Who Owns AI Visibility? The Answer: Everyone

Marketers and Content Teams Must Lead, But Not Alone.

AI visibility is not just a marketing project. It’s an organizational priority and marketers and content leaders are the best-positioned to drive it forward. But they can’t do it alone.

Every team shapes how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity understand your brand. This post shows how to lead the charge and who you’ll need to bring with you.

What Is AI Visibility?

AI visibility is the clarity and accuracy of your organization’s presence in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. These tools summarize what they find about your business across the public web and internal content ecosystems.

LLMs generate answers from:

• Your website

• Your help center and support docs

• Third-party articles

• Outdated PDFs

• Social conversations

• Anything they were trained or fine-tuned on

If your content is inconsistent or unclear, AI systems will misrepresent you. That creates risk, confusion, and lost conversions.

Why One Team Alone Cannot Own This

Most organizations  assume the content team or SEO lead should manage AI visibility. That made sense when search was about metadata and keyword rankings.

Today, content quality, consistency, and structure matter more than keywords. And that content often originates outside the marketing team.

Product descriptions, compliance notes, customer success call scripts, and visual design all affect what AI learns and how it responds. As Ethan Mollick writes in WIRED,

“The key to unlocking the true power of LLMs lies in moving beyond individual use cases to organizational-level integration.”

To show up accurately, organizations need specific teams and roles working together. Here is how each one contributes.

Marketing Team

What they do

Marketing brings audience knowledge, brand voice, and campaign strategy.

Their role in AI visibility

• Ensure consistent messaging across channels

• Translate complex concepts into understandable language

• Identify which content surfaces are most likely to influence discovery

Common misconception

Marketing owns everything AI sees.

Reality: Marketing is a guide, not a gatekeeper. AI visibility needs accurate and well-formatted input from product, compliance, and other teams.

Product Team

What they do

Product defines how your solution works, what it does, and who it helps.

Their role in AI visibility

• Provide clear explanations of features and use cases

• Supply real product language that content teams can use

• Clarify technical terms that should not be rewritten or generalized

Common misconception

Product documentation is just for internal use.

Reality: AI often pulls from public-facing spec sheets and help articles. If these are vague or outdated, models will get the product wrong.

Engineering and Development Team

What they do

Engineering ensures your content systems function and scale correctly.

Their role in AI visibility

• Structure pages for clean crawlability

• Apply schema to highlight key information

• Optimize loading speed and mobile responsiveness

Common misconception

Content is the team's problem. Engineers just support the CMS.

Reality: Without proper technical structure, even great content is invisible to LLMs.

Sales Team

What they do

Sales understands customer pain points and real-world objections.

Their role in AI visibility

• Highlight buyer questions that are not well answered online

• Contribute messaging that resonates with actual prospects

• Flag where content does not reflect how the product is positioned in deals

Common misconception

Sales doesn't touch content.

Reality: Their insights often hold the key to making content useful for LLMs and converting readers who come from AI search.

“Sometimes a story can only be told by the person who lived it or the technical expert that understands all the nuances.” (DS.Emotion)

Sales stories, use cases, and real-world objections make content richer and more aligned with what AI should surface in response to buyer questions.

Design Team

What they do

Design builds the visual systems that communicate brand and improve usability.

Their role in AI visibility

• Organize content visually so it is easier to read and easier for AI to understand

• Break up long sections into digestible chunks

• Collaborate on reusable templates that balance clarity and aesthetics

Common misconception

AI does not see design.

Reality: Design affects structure, and structure affects AI comprehension. Poor hierarchy can make content harder to parse. If you want the user to click through the link that AI provides and land on your webpages, you still need to ensure good UI/UX of your website.

What Makes Content LLM-Friendly?

LLMs prefer structured, factual, and scannable content. To improve your visibility:

• Write with clarity, not cleverness

• Use short paragraphs (under three sentences)

• Organize content with H2 and H3 headings

• Use bullet points to list features, use cases, or benefits

• Answer real user questions in natural language

AI responds well to content that looks like a help article or knowledge base.

That means clear intent, direct answers, and minimal fluff.

How to Kick Off AI Visibility Work: Start with One Surface

You do not need to overhaul your entire content ecosystem at once.

The fastest way to improve your AI visibility is to start small and start clearly.

Step 1: Choose a High-Impact Surface

Focus on a page that shapes how your business is described in AI-generated answers, such as:

• Your top product or solution page

• A frequently asked question

• A high-traffic use case description

These surfaces are often the first touchpoints AI tools reference.

Step 2: Assign Clear Owners

AI visibility is a shared responsibility, but shared responsibility needs clear ownership to begin.

Two roles should lead your first initiative:

Marketing team

• Shapes the message

• Brings audience context and brand voice

• Understands which surfaces influence discovery

Content owner

• Owns the publishing workflow

• Ensures structure, clarity, and consistency

• Bridges input from other functions

These two roles are critical. Without them, cross-functional alignment stalls.

Step 3: Rewrite, Align, and Test

Once the surface is selected:

• Gather the relevant SMEs (e.g. product, legal, support)

• Rewrite the page for clarity, structure, and factual accuracy

• Format with headings, bullets, and concise language

• Then test how AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity describe your company using public data

You’re not just updating content. You’re shaping how AI systems explain your business to others.

Final Thought

AI visibility is not one team’s job. It is a shared responsibility and requires collaborative efforts.

You already have the right people. You just need alignment.

Every part of your organization shapes how large language models talk about your brand. When teams align around clear, consistent, and structured content, AI starts reflecting your business the way it was meant to be seen.

Start with one page. Bring the right people to the table.

That’s how you turn AI visibility into a competitive edge.

References

DS.Emotion. (2023, March 31). 5 Reasons why the whole team should be involved in content creation and 3 things they can do to make it better. Retrieved from https://dsemotion.com/blog/involve-the-whole-team-in-content-creation/

Search Engine Journal. (2024, April 29). How LLMs Interpret Content: How To Structure Information For AI Search. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-llms-interpret-content-structure-information-for-ai-search/544308

WIRED. (2024, April 16). AI Will Evolve Into an Organizational Strategy for All. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-work-organizational-strategy

Business Insider. (2025, May 7). Meet 10 AI Trailblazers Who Are Steering Their Companies Into Tech’s New Age. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-leaders-pwc-mastercard-accenture-ikea-tech-adoption-growth-strategy-2025-5