WHERE ORGANISATIONS
GET STUCK
The barriers to progress on AEO and GEO are not primarily technical. Most of the organisations we work with have the technology. The blockers are structural, organisational, and strategic - and they tend to cluster around the same patterns.
Reaching for technology before fixing the foundations
The most common mistake is investing in AI-driven tools - content generation platforms, schema automation, optimisation dashboards - before addressing the data quality and consistency problems that sit underneath them. Sophisticated tools built on fragmented or inconsistent product data produce sophisticated-looking outputs that are still wrong. The engines evaluating your content will find the inconsistencies regardless of how they were generated.
The unglamorous foundational work - attribute completeness, unified taxonomy, governed data distribution - has to come first. Not because it is sufficient on its own, but because nothing else scales without it.
Fragmented ownership
In most organisations, content and product data is owned in fragments: ecommerce manages product page content, marketing owns brand messaging, legal holds regulatory claims and approved copy, data sits across multiple systems with no single governance owner. Each team is doing its job well by its own metrics. But the agent assembling a picture of your product from across all of these sources encounters a collection of disconnected pieces that don't add up to a coherent, consistent whole.
The engine has no concept that all of these fragments belong to the same brand. It only sees what it can find, and what it can verify. If your key product claim appears in your marketing copy but not in your structured data feed, it will not be surfaced with confidence.
The siloes we've always known are a problem are now directly costing brands their position on the AI shelf.
The accountability gap
The question of where accountability for AEO and GEO sits tends to fall between teams rather than within any of them. It is too technical for marketing alone, too commercial for IT alone, and too cross-functional for any single team to own without explicit programme governance.
The organisations making progress have resolved this by creating a clear programme structure - often a steering group with representation from ecommerce, content, data, technology, and in some cases legal and supply chain - with exec-level sponsorship and shared KPIs. Without that, even well-intentioned cross-functional work stalls when competing priorities emerge.
Why the best-prepared brands didn't plan for this
An important counterintuitive observation: the brands that look most ready for AEO and GEO today are only in that position because they had already invested in the right data and content infrastructure over time, not because they anticipated these engines. Good DAM governance, a mature PIM, a well-governed taxonomy, consistent structured data across channels: none of these were implemented specifically for AEO and GEO. They were implemented because they were good practice. And they are now compounding into a significant competitive advantage.
The implication is that the window for catching up is not infinite. The organisations establishing themselves as authoritative sources now - building the foundations, filling the attribute gaps, creating the governance structures - are creating an advantage that will become progressively harder to close.
