the SEO budget should cover the tools, teams, and time needed to improve this AEO/GEO/AIO.
I believe this is dead wrong and a fundamental misunderstanding of how large language models actually work and how different they are from traditional search indexes. If an entity is failing at AEO, it’s not because a canonical tag is broken or internal linking was neglected. This failure belongs to the brand team, whose responsibility it is to build a presence to be consumed and mapped by the LLM. To restate this even more clearly: AEO is a reputation problem, not a technical one.
(All subscribers can download the above matrix in an editable doc. Paid subscribers can download the brand entity visibility checklist, too. )
Traditional search needed SEO
Traditional Google search was basically a giant library catalog, which is why many library science methodologies underpin search engine indexes. The goal of the SEO team was to make it easy for the librarians (the search engine algorithm). To do that, it needed the right taxonomy, architecture, content, and context.
The SEO team supported all this by ensuring the metadata was clean, the structure made sense, and the internal links were in place. Technical work was paired with these plans to implement the requirements in the most effective way, enabling search engines to extract this data. Additionally, the SEO team supported this effort by building “SEO” external links, which were a bit more involved than typical PR efforts because the engines needed HTML contextual and authoritative links. It fell to the SEO team to implement this effort. (This is now almost obsolete, but I will get to that later.)
There’s an ugly truth to SEO: In the world of traditional SEO pre-2021, you could technically “rank” a website for a keyword even if literally nobody in the real world had ever heard of your brand, as long as you nailed these SEO best practices. You could functionally be the worst business in the world and still have great SEO. (Check out this story from 10 years ago about a site that was the worst business with great SEO.)
AI Thinks
Generative AI doesn’t work like this with logical flows that can be manipulated. That previous story with DecorMyEyes could NEVER happen. 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 vacuum cleaner for a hardwood floor,” the AI doesn’t look up a database of meta tags that pair the word hardwood with vacuum cleaner lists. It extracts the intent behind the hardwood floor and understands vacuums in a personal context.
Based on this, it predicts the most probable answer from the billions of words it’s read during training, then matches it against the elongated prompt it builds for itself. It looks for **vacuum cleaners that are most frequently and positively associated with hardwood floors **, with all those data points in the prompt. That includes forum discussions, news articles, PR releases, social media conversations, and expert reviews.
**Most of you reading this would relate to examples about SaaS rather than consumer products, but I am deliberately using a consumer product example because I want you readers to understand my point as a consumer rather than as a marketer/PM. Every single one of you buys consumer products, but not everyone buys SaaS.
AEO goes beyond your own site
This is where the difference between traditional SEO and AEO becomes critical. An SEO team can optimize the website so the 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 can solve by tweaking a sitemap or title tags. Low visibility is a problem of brand strength, authority, and narrative. These exact KPI’s are the responsibilities of the brand team.
When we look at AEO failures, we’re looking at a failure to establish the brand as a dominant force in its niche. Think about how search engines and LLMs see things. The athletic brand Under Armour is closely associated with sports, innovation, and athletes. Because those connections are reinforced millions of times across the web by third parties, an LLM has high confidence in associating UnderArmour with athletic wear.
The startup disadvantage
If an athletic-wear startup brand sells on a Shopify site and has strong technical SEO but no brand footprint beyond its website, the LLM has no data to verify its authority. 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. This startup can only achieve the same LLM visibility as Under Armour, Nike, and Adidas if it builds a brand footprint like theirs.
In the last 3 years, I have met many startups with vast funds that they hoped to deploy to “win” AEO in their vertical. More than likely, that is not possible because, unlike traditional SEO, money can’t buy visibility in LLMs; for that, you need to earn it with a brand. Statups don’t like to hear this.
The expectation that SEOs should “fix” AEO isn’t just misdirected rage; it is also dangerous because it misallocates resources. Despite what many say on social media, you can’t code your way into a language model’s recommendations. You have to earn your way in.
A brand (or PMM) 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 and not just LLMs but AI-empowered Google search, the “who” matters way more. Search algorithms have evolved to prioritize trust and consensus over keywords. Not only do the metrics we track need to change, but the departments responsible for digital visibility need to expand as well. If the brand team is sitting on its hands while the SEO team tries to reverse-engineer a dynamic AI, AEO will fail.
What the brand team should do right now
Brand teams are already responsible for PR and narrative distribution, but they need to ensure this narrative reaches LLMs. If it is not, they are the team to make this adjustment and not have a parallel PR track - one for SEO, one for PR. This worked for traditional SEO because search algorithms valued domain authority, while PR teams valued impressions. Search engines care less about domain authority, and their view on valuable links is now closer to what PR teams value.
For AI, this awareness is even more critical because it becomes a data point for the LLM. Every time a reputable news source mentions your brand in your industry, it strengthens the connection in the model’s training data. If your brand team is focused solely on TV interviews that talk about the stock price instead of the product catalog, they’re failing your AEO strategy. They need to raise awareness of what matters in an LLM response.
Brand content visibility
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 across all social channels. The brand team must make sure the company is defined consistently so the AI can understand exactly what you do. You can’t complain that an LLM doesn’t get the company if you don’t tell it what you do.
Partnerships are also a brand team effort that will impact LLM's visibility by creating affiliations. If you sell athletic shorts and you partner with the NBA, the AI begins to associate your brand with basketball. The SEO team can’t sign these deals; this is well beyond their area of responsibility. The SEO team can make suggestions as to how the partnership is showcased, but that’s it. The brand team negotiates the contracts and owns the relationship.
Naturally, the brand team needs to know their LLM baseline. They need to measure how they appear in LLMs (it can even be done manually), because this has a significant impact on how they will be perceived. This is why tasking only the SEO team with reporting on their performance doesn’t make sense.
The brand team should pay for AEO
If the activities driving AEO success are owned by the brand team, the AEO budget should also sit with them. Currently, most organizations draw on the SEO budget to pay for AEO tools or consultants, leaving the brand budget for “creative” and “media.” This is a mistake on so many fronts.
It starves SEO of the resources needed to continue driving acquisition in a changing market, but it also tasks a team with change that can’t necessarily drive it. Yes, the SEO team should do all they can to support search engine visibility, whether it’s AI or traditional search results, but many of the levers to impact visibility beyond SEO best practices come from the brand team.
Winning in AEO comes at a cost: building a market-leading reputation that requires PR, partnerships, and even community events. These have always been line items on the brand marketing budget. When you ask the SEO department to solve AEO with their existing budget, they’re forced to look for technical shortcuts that don’t exist or aren’t primed at long term success.
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 on Reddit, which 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. The SEO team is also building listicles that, again, work for now with LLMs, but are essentially very low-quality content that a human reader would not trust.
The SEO team can help devise the strategy, but it should be the brand team that supports and pays for it.
Aligning the AEO budget with the brand team ensures financial resources match the actual work required and empowers and funds the SEO team to focus on SEO. AEO is an additional layer on top of SEO, not a transformation from SEO to AEO. SEO isn’t going anywhere. That new layer has contributions from the SEO team, but the heavy lift 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.
[Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]
What happens when you combine best-in-class SEO with conversion optimization?
BigRentz’s traffic increased by 186% (85k), added 1950 conversions in 12 months.
Self Financial’s traffic increased by 50k/month, and added 685 new customers.
Lastly, Secure Data added 1968 phone calls.
North Star Inbound’s SEO strategies earn leads, conversions, and revenue..
Book a call for a free content audit and 10% off any engagement.
Intrigued? [Learn more here]
The more I think about it the more I think the budget should be covered by analytics and insights departments
I heard my internal thought bubble saying “yes” about 20x while reading this. Thank you, sir, for writing this beautifully articulated article!