AI visibility has an ownership problem, and no single team can solve it

Over the past 12 months, I have been in a privileged position to speak with dozens of leading brands across ecommerce, finance, travel, media and SaaS. Alongside this, I have hosted a series of roundtable discussions with senior marketing leaders to understand how organisations are approaching AI-driven discovery.

Each conversation has followed a similar pattern. The topic starts in one team, often SEO, then moves across PR, content, affiliate and into broader marketing leadership. Everyone acknowledges the change in search behaviour. But it’s so new that with most brands, existing structures, KPI’s and “day jobs” mean that no-one has been designated to lead, or allocated the budget, required to solve it.

While tracking and influence remain two of the most talked about challenges, ownership is discussed far less. In practice, it is often the most limiting factor.

AI discovery is largely offsite

Search and SEO teams have naturally been positioned as the starting point for Generative Engine Optimisation. That is logical given their role in organic visibility and their ability to work with this type of data.

Early guidance in the space has largely followed that thinking. Focus on onsite content. Ensure AI bots can crawl your site. Improve structure and schema. Supplement with PR where possible.

However, both our internal analysis and recent wider industry research point in a different direction.

For non-branded prompts, which represent the majority of AI use cases such as research and comparison, we typically see that over 95% of cited sources are offsite. In our recent study of five international D2C brands, less than 1% of total citations influencing their highest priority non-branded prompt topics came from their own website.

The outputs were dominated by:

• editorial publishers

• affiliate content

• forums and community platforms

• reviews

• Reddit & Wikipedia

While this is not new information, with many outlets reporting the important role of offsite content, it does further highlight how ownership cannot sit with SEO teams alone.

It also explains why many brands feel they are doing the “right” things from an SEO perspective but are not appearing in AI outputs in the way they expect. This is one of the reasons I’ve grown to dislike the statement “Good SEO is good GEO”, but that’s one for over a drink!

The structural issue inside organisations

Once you accept that AI visibility is primarily offsite, the organisational gap becomes clear. Most brands are currently not structured to influence it.

• Affiliate teams own relationships with many of the publishers shaping AI outputs and they have the commercial skillset to negotiate placements, but are measured on bottom-of-funnel revenue

• SEO teams understand search visibility, but are primarily focused on onsite performance and technical optimisation (and traditional backlinking methods are unlikely to impact AI visibility in the same way as they influenced rankings)

• PR teams secure broad editorial coverage, but operate on brand and awareness metrics, without direct control over media budgets or the page structure

• Heads of marketing sit closest to a blended view of performance, but are not embedded in the day-to-day execution required to influence outcomes

Ironically, affiliate teams may be some of the best equipped teams in the business to influence AI visibility, despite rarely being included in the conversation initially. They already understand publisher ecosystems, commercial placements, attribution complexity and how to scale relationships across editorial environments. The challenge is that most affiliate programmes have spent years being pushed further down funnel, measured almost entirely on efficiency and revenue contribution.

What I have seen across brands

Across both one-to-one conversations and roundtables, a few patterns come up consistently:

• Ownership is unclear and often defaults to SEO, who are expected to “figure it out”

• Budget is tied tightly to existing KPIs, making it difficult to justify investment in clickless AI journeys that don’t map cleanly to those metrics

• Collaboration between teams, particularly affiliate and SEO, is often new and not yet structured

• AI is recognised as important, but not yet operationalised or led by a single accountable owner

In summary, this is not a capability issue. Most of the required skills already exist within the business and the market is filling up with tools designed to help SEO and affiliate teams track or influence AI visibility. This alone does not solve the underlying organisational problem. Without shared ownership, aligned KPIs and coordination across teams, they just become another layer of disconnected activity.

In the few cases where we have seen real progress, there has always been a clear owner, or, organisation for shared ownership. Sometimes a defined Head of AI or AI search lead. Sometimes an individual within an existing team who has taken it upon themselves to connect the dots. Sometimes a weekly AI meetup.

In a number of instances, we have been brought in to act as that central ownership layer. Not because the capability did not exist internally, but because it was fragmented across teams with different incentives and they need someone to own it, acting as the glue between teams and systems.

Of course, with this centralised ownership has also been one unified approach to tracking & influence. Which I’ll cover in a later piece.

Different types of brands, different dynamics

The ownership challenge shows up differently depending on the type of organisation.

Smaller brands can move quickly. We are already seeing some exploit gaps in AI outputs through aggressive onsite positioning. For example, newer or AI-native brands publishing self-promoting listicle-style content positioning themselves as “best in category” for niche queries, sometimes making direct comparisons or claims against more established competitors on their own site.

In some cases, the content quality is questionable. The claims are not always well substantiated. But it is effective in the short term because the ecosystem is still forming. That opens up a separate conversation around content quality, ethics and misinformation, which I will cover in a follow up blog post.

Mid-sized brands are often best placed to make meaningful progress. Teams are typically small enough to collaborate, decision making is faster, and budgets can be moved with less friction. Members of marketing teams wear multiple hats, so ownership can be more easily assigned, and the fluidity of KPIs is a real asset.

Enterprise brands most often rank well in AI outputs today not because they built an AI strategy early, but because they spent the last decade investing heavily in digital PR, editorial partnerships, affiliate relationships and brand authority signals at scale.

However, they face the greatest internal complexity. Ownership is fragmented, budget is siloed, KPIs are slow to update, and change requires alignment across multiple stakeholders. In the few cases where progress has been made, it has often involved affiliate and SEO working closely together and sharing responsibility with budget investment.

Where we see this going

Over the past year, one of the most interesting parts of this shift has been watching disciplines that historically operated separately start converging again.

SEO teams are becoming more interested in publisher ecosystems and editorial influence. Affiliate teams are being pulled higher up the funnel into visibility and brand positioning conversations. PR teams are increasingly part of performance discussions.

That convergence is probably the clearest signal of where AI discovery is heading.

At Planit, we have found ourselves sitting in the middle of those conversations more and more often. Sometimes supporting SEO teams with offsite visibility analysis. Sometimes helping affiliate teams rethink publisher relationships beyond traditional conversion journeys. Sometimes simply acting as the connective layer between departments that historically never needed to collaborate this closely.

The specifics vary by business, but the underlying challenge is usually the same.

AI visibility is no longer being shaped by one channel, one platform or one team.

The brands that recognise that early will likely be the ones best positioned over the next few years.

How can Planit help you get started?

As this space continues to evolve, we are increasingly hosting roundtable discussions with brands navigating these challenges internally, particularly around ownership, measurement and cross-team collaboration.

We are also offering informal AI visibility health checks and consultation sessions for brands looking to better understand where they currently sit, how visible they are across key prompt categories, and where the biggest opportunities or structural gaps may exist.

I’m not going to say that there is a one size fits all structure everyone should apply. However, what we have seen consistently is that the brands making the most progress have a clear internal champion for AI visibility. Someone willing to stay close to the space, connect teams internally and continuously adapt as the ecosystem evolves.

For brands starting to take AI visibility seriously, the first step may not be choosing a tool. It may be deciding who owns the problem, which teams need to be involved, and how success should be measured.

At Planit, we are helping brands work through that question through roundtables, visibility health checks and cross-team consultation. If this is a conversation your team is starting to have internally, we would be happy to share what we are seeing across the market.