Who Should Own AEO? (Hint: It’s Not Your SEO Person)

If you’ve started budgeting for AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), you’re already ahead of most of your competitors. That’s the good news.

The bad news is most companies are about to hand it to the wrong team.

Why AEO can’t wait

There’s a lot of noise about “AI in marketing” right now, and most of it is all about tools promising efficiency gains that may or may not show up and workflows that may or may not survive the next model update.

AEO isn’t speculative. Buyer behavior has already shifted. People ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations instead of scrolling ten blue links. Google’s AI Overviews already sit above the organic results on nearly every commercial search. This isn’t a prediction about where things are headed. It’s already happening, to your buyers, right now.

That’s the part that should make you nervous if you haven’t started yet. This isn’t a channel you pick up whenever you get around to it. Every quarter you wait is a quarter your competitors show up in AI answers and you don’t. This is one of the few places in marketing where paying attention now, not eventually, actually changes the outcome.

So naturally, everyone’s rushing in. And that’s where it starts to go sideways.

Data brain vs. brand brain

Most of the people rushing into AEO right now are bringing an SEO mindset with them. They’re optimizing for the algorithm instead of the person on the other end. That instinct made sense when ranking algorithms were the whole game.

What you should be doing when it comes to AEO is starting with the buyer (a person), not a query. And here’s the trap: anyone can fall into data-first thinking, including good marketers and good SEOs. Starting with the spreadsheet instead of the human is the problem.

If you don’t understand the buyer, you’re not doing AEO. Or good SEO, honestly. You’re doing keyword research with extra steps, in a search landscape that’s already moved past keywords.

The buyer is the whole strategy

Your AEO is only as good as the buyer you’re connecting with.

I’ve seen this play out directly. One client was over-indexing on technical jargon: accurate, detailed, technically impressive content the actual buyer never would have read, because the actual buyer wasn’t the technical person. It was written for the wrong audience entirely.

That’s not a keyword problem. No amount of schema markup fixes content built for the wrong person. It’s a buyer-understanding problem, and it’s exactly what a marketing-minded team catches, and an SEO-only team misses.

It also points to where this is heading. Answer engines are moving toward role-specific responses: the answer ChatGPT gives a CFO won’t look like the answer it gives a CMO. For B2B companies, that likely means building content around how each buyer in the sales process actually thinks, not one pillar page trying to speak to everyone. That’s a marketing problem, not a technical one.

Who should actually own AEO

SEO and AEO aren’t two disciplines running side by side. They’re one continuum, both rooted in understanding people. Whoever owns this needs to lead with the customer and treat the technical work (schema, structured data, indexing) as the expression of that understanding, not a replacement for it.

That makes it a marketing-led job. Not because SEO doesn’t belong in the room, but because the SEO skill set on its own isn’t built to start with buyer psychology, and starting there is the whole game now. Bring your SEO expertise into AEO. Just don’t let it run on autopilot with the old playbook.

If your plan right now is “let our SEO person handle AEO too,” it’s worth a second look. Not because they can’t contribute, but because someone needs to be steering with the buyer in mind first.

Watch out for the free-audit flood

I get pitched free AEO audits constantly. You probably have too. They’re almost always the same checklist with new branding. It’s a technical crawl that flags missing schema and calls it a strategy. 

A real AEO engagement starts with the buyer. At Syrup, every AEO project starts with understanding who you’re actually trying to reach before we run a single technical check, because the audit only matters once you know who it’s for. Our AEO/SEO approach pairs that buyer-first strategy with the technical execution like schema, structured content, and AI citation tracking, so both halves get done right, by people who understand both.

You can take a look at what we saw when we did an audit on our own website here.

Own it before someone else does

AEO isn’t a feature you bolt onto SEO. It’s a discipline that starts with the buyer and ends with being the answer AI chooses to give. Brands already know it’s real. The ones who win it will be the ones who put marketing, not just SEO, in the driver’s seat.

Deep Dive:

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Post by Morgan Alverson

Morgan leads brand for Syrup’s clients, helping B2B companies figure out who they are, who their audience is, what makes them different, and how to show up in a way that actually connects. She’s part strategist, part storyteller, and fully obsessed with getting it right (every word, every detail). When she’s not building brands that make people feel something, you’ll probably find her with a coffee in hand, reworking a headline until it sings.

See all posts by Morgan