IBM has raised a question that many search and marketing teams are quietly asking: who actually owns GEO — generative engine optimization?

The company's piece, titled "Who owns GEO? The turf war no one's winning," points to an organizational problem rather than a technical one. As generative AI systems increasingly shape how users discover brands and information, multiple teams inside companies claim responsibility for optimizing that presence. The article's framing — a "turf war no one's winning" — signals that no clear answer has emerged.

The ownership question sits at the intersection of several established functions. Search engine optimization has traditionally belonged to SEO and content teams. Brand monitoring and reputation have typically fallen to communications and PR groups. Marketing analytics teams track visibility and share of voice. Each of these functions has a plausible claim on GEO, because generative engine visibility touches all of them.

The piece's central argument, as its title indicates, is that the fight itself is the problem. When no single team owns GEO, responsibility diffuses. Nobody wins the turf war in the current state of affairs — and, by implication, neither does the business, which risks having generative AI visibility managed in fragments or not managed at all.

This organizational ambiguity matters because generative engines now answer questions directly rather than returning lists of links. Visibility in those answers depends on how well a brand's information is structured, cited, and represented across sources that generative systems draw on. That work requires coordination across content, technical, and communications functions — precisely the coordination that an unresolved ownership dispute makes harder.

The article does not name a single winning team or prescribe a definitive org-chart placement for GEO. Its framing suggests the more useful question for enterprises is not which department should seize the function, but how to resolve the governance gap so the work gets done.

For search professionals, the piece reflects a broader industry reality: GEO has outgrown the informal ownership structures that carried it through its early phase. As generative AI answers absorb more of the query volume that once flowed to traditional results pages, the cost of leaving GEO unowned rises accordingly.

What to watch next: whether enterprises begin formalizing GEO roles and reporting lines, and whether vendors — IBM among them — start positioning products that resolve the ownership question by consolidating GEO tooling under one roof.