Transition requires communication. There’s no way around it if you want to succeed. Whenever a transition affects other people, communication — and how it’s handled — is central to success.
Search marketers are facing an organizational transition, though they’re hardly unique. Here, too, communication sits at the center.
LLM visibility is the immediate search marketing problem. AI adoption is the broader organizational force making that problem harder. Both expose the same underlying weakness: teams built around separate channels now need to solve increasingly shared problems.
Fortunately or unfortunately, internal communication is now at our doorstep.
At the end of the day, you’re not reorganizing teams, creating new processes, or developing new ways of working.
You’re guiding people who want to meet the challenges in front of them and embrace change, but like every other human being on this planet or any other, struggle to adjust their internal worlds to it.
And that’s just hard.
The renewed value of internal comms for search marketers
Internal communication has to be the least sexy thing on the planet. There’s no direct metric. Unlike brand, no one even sees it. It’s internal — which, in marketing, is often code for “why bother?”
However, strong internal communication is probably the most important capability an organization can have right now.
As I’ve said before, “You can’t communicate externally what you can’t communicate internally.” Marketing, in any form, is external communication (whether to people, bots, or both).
To put it in terms even Barry Schwartz would appreciate, the importance of internal communication is “not new.”
What’s new is that LLM visibility is the immediate problem in search marketing. AI adoption is the broader organizational force making that problem harder. Both expose the same underlying weakness: teams built around separate channels now have to solve increasingly shared problems.
So what are we doing here? Why am I writing this? Why are you reading it?
For the sake of shooting myself in the foot, I’m going to divide the SEO world into three buckets:
- SEOs trying to hack the system (i.e., LLMs).
- SEOs who think only Google traffic matters (that’s cool, no judgment).
- SEOs who think both Google traffic and LLM visibility matter, and aren’t trying to hack the system.
I’m primarily speaking to the third group of search marketers. They’re the ones who realize the conversation about visibility has moved beyond your website to your broader digital footprint. (For the record, many SEOs have viewed rankings this way for years.)
If you think LLM visibility depends on the strength and consistency of your brand’s overall digital footprint, then the way teams are structured becomes a problem. Teams have traditionally been organized by channel, but now we’re realizing channels are more like blended scotch: they come from different barrels, yet end up as one thing.
I’m not here to tell you team silos are a problem or that now is the time to break them down. Jen Cornwell already made that case exceptionally well in this article.
What I am here to tell you is that you’re facing a problem that, at least for now, can’t be fully solved.
There’s no simple solution. No fix. No magic pill. No snake oil. No hack.
This silo problem isn’t going away, and for the most part, you can’t solve it outright. Organizations aren’t going to restructure overnight for an emerging technology that’s still evolving.
Formal org charts may take years to change. Cross-functional operating habits don’t have to.
It’ll be a painfully slow slog through whatever muck your mind can imagine (mine goes straight to Marmite).
In fact, short of finding a genie to instantly restructure your organization and mature the technology overnight, the only thing you can really do is communicate.
At its core, you’re trying to move from one way of operating to another. You need multiple people to make that shift together.
You have no choice but to communicate with one goal: find common ground, establish shared realities, and build empathy for needs (or KPIs) beyond your own. That’s how you slowly — and I mean really slowly, with no guarantee of success — change how your organization operates.
You have to make conscious, from an organizational perspective, what was, what is, and what needs to be.
That means building organizational awareness of how your teams used to think and operate, how they need to operate now, and how they may need to operate in the future.
As a matter of commonplace human behavior, significant changes to what teams do, how they work, or how they’re organized tend to trigger vulnerability, resistance, and much more.
Those dynamics have to be talked through at some level.
Whenever you make substantial changes to what teams do, how they work, or how they’re organized, you’re asking people to step into a new and emerging reality.
Helping people cross that threshold takes a tremendous amount of communication.
Good thing talk is cheap. Otherwise, this whole process would cost a fortune.
Don’t rush to operationalize the problem
Your first instinct will be to ask, What do we do about this? That’s the wrong question.
At this stage, an action plan is one of the worst things you can reach for. It’ll set you up to fall harder than a SaaS stock.
Rushing to a step-by-step, overly linear plan will, in my view, hold you back. It’s a safety mechanism — a way to regain a sense of control. But sometimes you have to accept that this level of control doesn’t exist.
Action plans are clean. Life is messy.
I’ll take a brief detour to quote psychologist Paul Marcus on leadership, from “The Psychoanalysis of Career Choice, Job Performance, and Satisfaction.”
