{"id":7360,"date":"2026-05-28T10:55:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/?p=7360"},"modified":"2026-05-28T10:55:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:55:34","slug":"the-post-channel-marketer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/blog\/the-post-channel-marketer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Post-Channel Marketer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the fall of 2014<\/a>, Steve Kerr inherited a Golden State Warriors team that averaged 247 passes per game (the lowest in the NBA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He set a target of 300, noting that previous champions ranked near the top in ball movement. Then he rebuilt the offense around constant motion: screens, cuts, ball reversals, positional fluidity. Where most teams ran isolation plays, the Warriors ran them<\/a> at nearly the lowest rate in the league.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results were great, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I\u2019m a casual basketball fan (other than Knicks playoffs runs \u2013 and I\u2019ve scheduled this post out a few weeks, so we\u2019ll see how that plays out). But it seems like isolation basketball is transforming<\/a> into integrated basketball. And isn\u2019t this the plot of many sports movies? Selfish talent learns to be team players, team wins (but so do the players, emotionally and spiritually)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marketing, if you worked at a certain size company, ran the same isolation playbook for two decades. AI search is disrupting that from all angles (metrics, inputs, skills, technology, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have to learn to work together if we want to drive performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWho owns AI search visibility?\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This question threads many debates at the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good GEO is good SEO<\/a>, so SEO owns it. Off page dominates citation sources<\/a>, so PR\/comms owns it. Brand owns it<\/a>, because it\u2019s multidisciplinary and AI answers are essentially digital mirrors of your brand perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no simple answer. I don\u2019t profess to have one. It\u2019s probably variable across companies and industries and will evolve as often as AI models themselves do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While customer acquisition channels still function independently (i.e. the value of a review on G2 still matters for human readers of G2 category pages), AI search has collapsed channels into a single interface that abstracts the source materials to end users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The inputs to that interface are distributed across every function in marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No single specialist truly has ownership over the output. And the org chart hasn\u2019t caught up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Channel Era<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For two decades (or more), digital marketers were largely defined by their channel. SEO specialist. Paid acquisition manager. Social media strategist. Email marketer. Each owned a platform, understood its algorithm, and optimized within its walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Except for those growth marketing dilettantes who <\/em>suffered<\/em> benefited from a lack of focus and typically worked at startups with too much responsibility)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This never made a ton of sense from a bird\u2019s eye view (dark social, WoM, interaction effects across channels, etc.), but click-based telemetry and attribution<\/a> made it functionally easy to set goals and make progress on a channel-by-channel basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of course, each platform had its own rules. Google\u2019s algorithm rewarded different signals than Facebook\u2019s. Your SEO traffic was your SEO traffic. Your social engagement was your social engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is still true, and understanding platform\/channel dynamics still matters a ton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The T-shaped marketer<\/a> (deep expertise in one area, working fluency across others) was an early corrective that attempted to create some flexibility and holistic thinking in marketing career progression. Growth marketing<\/a> was the operational version: someone who could analyze data, run experiments, and pull levers across channels (and product) to drive a composite and measurable outcome. But even growth marketers operated in a world where channels produced separable results, delineated by columns on a spreadsheet<\/a>. You could trace which lever moved which number, granularly tweaking knobs like Facebook ad click-through-rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI search is disrupting this model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Convergence<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini a question, the answer draws from many places simultaneously, including its training data. Or rather, a probabilistic, ever-changing, multi-modal and multi-domain set of sources that can be impacted by paid, earned, owned, community, and more. One output. Many inputs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, Reddit was the talk of the town<\/a>. If SEO owns AI search, does that mean they now own community management?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The past few months, LinkedIn has been the talk of the town<\/a>. If SEO owns AI search, does that mean they now own organic social?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

G2 reviews, Gartner Peer Reviews, and PeerSpot<\/a> are cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity for product comparison queries. Review management is now search strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not arguing that SEO shouldn\u2019t own AI search (it is, after all, still by and large a search problem). If anything, I\u2019m biased to say that SEO should raise their hand and take on AI search, as well. But in practice, SEO teams are often disconnected from other teams\u2019 efforts, or at the very least, it\u2019s an uphill battle to work into their roadmaps. I know this from practice as a growth marketer at HubSpot trying to integrate SEO, affiliate, customer marketing, and paid efforts for the Surround Sound SEO<\/a> program. It wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI search visibility is, in many ways, an emergent property of everything your organization does and also everything your competitors and customers do. Even the tactics many talk about on LinkedIn, such as chunking, FAQs, content updates, etc. are only about retrieval, which is one piece of a larger puzzle. But what does passage retrieval mean if your brand is absent from every other relevant page on the internet? \u201cQuestions as headers\u201d<\/a> may marginally increase your citation rate, but it\u2019s a drop in the ocean in terms of brand visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Challenge<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

AI search is a conceptually similar problem as classic search: deliver information that users want through an intermediary platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge is that the input sources a) differ from brand to brand and b) change often. So while aggregate citation data may tell you that Reddit is the most prominent source of influence, that may or may not be true for your brand individually. And if it is right now, it may not be in 3-6 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, AI search requires a sort of orchestration or portfolio management approach<\/a> that both retains a level of cohesive brand messaging and throughput (consistency is important for legibility, broadly) and also a tactical agility to run experiments and pivot resources when influence or consumer behavior patterns change (e.g. shifting from thinking about citations in ChatGPT to agentic web visits from something like Claude Cowork\/Claude Code).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, it\u2019s not simple or obvious how to structure a team right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see a lot of client data. We also sit on calls with everyone from CMOs to SEO specialists to PR teams, analysts, growth marketers, and more. Our own engagements are increasingly broad and cross-functional. And what I can say is there\u2019s no universal playbook or story to tell apart from the foundations you all know and that we\u2019ve written about before.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While vendors who make content production functionally easy will talk about programmatic approaches to publishing or updating, for many of our clients, owned content is simply not the major problem to solve. So these solutions don\u2019t map perfectly to AI search performance. In other cases, it does and is a great unlock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In every case, however, I can say that no single channel delivers the full signal. The composite is what matters. This is true for a startup attempting to show up on AI visibility charts, and it\u2019s also true of Salesforce who acquired a new company and wants to integrate the new functionality into their messaging that shows up in AI answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Role That Emerges<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So what does the marketer who owns this look like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not the T-shaped marketer, I don\u2019t think. Or at least not the version from a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The T was built for a world where channels were independent and you needed 1-2 deep skills to anchor your career (mine were SEO & CRO, by the way). The role that AI search demands is something different: a marketer whose primary obsession is the customer journey as both humans and AI platforms experience it, and whose core skill is allocating investment across disparate efforts that produce composite results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three traits define this person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n