- Ashley Liddell
- Oct 31, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 24, 2025
Silos within your digital team are limiting your success for brand discovery in AI search. Specialization made sense in the Google era: SEO owned rankings, social owned engagement. But LLMs pull from your social posts, YouTube tutorials, and website, which means cohesion is a crucial part of generative engine optimization.
This is a shift for many marketing teams. For decades, search marketing had one clear objective: get your client a blue link on a Google SERP. I vividly remember the world being a buzz when the phrase “just Google It” became an official neologism, and the verb “to google” made it into Merriam-Webster and Oxford in 2006, underlining both Google’s dominance and its cultural impact.
For the longest time, “search” has been a platform. Now, search is a behavior. Discovery happens on TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Discord threads, and inside LLMs like ChatGPT. Don’t just take my word for it: 77% of Americans say they use ChatGPT as a search engine, per an Adobe survey. And there were over 7.5 billion visits to AI search platforms in August.
The search landscape is changing the way we work
As co-founder of the agency, Deviation, we’re consistently talking to brands about the need to engineer discovery across multiple platforms and thinking about where users are actively spending their time.
This democratization of search creates opportunity, but also friction. For the first time, search relies on more than just traditional SEO expertise. We’re challenging search marketing teams to think like social media marketers, creating discovery content on platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. There's a need for community efforts on Reddit, Discord, or Quora. And, as the role of ‘brand’ in discovery continues to become more significant, there’s a need to align our search efforts with brand campaigns.
AI search is becoming a vital consideration within marketing strategy planning discussions, too. It’s the likes of YouTube, Reddit (although ChatGPT has made a recent u-turn here), and Facebook that are regularly cited by LLM platforms, according to a recent study by SEMrush. And 89% of people search across at least three platforms before making a purchase, per McKinsey.
If your brand narrative, social distribution, and search presence don’t align, you won’t just lose visibility, you’ll lose preference. (More on that next.)
Why silos don’t work anymore
Traditionally, brand, social, and search teams haven’t always worked well together. Brand guarded positioning, social chased anticipation, and search obsessed over rankings.
Or, at best, these teams worked separately, toward different goals. Whether it was working to grow follower accounts, social sentiment, or brand recognition, digital teams have often suffered from working towards different KPIs, different incentives, and completely different conversations with senior leaders that could lead to tension as three siloed teams executed three separate strategies.
But there’s a huge flaw within this structure. For one, audiences don’t care about those silos. And, as established above, neither do AI models or platform algorithms. This means that what matters are the signals your organization is creating, aligned or otherwise.
How to break down silos for AI search success
Before I get into the tactile tips, you’ll need to shift from a “presence” mindset to a “preference” mindset. Too many teams still treat developing an online presence as the end goal.
Rankings, impressions, reach...these are presence metrics and are often the go-to discussions between digital marketing teams and senior leadership. But let's be frank, these metrics tell you if you showed up, not if you mattered.
Today, you need to convert presence into preference. It's the moment your audience (or the AI/LLM serving your audience) chooses you over the competition. Preference can’t be built in isolation. When a consumer sees you on TikTok, reinforced in Google, and validated in an AI answer box, the shortcut is made: this brand is the right one. Together, brand, social, and search can create the signals that AI, algorithms, and—most importantly—audiences trust and resonate with.
01. Establish ownership
Breaking silos needs to start with ownership. Now, I don't mean channels. I mean the need for connection between teams. Someone has to link the dots between brand, social, and search. And I believe this role belongs to search marketers.
Search sits at the crossroads of culture, intent, and performance. It already translates audience behavior and intent into insight, bridging what people search on social with what they type into Google or prompt into AI. This perspective makes it the natural facilitator.
Owning doesn’t mean controlling; it means enabling. Search should set the rhythm, bringing teams together, surfacing insights that shape brand storytelling, and turning cultural signals into measurable impact.
02. Reframe your goals around preference
Next, align on a shared north star: becoming the preferred choice.
Simplified, that looks like this:
Brand translates values into stories audiences care about
Search makes those values discoverable
Social injects the story into culture where discovery happens first
When success is framed as preference, teams stop competing for their own KPIs and start aligning on shared impact. Preference is both emotional and measurable: it delivers resonance for brand, conversion for search, and cultural relevance for social.
No other goal unites these teams so directly, or compounds their impact so effectively.
Whether across brand campaigns, social-search destinations, a traditional SERP, or increasingly, upon the dominant LLM interfaces like ChatGPT, developing preference is where a brand’s digital teams win.
This step in action
A great example of this in action is BullyBillows. Faced with declining non-brand keyword searches like “dog harness” and “dog collar,” they could have doubled down on traditional SEO.
Instead, we (at Deviation) worked with them to investigate where those searches were migrating.
The answer? Social-first discovery. By feeding those insights into brand storytelling and creating new intent-rich PLP pages, every team had a role to play in the solution, and every team shared in the results.
BullyBillows is now cited and featured within LLM responses because of the development of authority and relevance via social-search activations.
03. Build a shared playbook
With alignment in place, you can start addressing the practicalities. How do siloed teams work as one?
Again, I believe search should be the facilitator here. Search touches every stage of the funnel. It’s data-driven but flexible, able to inform both creative and commercial decisions. It’s these considerations that make search the natural connector between disciplines.
In practice, this looks like:
Empowering teams with data. Bring TikTok, Reddit, and search insights into brand conversations to drive brand narratives, future campaigns, and storytelling.
Tying to KPIs. Show how wins translate into what each team values (brand lift, engagement, organic revenue, social-search appearances).
Experimenting together. Run small joint tests where each team owns part of the outcome while contributing to the north star.
Sharing victories (and lessons). Celebrate collective wins, but also analyze failures constructively so every campaign improves the relationship between your team, rather than applying blame to one unit.
04. Create a discoverability engine
As silos fall, you can move beyond isolated wins and build something more powerful: a discoverability engine.
Think of it as a flywheel connecting brand, social, and search, so that every touchpoint reinforces the others while accelerating brand discovery and preference generation.
It starts with having aligned signals across every brand touchpoint:
On-site
Across every valuable social platform
Reddit/Quora/Whatsapp/Discord
If you’re wondering how to maintain regular communication without micromanaging large digital teams, here’s how I’d approach it:
Set up a short monthly or bi-weekly alignment session where leads from brand, social, and search come together to sync on narrative, signals, and metrics.
Those leads then filter updates and requirements back to their teams. It’s a lightweight rhythm that keeps everyone moving in sync, turning visibility and cadence into the fuel for your discoverability engine.
From there, bring in other stakeholders as needed. For example, if brand is planning an activation around a specific product category, start with a one-off kickoff between all relevant stakeholders from social, search, and brand. Once that campaign is aligned, those participants can fold back into the regular alignment structure mentioned above.
It’s this initial session that will allow you to establish consistent narratives that can then be fine-tuned for each touchpoint. Instead of copy-paste messaging, you establish a single story, flexed across formats. Brand anchors it, search ensures it shows up, and social makes it relevant.
Keep in mind: shared objectives build long-term equity. One-off spikes are fine, but a discoverability engine compounds over time. Each activation strengthens the preference signal, fueling the next initiative until the brand becomes the natural choice.
The classic example? Coca-Cola. Despite Pepsi often winning blind taste tests, Coke remains the global preference because its signals are unmistakably aligned (the red can, the logo, the promise of happiness), its narrative flexes but always returns to joy and community. With every activation, from Share a Coke to Olympic sponsorships, the same story is constantly reinforced.
Over time, consistency has made Coca-Cola not just visible, but instinctively preferred. So much so, I'd bet half of the people reading this blog right now are now craving a coke.
05. Build trust across teams
Frameworks and initiatives alone won’t dismantle silos though. Trust will. And, if search is to be the facilitator as we touched on, SEOs must lead and own this step, ensuring that all units within a developing discoverability engine feel seen and heard.
That means…
Transparency: Share dashboards that highlight collective impact. Get all teams in the same discussions: search in brand brainstorms, brand in SEO reviews, social at the strategy table.
Ownership: Give social teams the mandate to own discoverability moments that drive search uplift (empowered by search data). Allow search to make changes to the ‘Product Listing Pages’ (Collection Pages) or ‘Product Description Pages’ (Product Pages) while respecting the brand's narrative, specific campaign needs, and their overall objectives etc.
Of course, the specifics will look different for your team. But ultimately, breaking silos isn’t just an operational task, it’s the strategic key to thriving in AI search and achieving AI search success.
Presence can be borrowed. Preference is earned. And preference only comes when brand, social, and search work together as one discoverability engine.
