Building an SI visibility team: roles and responsibilities

A team for SI visibility work should be built as a small core team with a clear owner that brings content, technical infrastructure, digital PR, product data and measurement responsibilities together around a single goal and works regularly with other departments. In many companies, brand visibility in SI answers remains ownerless, on the assumption that “someone must be looking after it”. The content team sees it as a technical issue, the technical team as a marketing issue, and the marketing team as an experiment that is hard to measure. Yet the launch of ads in ChatGPT in Türkiye, Google’s AI Mode and the new SI reports in Merchant Center show that this area has become a measurable and budgetable line of business. An ownerless area means falling behind quickly in a space where competitors invest regularly. In this guide, we cover why this work does not fit into a single department, which roles the core team should include, which existing employees can move into these roles and how decision rights should be shared.

Why can SI visibility not be one department’s job?

SI visibility cannot be one department’s job because the factors that determine how a brand appears in an SI answer are spread across different units of the company. On-site content is the responsibility of the marketing team, the readability of pages to bots belongs to the software team, the accuracy of product data to e-commerce and operations, the brand’s representation in external sources to corporate communications and the management of customer reviews to customer service. If one of these units falls short, it can undo the efforts of the others.

For example, the content team can write an excellent comparison guide, but if the page is rendered with JavaScript, SI crawlers cannot see it. Or the technical infrastructure may be flawless, but if the brand is defined incorrectly in external sources, the model will still pass on wrong information. This interdependence requires building a structure that coordinates across departments rather than “handing” the work to one department. At the centre of this structure should be a small core team that owns the work and builds a shared language with other units.

Which roles should the core team include?

The core team should include an owner, a content strategist, a technical specialist, a digital PR lead and a data analyst. Each of these roles does not mean one full-time person; in small companies, one person can take on several roles, while in large companies one role can be carried out by several people. What matters is that every responsibility clearly belongs to someone.

In e-commerce companies, a product data lead should be added to this structure. Managing product feeds, variant information and price and stock synchronisation is one of the most decisive elements of visibility on shopping-focused SI surfaces. In companies using ChatGPT Ads or Google’s SI ad formats, having someone from the paid media team join regular meetings with the core team makes it possible to plan organic and paid visibility together.

Who in the current team can move into these roles?

Most of these roles can be filled by supporting existing content, technical, communications and analytics specialists with new skills. Although SI visibility is a new field, the underlying competencies already exist in companies. Content writers can move into these roles by learning to write citable copy that answers questions directly; technical specialists by learning SI bot behaviour and rendering issues; communications specialists by learning how the brand is represented in external sources; and analysts by learning to read new data sources.

The most common mistake in this transition is limiting training to tool usage. The team first needs to understand how SI systems gather information, which sources they trust and how they build answers. Without this foundational understanding, tools produce data but do not ensure it is interpreted correctly. External hiring should generally be considered for positions where experience is critical, such as the owner role and technical expertise. The profile sought for these roles is not an expert in a particular tool, but someone who can work with different teams and set priorities.

How should decision rights and prioritisation be shared?

Decision rights should sit with the core team’s owner, but be exercised together with the approval and schedule of the department implementing each change. The owner decides which questions are priorities for visibility and which improvements come first. But changing a page’s rendering structure falls into the software team’s work plan, and changing a product description into the product team’s. Priorities should therefore be reviewed monthly together with representatives of the relevant departments.

The healthiest approach to prioritisation is to start with the questions of highest business value. Questions about the products or services closest to sales, most often compared with competitors and with the highest conversion rates should come first. Which prompt sets will be used to track these questions should be decided jointly by the core team and sales and marketing leadership. This creates a direct link between the visibility being tracked and the company’s real commercial priorities.

When should the legal and compliance team get involved?

The legal and compliance team should be involved from the start and on a regular basis; in regulated sectors in particular, this involvement is essential. In sectors such as health, finance, insurance, law and food, every claim in content can be passed on verbatim in SI answers and create liability for the brand. In addition, comparison content about competitors, product information given to SI agents, ad copy in ChatGPT Ads and log analyses that contain personal data also require legal review. Because having the legal team approve every piece of content individually can slow the process down, a more efficient method is to prepare a guide defining acceptable and unacceptable statements and to review only risky content separately.

Which indicators should be used to evaluate the team’s success?

The team’s success should be evaluated with indicators that show visibility in SI answers, SI-driven traffic and conversions, and the health of the team’s workflow together. Looking only at visibility rate can hide the effect of the team’s work on business outcomes. Looking only at traffic does not account for situations where users make a decision in SI answers without clicking through to the site.

At the team level, process indicators should be included alongside outcome indicators. Indicators such as how quickly an identified technical issue is resolved, how much planned content is published on time and how many external source correction requests are completed show how effectively the team works with other departments. These process indicators are also a critical diagnostic tool for understanding where the problem lies if the expected improvement in visibility is delayed.

How is the balance between the in-house team, external specialists and tools struck?

The balance between the in-house team, external specialists and tools is struck by keeping strategic ownership and company knowledge in-house, running work that requires expertise and scale with external specialists and automating regular monitoring with tools. The in-house team knows the company’s products, customers and internal processes best. External specialists bring patterns and methods, drawn from experience across different sectors, that the in-house team would find hard to see on its own.

In its GEO consulting projects, Webtures works alongside in-house teams to build role distribution and workflows around the company’s existing structure; while providing expertise in strategy, technical audits and digital PR, it also develops the in-house team’s capability in this area step by step. On the monitoring side, using a GEO tool such as Brantial allows the data analyst to see visibility, competitor comparison and source data regularly on a single screen instead of querying prompts manually for weeks. When this balance is struck correctly, the in-house team can focus on strategic decisions and internal coordination, while repetitive work is handed over to tools and expert support.