Your SEO team should own GEO. At TJ Digital we run AI search optimization for 40 to 50 client websites and track around 4,000 AI prompts every day. Nearly every recommendation these models make starts with the model running a search.
GEO work resembles SEO work more than anything else happening at your company. The people who already understand search engines are the ones best positioned to own it.
That comes with one condition. Your SEO team only qualifies if they’ve shifted their focus to ranking for AI. A team still optimizing for human clicks on a page of blue links is solving last year’s problem.
Why Does Nobody Own GEO at Most Companies?
Nobody owns GEO at most companies because the work is new and nobody has been assigned to it. Muck Rack’s State of PR report analyzed responses from 971 communications professionals in 2026. Seventy-three percent of them said GEO is at least somewhat important to their strategy. The most common answer to who owns it was nobody.
| Who owns GEO | Share of respondents |
| No one | 29% |
| PR / communications | 24% |
| Marketing leadership | 11% |
| Not sure | 13% |
I talk with a handful of business owners every week, and this matches what I hear. They know AI recommendations matter and that none of their competitors have moved on it yet. They also know nobody on their team has a plan, and they suspect their agency is telling them what they want to hear.
That gap is the opportunity. Almost every business in your industry is sitting in the same spot right now, and the first one to assign this work gets a head start that compounds.
What Does GEO Work Actually Look Like?
GEO is ranking in a search engine for AI. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode for a recommendation, the model runs its own searches, pulls a set of pages, and builds an answer out of what it finds. If your brand is recommended on the pages it pulls, your brand ends up in the answer.
The truth is, every step of that process is search work. You have to know which prompts your buyers are typing, which pages the models retrieve for those prompts, and how to get your brand onto those pages. Our best GEO strategy breakdown walks through how that retrieval process works in detail.
Here’s what the day-to-day work involves:
- Tracking which sources AI models cite before recommending you or a competitor
- Getting your brand mentioned favorably on those specific pages
- Building new pages that answer the sub-queries models are running
- Making sure AI crawlers can reach and parse everything on your site
- Structuring content so a model can lift a clean, self-contained answer out of it
- Measuring citation frequency and share of voice over time
Look at that list and ask which team in your company has done anything resembling it before. For almost every business, the answer is the SEO team.
Should PR, Product, or a New AI Team Own GEO Instead?
Each of those teams contributes something, and none of them can carry the whole thing alone. They do their best work supporting a search-led program that somebody else is accountable for.
| Team | What they contribute | Why they can’t own it alone |
| PR / communications | Earned mentions on high-authority sites that models cite | No visibility into which sources models actually retrieve |
| Product | Accurate specs, FAQs, and consistent entity data | Little experience with search or retrieval |
| AI integration team | Comfort with models, prompting, and automation | Knows how models behave, thin on how they source |
| A brand new GEO team | Full focus on the problem | Rebuilds skills your SEO team already has |
| SEO team | Search mechanics, content structure, technical access, authority building | Only qualified once they’ve pivoted to AI search |
Standing up a separate GEO team is the most expensive version of this. You’d be hiring people to learn search from scratch while a team that already knows search sits down the hall. Retraining is faster and cheaper in nearly every case.
Why Is Your SEO Team the Most Qualified to Own AI Search?
Your SEO team is the most qualified because the underlying skills transfer almost completely. Google’s own guidance has been that its AI features run on the same core ranking and quality systems as regular search, which means the fundamentals your team already practices still apply.
Their existing work maps directly onto what AI models reward:
- Clear headings and clean page structure make passages easy for a model to lift
- Technical fixes keep AI crawlers from missing your content entirely
- Authority signals like brand mentions and quality links correlate with appearing in AI answers
- Query research is already the habit of figuring out what people ask and how they ask it
No other team in your company understands how search engines behave. Without that understanding, this work gets really hard. Most of what I see sold as GEO right now is guesswork dressed up in new vocabulary.
How Do You Know if Your SEO Team Can Handle GEO?
Ask them what they’re tracking. A team doing real AI search work can tell you which sources the models pull for your industry, because that data only exists if you go collect it. We use Peec.ai to run those prompts daily, and there are several AI rank tracking tools that do the same job now.
If you ask your SEO team or agency whether they can handle GEO, they’ll say yes. A year ago many of them were telling you GEO wasn’t really a thing and that regular SEO would sort itself out. They’ve since realized their livelihoods depend on doing this work, and they’re right to worry.
Things are only trending in one direction. We’re very close to a world where all search is AI search, and traditional SEO aimed at human clicks is about to be obsolete. An SEO team that isn’t entirely focused on ranking for AI has lost the plot.
Questions worth asking before you hand this over:
- Which sources do AI models cite when someone asks about our category?
- How often is our brand mentioned in those sources compared to competitors?
- What have you tested in the last 90 days, and what did the data show?
- How will we know in three months whether this worked?
An agency that answers with schema markup, llms.txt, and adding more FAQs is repackaging old work. Restructuring the content on your own site moves your AI visibility by 5% or 10% at most. The same instincts that apply to hiring an SEO agency apply here.
What Happens if You Wait?
You lose visibility while your competitors gain it, and you find out late. Marketing analysts have reported organic traffic declines across tech, travel, and retail since Google rolled out AI Overviews. When your content isn’t cited in an AI answer, the buyer never reaches your site and you have no record they were ever looking.
In B2B that shows up in pipeline before it shows up anywhere else. Somebody asks an AI for the top vendors in your category, your name is absent, and you’re off the shortlist before a human compares options. Nobody sends you a report about the deals you were never considered for.
What Else Should You Know About GEO Ownership?
Is GEO the same thing as SEO?
They overlap almost entirely. GEO puts more weight on self-contained passages, citation-worthy sources, and third-party mentions, while traditional SEO puts more weight on click-through and ranking position. We use the term AI search internally because GEO gets applied to a lot of work that has nothing to do with AI.
Can a PR team own GEO?
PR should be involved and shouldn’t own it. Earned media placements are one of the strongest levers for getting cited by AI models, so PR does real work here. Deciding which placements to chase requires citation data that the search team collects.
Do you need to hire a dedicated GEO specialist?
Most small and medium-sized businesses don’t. Giving one person on your existing search team the mandate and the tracking tools usually gets you further than a new hire learning your business from zero. Larger organizations with a mature SEO function sometimes benefit from a specialist who owns AI visibility full time.
Will traditional SEO still matter in a year?
Traditional SEO as most people practice it is on its way out. Optimizing for a page of ten blue links is a shrinking opportunity as AI answers take over more queries. The underlying work still matters, because clean structure, technical access, and real authority are how AI finds you too.
Where Should You Start With GEO Ownership?
Right now almost nobody in your industry has anyone accountable for AI recommendations. That won’t be true in twelve months. Pick your search team, give them the mandate, and hold them accountable to citation data.
We do this work for 40 to 50 businesses every day and we’ll tell you exactly what we see. Contact TJ Digital and we’ll show you where your brand stands in AI search today.