Don’t Dump LLM Visibility on Your SEO Team

Here’s an uncomfortable conversation no one wants to have with their CMO.

When AI visibility became the next big metric to chase, most marketing leadership did what felt instinctively logical: handed it to the SEO team. Rankings, citations, mentions — that’s what SEOs do, right?

Wrong instinct. And in this episode, Miruna explains exactly why.

LLM visibility isn’t a ranking problem. It’s a brand perception problem. When you audit why your company isn’t being cited by AI, what you often don’t find isn’t a technical gap — it’s a positioning gap. A signal that the market doesn’t fully understand who you are, what you’re best at, or why you matter. That’s not something an SEO team fixes with an outreach campaign and a few listicles. That’s a CMO problem. Or — as Mordy points out — a CEO problem, because the CMO is usually just absorbing pressure from above.

Miruna shares a candid example from Planable’s own experience: their LLM audit didn’t reveal a citation problem. It revealed that the market still perceived them as a niche collaboration tool, not the fully equipped platform they’d since become. The SEO team was never supposed to fix that. It was always a brand repositioning conversation that no one had escalated to the right level.

Laura Little, founder of the British Chick Marketing Agency, joins to answer the question that makes a lot of org charts uncomfortable: if LLM visibility is just a symptom of brand visibility, then who should actually own it?

Transcript

Mordy Oberstein (00:00)
You hear that? Of course not! And that’s the whole point.

Welcome to Say It Anyway, where we say things about digital marketing you’re kind of supposed to keep quietly to yourself, and — wait for it — we say it anyway.

Mordy Oberstein (00:19)
Each week, we’re taking an honest, maybe even uncomfortable look at something marketers need to know but might be too afraid to say anyway.

I’m your host, Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Brand at SE Ranking, and I’m joined by the impeccably amazing, the uncharacteristically characteristic — I don’t know what that even means — the CMO of Planable, Miruna Dragomir. How are you?

Miruna Dragomir (00:40)
I’m good, especially after this intro. I love how every time you make the intro more bombastic, you raise the expectations.

Mordy Oberstein (00:48)
I have experience with this, like coming up with new — I don’t want to go too far — but also new adjectives. You’re still looking at me like, “No, why wouldn’t you go too far?” You’re right. I should.

Miruna Dragomir (00:58)
I don’t think you could go too far, but “impeccably amazing” is exactly what anyone would describe. No, you had a very accurate description of how I identify myself. Thank you very much, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein (01:04)
Astoundingly astounding.

Mordy Oberstein (01:12)
I’m on my thesaurus now. I would like to say “impeccably amazing.” Yeah. I was going to say you have a new background, but the audience can’t see it.

Miruna Dragomir (01:19)
So I do have a new background, yes. I’m in what we call the podcast room here in the office at Planable. And I have a mic too.

Mordy Oberstein (01:21)
It’s nice.

Mordy Oberstein (01:25)
Oh, it’s very coordinated. Look at that. You always need a mic for podcasting. You know, they say, what are the things you need for podcasting? It’s talking and a microphone.

Miruna Dragomir (01:35)
And a personality.

Mordy Oberstein (01:52)
Well, it depends what podcast you’re listening to. Sure. Seems like 99.9% of them don’t need one. Can we keep crapping on podcasts?

Anyway, today we are taking up why you should not dump LLM visibility on your SEO or any other team, which is fun just to say.

But before that, I just want to let you know that Say It Anyway is brought to you by SE Ranking and Planable, two sister companies helping brands grow their presence across channels and the ecosystem. SE Ranking helps you understand your search and LLM visibility, and Planable helps you create and collaborate on the content that improves it across social, website, PR, and beyond, so you can track, distribute, and validate the impact of your data in an AI world.

Okay, Miruna, why should we not dump LLM visibility on the SEO team?

Miruna Dragomir (02:22)
Okay, I’ve been waiting for this rant. I’m so excited about it because I feel like this is the default. And I see this through empirical evidence, personal experience, and honestly, I see it all around me.

CMOs, heads of marketing — they found this new thing, of course. Now it’s AEO. Now we don’t have attributable data, which we talked about in the previous episode. And then what we see is that, okay, we need to grow our AI citation rate and mention rate and all of that fancy stuff.

But who is accustomed to this whole idea of ranking and being mentioned and yadda yadda? I know: the SEO team. It must be the SEO team.

Mordy Oberstein (03:04)
I love ranking stuff.

Miruna Dragomir (03:06)
Yes, and of course it works exactly the same because nothing revolutionary happened. The exact same algorithm just got replicated, but it’s in ChatGPT slash Claude, because now that’s what we like. Chat.

No, that is not how it works.

I am ranting about this and I sound very judgmental, but imagine the person that I’m judging is myself because I did it quite similarly, honestly. I was like, it just makes sense, right? Team, we need to rank higher. We need to be cited more. Please do that. Please do whatever it takes.

