Okay, I need to talk about something uncomfortable. Not the usual "AI is coming for your traffic" uncomfortable — we're all numb to that by now. This is the other kind. The kind where the problem isn't the technology. It's your team structure. Your reporting lines. The fact that nobody in your organisation can actually explain who owns "making sure we show up when someone asks Perplexity a question."

I know. Org charts aren't sexy. But here's the thing: the companies actually winning at Answer Engine Optimisation right now aren't the ones with the cleverest prompt-optimisation tactics or the fanciest LLM monitoring dashboards. They're the ones who figured out how to get their people to stop working in silos long enough to address the fact that search has fundamentally changed.

Change management is the corporate equivalent of eating your vegetables — everyone knows they should, nobody wants to, and the people who skip it end up with scurvy. (Metaphorical scurvy. Characterised by declining organic visibility and a vague sense of organisational dread.)

Here's where most companies go wrong, and I say this with the tenderness of someone who has personally gone wrong in exactly this way: they skip straight to tactics.

Optimise for ChatGPT. Add schema markup. Track AI citations. Test different content structures. None of this is wrong — it's all necessary. But it's step two. Step one is getting everyone to agree on what you're actually trying to achieve. And most organisations treat alignment like that IKEA bookshelf instruction manual — theoretically important, almost certainly skippable, definitely regrettable later when the whole thing collapses sideways.

Here's what misalignment actually looks like in the wild. One stakeholder wants rankings in ChatGPT. Another wants brand mentions. A third wants citation links. A fourth is staring at declining organic sessions with the expression of someone who's just discovered their flight has been cancelled. Every experiment gets judged against a different standard, and nobody agreed which standard matters because nobody had that conversation. Your SEO team is reporting "influence metrics" while the CMO is pointing at a traffic graph that looks like a ski slope and asking pointed questions about headcount.

Meanwhile, AEO touches SEO, content, brand, product, PR, and sometimes legal — but nobody has explicit ownership. So each team runs experiments in its own silo, and conflicting tactics cancel each other out like noise-cancelling headphones for your entire marketing strategy.

BCG found that roughly 70% of transformation failures come down to people and processes. Only about 10% of the challenges were purely technical. Which means your inability to implement structured data is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the meeting that should have happened three months ago where everyone agreed on what AEO actually means for your business.

(I realise I'm essentially telling you that the solution to your AI search problem is "have better meetings." I'm not thrilled about it either.)

Traditional SEO operated as a channel function. It sat in marketing, had a relatively contained scope, and coordinated with content and dev on a project-by-project basis — the organisational equivalent of a well-behaved house cat. AEO is more like a border collie that's escaped the garden. It needs to be everywhere, all the time, and it will absolutely herd your other departments whether they've consented to it or not.

Here's why: answer engines don't just crawl your website and rank your pages. They synthesise information from across the entire internet — your site, third-party reviews, social media, news coverage, Reddit threads, that one industry publication nobody reads but which apparently has massive topical authority. They decide what to cite based on authority, relevance, consensus, and recency.

This means your AEO strategy can't live inside a single department. PR and AEO become symbiotic, because answer engines prioritise what others say about your brand over what you say about yourself. Social listening informs what content to create. Brand marketing feeds AEO because sentiment and salience work is increasingly correlated with AI visibility.

AEO makes search more social, more offsite, and more upper-funnel. Which is a polite way of saying it makes everyone's job slightly more complicated and nobody's reporting lines any clearer.

If You're a Small Team (2–10 People)

You don't have headcount for a dedicated AEO team. That's fine. What matters is that the AEO mindset is embedded in the people you already have, like seasoning in a good sauce rather than a garnish you add at the end.

The practical move: designate one person as the AEO lead. Not a full-time role — more like the person who's accountable for staying current, running experiments, and explaining to the founder why declining organic traffic doesn't necessarily mean declining influence. This person becomes the internal translator. Every small team needs one, and if you're reading this newsletter, it's probably you. (Congratulations? Condolences? Both?)

At this stage, process beats headcount. Research the questions your audience is actually asking. Write content that answers those questions directly. Structure it for AI extraction. Publish. Monitor AI citations. Iterate. That loop, run consistently by a small team that understands the "why," will outperform a larger team running disconnected SEO and content plays every single time.

If You're Mid-Size (10–50 People)

This is where structural decisions start mattering, and also where most companies hire one person with "AI" in their title and hope the problem resolves itself. (Spoiler: it does not.)

