Nearly a third of businesses have nobody in charge of getting recommended by AI
Almost every business now understands that it matters whether AI recommends them. Very few are doing anything about it. That gap is the opportunity, and it will not stay open forever.
There is now a number on it. Muck Rack surveyed nearly a thousand communications professionals in mid 2026 and found that 73% think generative engine optimisation matters to their strategy, while 29% say nobody at their organisation owns it. A further 13% did not know. And 39% are not measuring it at all.
Read that again. Three quarters say it is important. Nearly a third have not put a single person in charge of it. Only 24% said their PR or communications team owns it, and just 11% said marketing leadership.
That matches what I hear every week. Business owners know this matters. They are fairly sure their competitors are not doing it. But nobody on the team knows where to start, and the agency saying they have it covered is the same agency that was telling them a year ago it was a fad.
So let us work out who should actually own it.
The question is already slightly wrong
Here is where I have to be awkward about my own headline.
I have watched people argue that product should own GEO, or PR, or the technical team, or that you need a whole new team for it. Each argument has something going for it. The PR case is the strongest, because AI is largely reading what other people say about you, and roughly 99% of AI citations come from non-paid sources.
But the fact that this debate exists at all tells you something has gone wrong.
GEO is not a new discipline that needs a home. It is search, with a different reader.
I have written before about why optimising for AI is still just SEO, because that is the clearest warning sign there is when someone sells it as separate. The only way an AI recommends you is by finding you through a search engine first. It searches, reads what it finds, and builds an answer from those pages. If you cannot be found, you cannot be cited.
So when a business asks “who should own our GEO,” the honest answer is that the question smuggles in an assumption. It presumes there is a separate job to be owned. There is not. There is search, and one of the things now reading the results is a machine rather than a person.
What the work actually looks like
If you are still not sure, stop arguing about org charts and ask a simpler question: what does the work involve, and who already does that?
Understanding what gets crawled and indexed. Understanding why one page gets chosen over another. Writing content that answers a question so directly it gets quoted. Building enough presence elsewhere on the web that you count as a credible source.
Every one of those is search work. It was search work five years ago and it is search work now. The reader changed, the mechanism did not.
And nobody else in your business understands how search engines work. Without that, this is genuinely hard. With it, most of it is familiar territory.
Which is the real answer to the headline: it belongs with whoever already handles your search presence, because it was never a separate thing to begin with.
The awkward bit about SEO people
Now, if you ask your SEO team or agency whether they can handle GEO, they will say yes. Of course they will.
Some of them are the same people who told you a year ago that GEO was not really a thing, that you just needed good SEO and it would all sort itself out. They have since worked out that their livelihood depends on being able to do this.
Here is the uncomfortable part. They were half right then, and they are right now. Good SEO genuinely is most of the job. But the version of SEO that was aimed purely at getting a human to click a blue link is heading for obsolescence faster than most of that industry wants to admit.
Everything is moving one way. We are close to a point where most searching is AI searching. At which point traditional SEO, optimising for a human scanning ten results, becomes a smaller and smaller part of the picture.
So the test is not whether your SEO people say they can do it. It is whether they have genuinely turned to face the new direction, or whether they have just added a word to the menu and put the price up.
How to tell which you have got
Ask them these, and listen to how quickly they answer:
- Which pages does AI cite when someone asks for a business like ours, and how are you tracking that? If they cannot tell you which sources are being used, they are guessing.
- How does this fit with our existing search work? It should be one strategy. If it arrives as a separate service with a separate invoice, be careful.
- What proportion of this is content? It should be most of it. Heavy on technical implementation usually means someone selling the bit that is easiest to bill for.
- Does this still work in two years? Or only until Google notices.
Those questions come from a longer piece I wrote on spotting a GEO outfit that is about to take you for a ride, because there is a lot of smoke being sold at the moment.
What this means if you are a small business
Everything above is written for organisations with teams and org charts. Most businesses I work with have neither. So let me translate.
You do not need to appoint anybody, and you certainly do not need to buy a new service called GEO. It belongs with whoever already handles your website and your search presence, because it is the same job. If that is an agency, ask them the four questions. If that is you, then it is you, and the work is more familiar than it sounds: be findable, write things down plainly, answer the questions your customers actually ask.
And the survey is genuinely good news for you. Nearly a third of professional communications teams, people whose entire job is this sort of thing, have nobody looking after it. If they have not got round to it, neither have your competitors on the Fylde coast.
The window where being organised counts as an advantage is open right now. It will not be in two years, because by then it will just be what everyone does.
The short version
The work looks like SEO because it is SEO, aimed at a different reader. So it belongs with whoever understands search, provided they have genuinely turned to face the new direction rather than bolting a new word onto an old menu.
If anyone offers to sell you GEO as a service that sits alongside your search work rather than inside it, you have learned something useful about them.
And if nobody owns it in your business, that is not a scandal. Nearly a third of professional teams are in the same boat. But somebody needs to, and it may as well be before your competitors work that out.
Not sure whether anyone is looking after this for you? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself, and I will tell you straight.