SEO rarely wins or loses on its own. The word “optimization” — in SEO, GEO and AEO alike — says it all: I work on potential that other teams create. I've written before that even the best specialist can't deliver results alone. This article is the practical other side of that argument — and an answer to the question clients ask me most: “why are you asking about things outside SEO?”
Because in the AI Search era the dependence between teams hasn't shrunk — it has grown, since language models recommend brands they recognize. I've grouped these dependencies into three families: marketing, the teams that build and measure the site, and the strategic decision-makers. For each department I say plainly what breaks without collaboration and what I do about it.
Part 1. Marketing teams — symbiosis, not scavenging
SEO and GEO have “optimization” in the name, and there's no running from it. Optimization by definition needs something to draw on: an existing brand, content, demand, the company's activity online. Where the rest of marketing works hard, SEO has material to work with and grows alongside it. In a marketing vacuum, even the best specialist has nothing to optimize.
Some will call it parasitic — that SEO feeds off other people's work. I call it symbiosis, because it runs both ways. The stronger your branding, PR, social and paid, the easier it is for me to build visibility in search and in AI. And in return, SEO hands the rest of marketing hard data on what customers actually search for and how — knowledge that makes everyone more effective. We use each other's work.
What, in that symbiosis, belongs to me as the SEO/GEO specialist:
- capture and amplify the demand the rest of marketing creates — make the brand findable in search and citable by the models;
- keyword and prompt research, and mapping intent to specific pages;
- content structure and extractability, structured data, technical foundations;
- turning brand signals (mentions, links, engagement) into rankings and AI citations;
- measuring visibility — including inside AI answers — and feeding that data back to the teams.
The brand team
Today one of the most important entries on this list — and the most common reason a technically sound site still loses. A model, like a person, picks the brand it recognizes: recognition lifts CTR at the same position, protects you from being personalized downward, and increasingly decides whether AI cites you at all. I won't build a brand single-handedly, and I say so plainly — optimization works on potential that already exists. What I do is structure your content and data so the recognition the brand has already earned turns into rankings and citations. I wrote more about this in the gap that's easy to mistake for a link problem.
The social media team
An engaged community around the brand is a real recognition signal — and recognition drives both rankings and AI citations. For me, social is also the cheapest source of content ideas and real customer questions that aren't on the site yet. If the channel is alive, I use it; if it isn't, I'm missing one of the signals I work with.
The PR and media team
Good press can sail right past SEO — no links, no use of the mentions. That's a waste, because some of it lands on strong outlets (at least partly as links, even nofollow), and in the AI era the mentions themselves matter: they're what models use to build their knowledge of the brand as an entity. So I make PR aware of the value of links and mentions, and in return I ask them for write-ups of the brand's offline activity as raw material for content.
The paid campaigns team
A new project has no organic results yet and takes a while to “pay for itself” — a natural moment to lean on paid. We're in the same search environment, so it's worth sharing data on keywords, users and conversions. Paid speeds up the start, organic takes over later, and the data exchange makes both channels more efficient.
The design and video team
A site running on stock photos reused across thousands of others gives up ground. Original graphics and infographics are stronger in Google Images and useful in outreach, and video takes up more and more of the results — YouTube is effectively another search engine. In the era of multimodal models, authentic visual material counts for even more.
Part 2. The teams that build the site — execution, conversion and measurement
The second group is the teams I build and measure the site with. Here SEO is at its most “hands-on”: without them my recommendations stay on paper, and without measurement nobody knows whether anything worked.
The development team
The first place I go on a new project, because the best audit is worthless if no one ships the changes — and most technical fixes can't be done from the CMS. From day one I agree a process and priorities with the developer: indexability, architecture, internal linking, Core Web Vitals (now with INP instead of the old FID), the server environment. In the AI era there's also access for AI crawlers (GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot) and clean structured data — without it, content may simply never reach generative answers.
The UX team
You can hold a high position and heavy traffic and still miss the goal — because the site doesn't lead the user to conversion. So I design content together with UX; the “answer-first” structure the models want is, to a large extent, simply good content UX. If you're looking for someone who genuinely understands UX, I can wholeheartedly recommend Max Kapitańczyk (uxchojrak.net).
The analytics team
In the AI era there are fewer and fewer clicks, and classic reports stop telling the truth. So I tag AI traffic (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) as its own segment, combine data from GSC, GA4 and sales reports, and answer for business outcomes rather than position alone. Without solid analytics, the rest is guesswork. For web analytics I can recommend, with a clear conscience, Mariusz Szczerbal (szczerbal.pl).
Part 3. The strategic, product and decision-making teams
The third group sets the direction. Here I impose nothing — I fit SEO to the strategy and the offer, and in return bring hard knowledge of what your customers search for and how.
The product management team
In e-commerce, traffic turns straight into sales, so I need to know what's happening with the range: which products are being retired, what's launching, which promotions are planned. Without it I find out after the fact and lose results, instead of protecting visibility and preparing pages in advance. There's an AI layer too: shopping assistants (like Amazon Rufus) read product attributes as a body of facts they build recommendations from — complete product data is no longer only an SEO concern.
The finance team
It's easy to optimize for traffic instead of profit — and then “success” in the report doesn't translate into the company's result. So I base strategy on margin, not revenue alone. Sometimes it's better to sell one high-margin product than a hundred sold at cost — and it's finance's data that shows where to point the effort.
The company strategy team
Sometimes SEO tries to win queries that contradict the brand's positioning — “cheap,” say, when the company targets premium. That's a mistake: I plug SEO into the company's strategy, not the other way round. And when there's no strategy yet, the knowledge of users and intent I gather can be a real source for one.
What to expect from me
I'll be part of a larger team, not a lone island. In practice that means I'll ask about your developer, your brand, your product and your budget — and I'll tell you plainly when the result depends on something outside SEO. It's a symbiosis: we use each other's work, and in the AI Search era that interdependence has only deepened, because the brand has become the currency of visibility. If you're looking for someone who'll promise to do “all of it alone,” that's not me. If you're looking for someone who'll honestly show what will actually move your visibility and how to line it up across teams — let's talk.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Simplest in three groups: marketing (brand, social, PR, paid, design and video), the teams that build and measure the site (developers, UX, analytics), and the decision-makers (product, finance, strategy). SEO benefits from the company's activity as a whole and suffers when other channels aren't developed.
They don't need to do them, but they need to understand their impact on visibility and be able to communicate with them. What matters is exchanging data and being able to explain why the priority is X and not Y.
Because recognition lifts CTR, protects against being personalized downward, and — in the AI era — decides how often a model cites you. Optimization uses a brand's potential; it doesn't create it from zero.
It deepens it. The work of branding, PR and social now feeds not only classic rankings but visibility inside generative answers. There is also a new role for analytics: measuring AI traffic and citations.
No. It's an important element, but it should support the company's strategy, not the other way round. Sometimes a different channel is the better investment — and I'll say so plainly.
Access to GSC and analytics, clarity on your business goals and margins, a contact for your developer, and a picture of what the other marketing teams are doing. The more of that, the faster SEO starts to deliver.