The whole issue with that is that SEO works in an SEO fashion, with an SEO mechanics mentality, which is not wrong. It just does not apply to everything. It’s not that the SEO team should not be involved in AEO. It’s not their responsibility, because what they’ll do is they will treat this task, this project, in the classical, surgical manner that SEO works, right?

SEO fixes issues. We don’t get cited, we don’t get mentioned because we are not mentioned in the sources that ChatGPT uses. So what should we do? Be mentioned in the sources that ChatGPT uses. We are not already — we are not there, we are not there — so we have to pitch, we have to do an outreach campaign, we have to do everything that is, which is all amazing. It’s just not going to be the only thing that needs to be fixed because — and this is the pause in my rant —

Mordy Oberstein (04:30)
SEOs, if you’re listening, earmuffs. Close your ears right now.

Miruna Dragomir (04:34)
Again, I am not throwing anything bad at SEOs. It’s just that it’s like part of the problem. It’s not everything. So this is actually unfair to you, being tasked with it.

Mordy Oberstein (04:44)
I like that angle.

Miruna Dragomir (04:46)
Honestly, obviously, I love SEO. That’s not the issue here. The issue is CMOs.

Mordy Oberstein (04:51)
Yeah, the issue is CMOs. Let’s talk about that. And then CEOs, who are the ones feeling the pressure on the CMOs.

Miruna Dragomir (04:57)
Don’t even get me started on CMOs. But the truth is that any AEO audit, if you really look at it through the lens of a CMO, what you will find is that it highlights a brand perception and positioning problem.

It does not highlight that you are not cited enough or mentioned enough in the top listicles. That, of course, is part of it. That’s another symptom, is what it is.

Mordy Oberstein (05:24)
I don’t want to get too far down the rabbit hole on that point because in our next episode we’re going to talk about why SEOs and all the other people involved in this should stop hacking to get into LLMs.

And by the way, if you’re not in the SEO space, this point won’t land for you. But if you are in the SEO space, this is a spicy point because the old-school SEOs — well, some of the old-school SEOs — are like, “AEO, GEO, it’s a whole new thing.” Some of the old-school SEOs are like, “SEO has always been about building authority and getting yourself out there across the web. It’s the same thing.”

I am not getting into that. I do not want to take a position on that and step into that landmine.

What I will say, though, is that you see, first off, just structurally — and we’ll do another full episode on this also — structurally, how is it to be on the SEO team? Because if it’s everything, and it is everything, it’s your whole digital reputation, it’s your whole digital footprint.

If the SEO team needs to build this, a lot of the teams that they work with, they have no control over. So imagine they need the PR team. The PR team doesn’t answer to the SEO team.

And I’ll say this, having worked with lots of SEO teams: some SEO teams are pretty good in the organization at getting some clout, getting some power, having some maneuverability, and working really well with the other teams that can handle this.

Some of the teams are, I don’t know how to say this, they’re led by technical nerds. And they’re great at their technical nerding — full respect. I come from the SEO world. Full respect to technical nerds. But they are not about the comms across the team, and it doesn’t work.

Miruna Dragomir (06:50)
Nor should they be. Like, you’re correct. If you want them to succeed at this task, you know what you should do? Turn them into the CMO. Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein (06:58)
I once wrote a blistering post — I took down the site, so I don’t have it anymore — about why LLM visibility is the CMO’s fault.

Miruna Dragomir (07:05)
It’s 100% the CMO.

Mordy Oberstein (07:06)
I said it’s the CMO’s fault until Wil Reynolds told me he had a great point: it’s really the CEO’s fault, because the CMO is just getting pressure from the CEO. I like that.

Miruna Dragomir (07:16)
I think that’s even better.

Look, I can be super transparent about this. And again, if you’re feeling judged by us at this point, don’t, because again, I am mostly talking about myself.

The true, true use case, true scenario: Planable, a brand. First audits that happened whatever time ago. We’re not getting cited enough. Welcome to the real world. We’re not the number one biggest company in our space, so by default, we are not the most cited tool in this space.

Okay. Cool, we need to get on that. Hey, SEO team, please fix it, said Miruna smiling.

SEO team, what do they find? They look at the audit and they say, actually, we’re super well-cited and mentioned when you look up collaboration tools, approval tools, workflow tools, and the social media space.

I wonder why. Why? Because the entire marketing team at Planable for six years has worked tirelessly to make that happen — to make the market understand that Planable is that tool you go to if you have complex workflows and if you need to approve social media content and yadda yadda.

That was because that’s what we were, and we did not want to be perceived as an all-in-one tool because we were not an all-in-one tool. We wanted to be a tool that does collaboration, best in class in collaboration, which meant trade-offs. And trade-offs were that we were not an all-in-one tool.

Time passed. We matured. We did reach best in class at collaboration. What did we do after that? We covered the trade-offs that we had made in the previous years.

Today, that positioning is not necessarily the most accurate one. We are the best in class at collaboration, but we’re also very freaking good as an all-in-one tool.

So what does the SEO team do in this sort of scenario? Listicles, blog posts —

Mordy Oberstein (09:01)
Listicle blog posts.

