Jose Nunez recently shared something that caught my attention: "SEO vs. Brand: A New Division within Digital Teams" and a simple but sharp diagnosis of what is breaking inside modern marketing.

In his words, "In a generative search landscape, teamwork is divided... between accessibility and reputation." He also warned that if you are "flying blind" and blaming your SEO lead, you are probably missing the "Execution Feedback" that explains why an LLM chooses a citation.

That framing resonates because it names the tension a lot of teams feel but struggle to articulate. We keep treating Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) as if it is just "do the technical SEO better." Meanwhile, the models are quietly judging something else: whether your brand is a trustworthy entity in the wider world.

The new split: Accessibility vs. reputation

Jose is essentially proposing a responsibility matrix for the AI search era:

SEO owns accessibility: making your information retrievable, parseable, and stable for machines.
Brand owns authority: making your entity consistently validated by third parties across the web.

When SEO and Brand are not aligned, you can end up with pages that are easy to fetch but not worth citing.

This is not a philosophical distinction. It is operational. In a world of AI overviews, chat answers, and agentic browsing, your content must both (1) be found and understood and (2) be trusted enough to become a citation.

What the SEO team really owns: "Answer Contracts" (accessibility)

Jose Nunez described the SEO team as the builders of "Answer Contracts." I like that phrase because it implies an agreement between your site and an AI agent: "Here is the data, in a form you can reliably consume."

In practice, that means the SEO team is responsible for removing retrieval friction and ambiguity:

Technical clarity for machine readers

Structured data (for example JSON-LD) that clearly defines entities, relationships, and key attributes
Clean information architecture that reduces duplication, cannibalization, and contradictory pages
Sitemap and internal linking efficiency so crawlers and agents can traverse your content without dead ends

Performance and stability signals

Strong Core Web Vitals and predictable rendering so agents do not encounter slow loads, layout shifts, or blocked resources
Indexation hygiene so the right pages are eligible to be retrieved (and the wrong ones are not)

The goal: avoid "retrieval failure"

If an AI agent cannot reliably ingest your content, it will not matter how strong your brand is. This is the hard truth about accessibility: it is table stakes, but it is still mandatory.

And yet, many teams stop here. They assume that if the content is accessible and well structured, the model will reward it with citations. Jose argues that is exactly where the disconnect begins.

What the Brand team really owns: "External Consensus" (authority)

Jose Nunez put it bluntly: Brand teams manufacture "External Consensus." That is the set of signals that tell the web (and therefore models trained on the web) that your entity is real, consistent, and endorsed.

He points to "Entity Consistency across the web" as a driver of citations. In other words, models look for patterns:

Do reputable sources talk about this brand?
Do they describe it in consistent terms?
Is the brand demonstrated in formats people trust (video, expert interviews, research, case studies)?
Does the brand show up repeatedly in contexts where accuracy matters?

If a brand is not being discussed, demonstrated, and cited on high-authority surfaces, LLMs have no reason to cite it, even if technical SEO is perfect.

This is the part many CMOs feel but cannot measure with the old dashboard. Rankings and clicks do not fully explain why your company is absent from AI answers. The missing variable is reputational authority.

Examples of "high-authority surfaces"

Jose mentions places like YouTube and peer-reviewed journals. I would broaden it to include:

Industry podcasts with credible hosts and guests
Conference talks and published slides
Partnerships and integrations that earn mentions on other trusted sites
Practitioner communities and professional associations
High-quality newsletters that are frequently cited and forwarded

The tactical mix depends on your category, but the principle stays the same: if you want to be cited, you must be cite-worthy in the places the internet treats as credible.

The "Reputation Bottleneck" in AEO

One of Jose Nunez's most useful lines is that CMOs are panicking because they treat AEO as a technical task rather than an "Entity Management" task.

That is the reputation bottleneck:

SEO can fix information co-location so an agent can find the answer.
Brand must earn enough third-party validation so the answer is trusted.

Jose describes it as "Information Co-location vs. Trust." You can make the information easy to assemble via multi-step retrieval (he references a multi-step search like S=4). But when the agent reaches your page, it still has to decide whether to use it.

If the model suspects your page is self-serving, thin, inconsistent with external sources, or unsupported by independent validation, it will cite someone else.

The "Execution Feedback" loop: where models stop caring

Jose Nunez also references a "Feedback Loop" and says he uses SAGE-Analysis to identify where the AI "stops caring" about a brand.

You do not need his exact methodology to adopt the mindset. The key idea is to stop measuring only inputs (pages published, schema added, links built) and start measuring decisions:

When an AI agent retrieves your page, does it quote you?
If it does not, who does it cite instead?
What third-party sources appear repeatedly alongside the winning brand?
What topics trigger competitor citations even when your content ranks well?

This is what Jose calls the "Execution Feedback" you miss when you are flying blind. The model is giving you a constant stream of signals about what it considers grounded and trustworthy. Your job is to capture that signal and route it to the right team.

A 2026 strategy: build a cross-functional growth engine

Jose Nunez's recommendation is refreshingly unglamorous: stop asking for a magic tool and build a cross-functional engine.

Here is my expanded version of his 1-2-3 structure:

1) SEO: be readable

Build schema that reflects real entities (products, people, locations, studies, methods)
Create clean topic hubs that reduce conflicting interpretations
Ensure fast, accessible pages with predictable rendering

2) Brand: be remembered

Create proof in public: demos, technical walkthroughs, expert interviews
Secure mentions where credibility is borrowed: respected podcasts, reputable channels, trusted newsletters
Align messaging so the same entity description repeats across many surfaces

Jose suggests monitoring "Citation Share" and "Entity Repetition" as primary KPIs. That is the right direction.

Practical metrics to consider:

Citation share across target queries in major AI surfaces (and how it changes month to month)
Entity repetition in high-authority sources (not just volume, but quality and consistency)
Competitive citation gap analysis (where competitors get cited and you do not)
Retrieval-to-citation rate (how often being retrieved results in being used)

The goal is to eliminate the "confidence gap" by clearly separating where technical infrastructure ends and reputational authority begins.

A simple operating model you can implement

If you want to operationalize Jose Nunez's AEO responsibility matrix, try this weekly workflow:

Pick 10 high-intent prompts or queries in your category.
Capture the citations used by major AI experiences.
Classify each citation failure:
- Accessibility issue (not found, not parseable, wrong page)
- Authority issue (found but not trusted, competitor preferred)
Route fixes accordingly:
- SEO backlog for accessibility
- Brand and PR backlog for external consensus
Re-test and log changes to citation share.

Over time, you will stop arguing about who is "responsible" and start building the flywheel Jose is describing: readable content plus remembered authority plus measurable trust.

Closing thought

Jose Nunez is not saying SEO matters less. He is saying SEO is no longer the whole game. In generative search, you need technical accessibility to enter the arena, and you need external consensus to win citations.

If your team is still structured as if discoverability automatically leads to trust, Jose's post is a timely wake-up call.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Jose Nunez. View the original LinkedIn post →