Why 2026 is the year the SEO silo breaks and cross-channel execution starts

In 2025, the SEO industry debated whether AI required a strategy shift. 

In 2026, we are still debating, but we are moving further into the testing and execution phase. 

To navigate the new search landscape, we have to kill the channel silo and let the SEO team act as the strategic quarterback for brand authority.

Organic search has always been a treasure trove of insights into consumer behavior, platform changes, brand presence, and organic influence. 

Right now, LLMs are binging on a diet of earned media. 

Press releases, social media content, UGC, your website, your retailers’ sites, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads all have a huge influence on the topic ecosystems that LLMs use to develop their understanding of your brand and products and generate answers for users.

It’s time to install a new operating system – a cross-functional model that moves SEO from a technical department to the primary driver of your brand’s presence.

A phased blueprint for a cross-functional AI SEO team

When I talk to brands about 2026, the reaction is often the same: “There is so much to do, and we can only do so much.” 

They aren’t wrong. If you try to execute everything you think you need, you will waste resources. 

The secret to a better AI SEO operating system is determining what matters most right now and facilitating collaboration across your organizational teams by priority.

You don’t need to do it all at once. Identify your highest-priority collaborations by relying on your SEO quarterback and approach execution in phases.

Phase 1: Collaborating on your owned assets

• Essential collaborators: Web development team, content team, product team.

Before you start to worry too much about influencing an LLM’s “opinion” on your brand, focus on the facts you’re sharing in your owned assets. 

Building a solid foundation for AI search starts with your own website and it’s where you have the most control. 

The SEO pivot

Instead of just focusing on optimization for a specific search term, you are now optimizing for entity extraction. 

The shift is moving from “Is this page readable for a human?” to “Is this data structure undeniable for a bot?”

The collaborative effort

Your SEO quarterback works with your product and sales teams to identify exactly what information an LLM might need based on real-world customer conversations and product applications. 

This insight then flows to the content team to cover information gaps and the web development team to implement structural changes that support better extraction.

The goal

Establishing a source of truth for your brand. 

You want to ensure that every factual claim about your product – from use cases to specs and availability – is so clear and well-structured that it can be easily extracted to become the primary source of truth on your products. 

If the AI can’t find the facts on your site, it will hallucinate them from somewhere else.

Phase 2: Collaborating on your earned assets

• Essential collaborators: PR and communications, creative team, brand team, social media team, commerce and marketplace teams.

Once your foundation is solid, you need to expand into other sources. 

LLMs often tend to care a lot more about what others have to say about you than what you want to say about yourself. 

When AI search is generating answers, it’s looking for a consensus across the web to validate facts. 

This is where your SEO strategy must merge with your PR and communications efforts to influence the sources the AI trusts most.

The SEO pivot

Instead of chasing a high volume of backlinks to boost domain authority, you are now chasing high-value citations to build brand mentions and authority in specific spaces. 

The shift moves from old school link building to narrative building to build better brand authority.

The collaborative effort

Your SEO quarterback works with your PR and communications teams to move away from episodic, one-off media pushes toward an “always-on” news cycle where you repurpose and syndicate content stories to build conversations. 

The creative and brand teams start to integrate as part of the larger content strategy with insights into the topics that could be supported by video content. 

This is a great time to incorporate the organic social team – aligning your themes across platforms to create a consistent narrative and double-dip on content ideas.

For ecommerce brands, commerce and marketplace teams hold an important source for chatbots when it comes to validating product data.

Leverage the real estate with your retailers as part of your larger PDP strategy.

The goal

Make sure that when an LLM goes looking for validation, the facts are the same everywhere. 

From the technical specs on a retailer’s PDP to the sentiment and highlights in a press feature. 

By turning these off-site entities into extensions of your own ground truth, you can begin to sculpt the consensus an AI needs to cite your brand correctly.

Phase 3: Building your brand and community

• Essential collaborators: Social and community management team, paid social and search team, affiliate marketing team.

The final phase of the operating system shifts efforts to focusing on influencing the human signals from user-generated content. 

AI models can’t have original opinions, so they supplement their understanding by scraping platforms like Reddit, YouTube, third-party review sites, and niche communities to see what real people think about you. 

If Phase 1 was about what you say and Phase 2 was about what experts say, Phase 3 is about ensuring the community validates that narrative.

The SEO pivot

You are now optimizing for community authority and sentiment. 

The shift moves from simply existing in these social spaces to actively shaping the narrative in the spaces where AI models go to learn human preference.

The collaborative effort

Your SEO quarterback works with the social and community management team to identify where your audience engages, what drives LLM influence and what the conversations are that you can naturally participate in or leverage. 

Passing those findings and insights to your paid search team to test ad copy or landing page strategies and create brand alignment on all fronts. 

This coordination extends to the affiliate team to secure placements within highly relevant domains in your topic ecosystem, and the paid social team to align influencer scripts with specific semantic themes that better define your brand narrative. 

The goal

Building your brand association and scaling the conversations that matter within your community.  

By shaping and expanding on these conversations, you can find genuine insights from your customers that you can reflect back into your other strategies.

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Integrated execution: The data exchange

The operating system works through an exchange of data, insights, and executional support. 

The SEO quarterback ensures that every team is provided the right inputs and receives the strategic insights they need to successfully execute on the work required for AI search.

Team	What they provide to the SEO lead	What they receive from the SEO lead
Content team	Topic expertise and high-quality creation	AI-driven keyword strategy, optimization guidelines, performance data
PR and communication team	Brand messaging and outreach support	Search trend analysis, brand mention monitoring, and authority-building targets
Commerce and marketplace team	Product data, reseller insights, and customer pain points	PDP strategies and product visibility insights
Social media team	Engagement data, social trends, and content distribution	Trending topics and cross-platform visibility strategies
Web dev team	Technical infrastructure and site performance data	Technical SEO audits and implementation priorities
Creative team	Engaging visual assets, infographics, and brand visual identity	AI-driven visual trends, image/video optimization data, content performance insights

Approaching in phases helps you to ramp and prioritize by effort and impact, but this is a cyclical system. 

Your SEO quarterback needs to keep drafting up the plays with insights from your reporting platforms and a focus on critical KPIs in your roadmap, like: 

• AI answer inclusion. 
• Sentiment theme shifts.
• Citation evolutions. 

AI visibility tracking platforms are extremely helpful for analyzing and measuring each of the phases as you move through them.

Breaking it down this way keeps your team aligned on what’s important in each phase of your roadmap and where you need resources. 

A plan like this can also help with budget alignment. 

If creative is an essential part of your SEO strategy, can you create shared budget allocations to justify testing and collaboration. 

Cross-channel strategies require consolidated resources that start to blur the lines between channel budgets – something to consider when you’re asking for more resources from your C-level team.

Architecting your 2026 SEO team

Your SEO lead, whether it’s in-house or agency, should have a vocal seat at the table. 

If expectations are the occasional technical audit or a list of keywords, you are missing out on the insights required for success. 

To run the AI SEO operating system, you need a strategic leader at the helm.

The SEO lead is your strategic quarterback is focused on internal strategy, performance, insights, and innovation. 

They are the ones looking at the AI visibility data and deciding which plays to call. Whether that’s a content push or a PR pivot. 

In order to optimize for organic search, it’s essential that they are participating in navigating developing the brand’s entire identity across multiple entities.

Agency vs. in-house: Balancing nuance and innovation

I’m often asked if this quarterback should be an internal hire or an agency partner. 

The truth is that the best results come from having a strong internal lead who acts as the primary quarterback, regardless of who is executing the tactics.

Full-time employees understand the business differently. 

They have a level of nuance, internal connections, and a deep understanding of the product and customer that can be hard to replicate with an outside partner.

Because SEO is so situational, it can be hard for an in-house team to stay on the cutting edge of innovation solo. 

A good agency partner will act as an extension of your larger team. They:

• Ask the right questions.
• Bring in supplemental resources to fill gaps.
• Provide a broader perspective from findings across the industry.
• Help build the collaboration that drives the strategy forward.

Whether you build an in-house team or lean on an agency to supplement your resources, the requirement is the same: you need a strong lead who can facilitate the cross-channel collaboration that AI search requires.

AI search success comes from cross-channel collaboration

You can’t recruit a star quarterback, an offensive line, and an elite receiver and expect a championship team. 

They only win when they are running the same playbook. 

In 2026, an isolated SEO strategy is like a quarterback stuck in the locker room. 

The talent may be there, but no points are scored until the full team takes the field.

In the new search landscape, strategies must change, but so must execution. 

By moving SEO out of its technical silo and into the center of the organization, it shifts from a line-item expense to a primary driver of brand authority. 

Empower your SEO lead to call the plays, break down silos, and build a brand that is undeniable to both bots and the humans they serve.