AI search is exposing a hidden weakness in the way many brands operate

The rise of AI search is exposing an organizational problem that companies often ignore.

Only 22% of US marketers recently polled by Adobe's digital marketing platform, Semrush, said they had a "fully integrated" AI search and search engine optimization strategy. The rest described some version of a gap.

Internal silos are a problem for brands in the AI search era, Semrush said. Large language models are pulling data from multiple sources, including corporate websites' blogs, news articles, Reddit chatter, and YouTube videos.

"In the past, companies were able to operate in a fairly siloed approach," Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush, told Business Insider.

"Maybe the brand team was doing something on social media that was different to what the SEO team was doing on the blog, and the customer success team didn't really pay too much attention to how many people were talking about the brand on Reddit," McKenzie added.

In the AI era, inconsistencies in how companies talk about themselves — and how consumers talk about them — can lead to inaccuracies in how chatbots and search platforms represent their brands, potentially affecting their visibility on these channels relative to competitors, Semrush said.

Plus, brands that aren't joined up internally may not be measuring their AI search efforts effectively.

The companies that are executing best in AI search right now have been making sure their brands show up across all these channels in a much more cohesive way, McKenzie said.

Since ChatGPT's debut in 2022, brands have been scrambling to figure out generative engine optimization, or GEO — ensuring AI answer engines accurately surface their products, services, and messaging. With AI companies regularly updating their models and search increasingly moving from links to answers, marketers are having to rewrite their SEO playbooks in real time.

Take HubSpot, a customer relationship platform that ranks third in the business and professional services category in Semrush's latest quarterly brand visibility index report.

HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar said the company never treated answer engine optimization as a separate team or strategy from SEO, and instead approached AI visibility as an evolution of search.

"That integrated approach has allowed us to move faster, avoid duplicate work, and create a more consistent experience across both traditional search and AI-driven discovery," Bodnar said.

When asked about the issues they'd experienced with AI search, 37% of the marketers Semrush surveyed said competitors were mentioned more often than their brand. Thirty percent said their brand was described inaccurately, and 29% said their positioning was unclear or generic.

Companies are taking different approaches to who should be responsible for AI search. While 18% of the companies Semrush surveyed said they have a dedicated GEO specialist or team, 16% said it sat within the SEO department, 15% said their content teams looked after it, and 14% said responsibility was shared across multiple teams.

At Semrush, the SEO team has taken on a more prominent role within the corporate hierarchy.

"I have a much bigger seat at the leadership table than I had two years ago," McKenzie said.

Semrush's study, which was shared exclusively with CMO Insider, surveyed 481 US marketers, business owners, and SEO professionals in April 2026.