The most effective model is a lightweight Centre of Excellence — not a separate department, but a cross-functional working group with a clear mandate. Two to four people at the core, with dotted-line relationships across content, SEO, PR, social, and dev.

Your core team needs an AEO strategist who owns the overall approach and the deeply unglamorous work of stakeholder education. A content specialist who understands answer-first writing and entity coverage. A technical SEO or dev resource handling structured data and AI crawler accessibility. If you can stretch to a fourth, add someone with a PR or brand background for offsite authority — because what others say about you is increasingly what answer engines will cite.

The critical process shift: stop doing sequential handoffs. The old model was linear — strategy to writing to SEO review to publishing, like a relay race where each runner waits patiently in their lane. AEO needs these roles working simultaneously. The content person should be in the room during intent research. The dev resource involved before content is written, not after. Everyone oriented toward the same output: being the answer that gets cited.

If You're Enterprise (50+ People)

The risk here isn't lack of resources. It's fragmentation. Large organisations have the people, the budget, and the tools. What they usually lack is coordination. (This is my polite way of saying "the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing, and both hands are filing separate reports about it.")

You need three things: executive sponsorship, a dedicated cross-functional team, and a governance model that prevents siloed experimentation. Executive sponsorship is non-negotiable — 25 years of change management research consistently identifies it as the single most important success factor. If AEO doesn't have a senior leader championing it, it will stall.

Research: From Keywords to Questions

Stop asking "what are people typing" and start asking "what are people asking, and what does a complete answer look like." Study AI-generated answers. See which sources get cited and how they're structured. Look at the follow-up questions that Perplexity and Gemini surface. Your research process needs to capture all of this, not just the primary keyword you've been tracking since 2019.

Creation: Answer First, Context Second

The old model: pick a keyword, write 3,000 words, optimise for on-page SEO, publish, hope for the best. The new model: identify the question, deliver the answer immediately, then build supporting content around it. If your core answer is buried in paragraph seven of a sprawling article, it won't get cited. No matter how good it is. Answer engines extract passages. Give them something worth extracting, and put it where they can actually find it.

Measurement: The Hard Conversation

This is the one that makes leadership uncomfortable, which means it's the one most teams avoid. Traditional SEO metrics — rankings, organic sessions, click-through rates — are familiar. AEO metrics are newer, less standardised, and harder to tie directly to revenue.

The practical approach: run both systems in parallel. Keep reporting traditional metrics, but add AI visibility alongside them. Track brand mentions in AI-generated responses. Monitor citation frequency. Over time, shift the reporting weight. But — and this is crucial — define what success looks like before you start. If you don't, every result will be judged against whatever standard is most convenient in the moment, which is how you end up in a quarterly review explaining why a 400% increase in AI citations "doesn't count."

Education: Not a Slide Deck. A Translation Function.

The temptation is to send around a one-time training deck and consider the job done. That's necessary but wildly insufficient. What AEO requires is continuous translation — the same strategic message adapted for different audiences. Individual contributors need to know how their day-to-day work changes. Managers need to report success in the new framework. Executives need to understand why traffic metrics don't tell the full story anymore without feeling like they're being managed.

This translation work is ongoing because the landscape won't sit still. AI search products change constantly. New answer engines emerge. Your internal education function needs to keep pace — not through periodic training events, but through a steady drumbeat of updates that keep the entire organisation calibrated.

The sequence matters more than the tactics. Define what AEO means for your organisation. Assess your current state. Get executive buy-in — real sponsorship, not a vague "sure, go experiment." Establish shared KPIs. Name the owners. Educate at every level. And then deploy the tactics.

Tactics on an unaligned organisation waste resources and burn credibility. Tactics on an aligned organisation compound advantage. The companies that get this sequence right won't just adapt to AI search. They'll be the ones answer engines choose to cite.

Which, I realise, means the most important thing you can do for your AI search strategy this week is probably... schedule a meeting. I'm sorry. I truly am.

Jo Lambadjieva is an entrepreneur and AI expert in the e-commerce industry. She is the founder and CEO of Amazing Wave, an agency specializing in AI-driven solutions for e-commerce businesses. With over 13 years of experience in digital marketing, agency work, and e-commerce, Joanna has established herself as a thought leader in integrating AI technologies for business growth.

😍It was great, all I needed

🙂Good, not great

🙄It sucked