Miruna Dragomir (09:09)
They did span across teams. They asked the team, okay, when we talk about Planable, stop saying it’s the collaboration tool, start saying it’s the social media management tool, yadda yadda yadda. A bit of anchoring, keywords, use, action, yadda yadda, which is part of the brand repositioning.

But what should we have done? Miruna, the responsible, accountable CMO, should have stepped in and said, team, this is not a “let’s change keywords here and there” type of situation.

This flags to us that the market perceives us as the niche tool that we used to be, not as the fully equipped industry-standard tool that we are today.

Mordy Oberstein (09:44)
That’s kind of the problem, is that with LLM visibility, people look at it as — I’m not saying it’s not this at all — but they look at it tactically.

It’s not a tactic. The visibility is an outcome. It’s an outcome of all the things.

One is, and every brand, I think, it’s one of the things that falls to the wayside. It starts with who you are, understanding who you are, and putting who you are out there to the world — to the digital world and real world. And as an outcome of that, that world now perceives you a certain way. And as an outcome of that, the visibility is now there.

I’m not saying that means you don’t need to optimize and be strategic, but it’s really far more of an outcome of everything that you’re doing combined into one than it is a particular set of tactics.

I think I just upset the SEOs, the GEOs, and the AEOs saying all of that.

But you do see that in the rise of digital PR coming into a new life. And it’s interesting to watch SEOs pivot from old-school quote-unquote digital PR into a much more holistic version of digital PR because of this.

But this makes me think of a question — a question that we asked our guest this week. If LLM visibility is just a symptom of brand visibility, then who should run your AI visibility program?

Here’s Laura Little, the founder of That British Chick marketing agency, to answer just that.

Laura Little (11:03)
Who should take accountability for LLM visibility? Everybody. Basically, everybody on the team that is responsible for any type of content should be taking accountability for LLM visibility.

I actually think if you are doing a good job naturally, you will be surfaced. I don’t actually think you need someone to just be like the head of LLM visibility or to be just managing that. It’s just a group role. It’s a group effort, and quite honestly, if you are doing everything the way that you should be, you will be surfaced in the LLM.

So it actually just doubles down on doing a good job. There’s no magic secret to this. It’s just keep creating great content, keep creating useful content, keep structuring it in the way that you used to. Obviously, no keyword stuffing, but yeah, that’s it.

It’s a group effort. I don’t think one person needs the hack or the job of being responsible for being surfaced in the LLMs.

Miruna Dragomir (12:08)
Exactly. Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein (12:10)
I don’t know what to add on that. Couldn’t agree more. Make sure you follow Laura Little on LinkedIn.

That’s kind of the problem. I want to get into a separate episode. It’s kind of the problem.

Someone one time said, I don’t know who it was, no one famous, like someone I heard speak somewhere, said, “Shared responsibility is no responsibility,” which I think becomes tactically part of the problem. How do you handle that? That’s a separate topic for a separate time.

Miruna Dragomir (12:30)
Two things I want to say. First of all is that I love Laura’s answer, and I know that it upsets a lot of people.

Mordy Oberstein (12:37)
That’s why we say it anyway.

Miruna Dragomir (12:59)
Yeah, because we say it anyway.

But because the thing about this is that AI is putting more pressure than ever to move fast and to adapt fast and to conquer everything quickly. But the truth is that we can do the hacks, we can do the shortcuts, we can do whatever we want, but at the end of day, you have to do what you should have been doing anyway, which is expand your presence, position your brand, increase your market awareness, all of that stuff. And that’s going to get you the LLM visibility.

Mordy Oberstein (13:13)
Hey, you’re just talking crazy talk at this point. You’re talking about holistic buildup of marketing and momentum and brand and performance all in one. That’s ridiculous. Get out of here.

Miruna Dragomir (13:25)
Hey, who wants to get back to the old roots of marketing? No one, because we’re modern. No one.

Mordy Oberstein (13:30)
I want to be out there with a sign saying, you know, “Buy my SaaS platform,” like people outside of a hamburger joint. Yeah, that’s what I want to be doing.

At the end of the episode, we’re just going to tell you what we’re saying and just going to say it very clearly.

What we’re saying very, very clearly is that LLM visibility is not a separate thing from your overall brand strategy, and isolating it and throwing it on one team — check this out — it’s not going to fix the problem.

Miruna Dragomir (13:53)
Unbelievably, but no.

Mordy Oberstein (14:00)
No? Yeah, you would think. You might get some short-term gains out of it, which we’ll talk about in our next episode.

Which means I think we’ve said quite enough this week. Join us next week as we ask why you should stop hacking LLMs — why and how.

Look for a new episode of Say It Anyway on the Planable and SE Ranking websites, and wherever you choose to listen to podcasts.

Please don’t be shy about leaving us a review or a rating on iTunes and Spotify. Look for more from the podcast on the Planable and SE Ranking social media channels.

And until next time, don’t keep quiet.