“When change is perceived as programmatic, linear, sequential, and predictable, the change initiatives usually are not successful in most contexts. However, when change is conceived as a ‘complex responsive process,’ one that is ‘messier, less planned, and informal,’ and this awareness is woven into the change process, the success of the change initiative is far more likely.”
The best thing you can do right now is sit with the problem. It’s a human problem, and human problems are complicated. Yet you want a “5-step plan to improve internal communication”?
Step 1: Stop asking for a “5-step plan to improve internal communication.”
Just let the problem sit. Absorb its complexity.
It’s internal communication because it’s an internal process. If you’re going to lead — or help lead — you have to internalize the problem. You have to let it sit with you until the reality of what’s happening, and what will have to change, truly sinks in.
No one can answer these questions instantly. Awareness develops over time. You have to sit with the problem until it begins to take shape.
Once you grasp how significant the challenge really is, you can start dealing with it.
You’re reshaping how teams work, what they prioritize, what they consider, how they think, and how they make decisions. If you’re going to help shape that new reality, you need vision and perspective. The only way to develop them is to let the challenge sink in.
Your job is to help your teams do the same. Don’t rush people into changing reality. Help them recognize that reality itself has to change. Turn what feels like an overwhelming, formless idea into something they can begin to understand.
I understand the instinct to solve problems. Most of our work lives are built around it. But when you’re leading a major organizational change — especially one that’s deeply human — the best thing you can do is create space.
Give yourself space to absorb the nature, scope, and meaning of the change. Give your team that same space.
At the start of Q3, we held an offsite to discuss how we could better automate our workflows, collaborate across teams, and coordinate with teams across both SE Ranking and our sister company, Planable. Those are significant changes, and they’re challenging.
As we discussed ideas, a senior team leader started outlining an execution plan. In what was easily the best line of the offsite, SE Ranking CMO Bogdan Bobiak said, “Don’t worry about the plan right now. Let’s just absorb this.”
Exactly.
When you’re trying to break down the walls between teams and change how they work together, you have to give people time to process it. Everyone does that differently, which means this process isn’t programmable. It doesn’t follow a neat, linear plan.
Don’t expect a clear path forward
Once you’ve sat with the problem and are ready to move forward, expect the path ahead to be messy.
You’re slowly leading a group of people into unfamiliar, challenging territory. That’s difficult on every level, especially in the current environment.
I’ll give you a firsthand example. As we’ve pushed to become a native AI company, we’ve done more than shift the company’s strategic focus. We’re also asking our teams to build workflows, skills, automations, and new ways of working around AI.
Sometimes what we build is outstanding and gets adopted across the company. Other times it falls flat. Sometimes the work itself is excellent, but not enough people know it exists. The list goes on.
I’ll give you a firsthand example. I’ve been trying to build a Claude skill to review our research studies through the eyes of a journalist receiving a cold pitch. I want it to evaluate how compelling the study would be to someone with no prior relationship with us.
For the life of me, I can’t get it right. Every time I rework the skill, it still doesn’t do what I want. (I think of Claude skills as trying to catch the creator of the skill in a bottle.)
That’s frustrating. I see a need I could solve with automation, spend hours trying to build it, and still end up nowhere. (I’ll get there eventually.)
If we step back and look at what our company is asking of its people, it looks something like this:
- A major shift in focus.
- A major shift in expectations.
- A high potential for innovation and success.
- A high likelihood of frustration and failure.
- Less stability in people’s day-to-day work. (If I build enough great skills, who needs Mordy anymore? Story of my life.)
This is incredibly challenging territory. I’d bet the industry has never faced organizational challenges at this scale before.
Take the last item on that list: less stability in people’s work. Many people are being asked to create new ways of working while wrestling with the reality that those new ways often involve automation. That’s scary.
If you’re leading a team or an organization, you have to be sensitive and compassionate about that — including with yourself.
When your organization is navigating change that touches so many emotional fault lines, you can’t expect the process to be linear. Your communication has to respond to the people experiencing the change.
Real change is never linear.
The changes facing marketers are significant. That means your response has to be equally significant. A type-A, “map everything from start to finish” mentality will hold you back.
It’ll cause you to overlook your team’s real needs, crowd out empathetic communication — which is the most important kind of communication here — and ignore the people who don’t fit neatly into the plan (more on that later).
Instead, do what I suggested earlier: sit with the problem. