AI Visibility Is Now a Corporate Priority. So, Who Owns It?

Last week’s WSJ piece re: AEO/GEO/SEO made one thing clear: AI Visibility is now a corporate priority. It also exposed a big gap: who’s actually accountable for it.

TL;DR: GEO/AEO may seem like a Marketing or IT responsibility, but the work itself screams Communications. Here’s four key reasons why:

1. AI models retrieve narratives, claims, and reputational signals…aka the core outputs of the Communications team.

2. AI misrepresentation is a reputation and trust issue. LLMs pull from the open web. They ingest executive bios, product claims, earned media, analyst reports, public filings, interviews, brand narratives. (Notice a pattern? This is the Comms ecosystem.)

3. This means brands and leaders need to get very clear very quickly about how they define entities, clarify claims, eliminate ambiguity, and ensure narrative consistency. Guess who’s been facilitating those conversations IRL long before Sam Altman was a household name? Yep. The comms crew.

4. PR has always been responsible for the “first impression layer.” Now AI is that layer. Not search. Not social. Not ads. AI answers are the new front door to your brand.

Net-net, this ain’t your momma’s SEO. This is the first time in years that Communications is very clearly the lead choice to be responsible for this new corporate function that directly impacts revenue, reputation, and competitive positioning.

Before anyone jumps into the comments with turf concerns, let me be clear. Comms shouldn’t run AI Visibility alone. (Similarly, it shouldn’t be buried inside Marketing or Product, given to IT to “figure out,” or worse, kinda/sorta “everyone’s job.”)

At least for the near-term, it should sit with the people who understand how narratives are built, protected, and scaled. The comms team. They have the track record of working cross-functionally with marketing, product, IT, legal, execs, influencers, earned media and more.

Clearly, it’s their moment to take the prompt by the horns.

Want to shape the future function? Reach out.

If you want to join a private group of marketing and comms leaders who are figuring out the matrixed/integrated/understaffed AI Visibility department of the future, DM me. We’re hosting a conversation to trade best practices on integrated organizational structures and it promises to be a real “RACI” conversation.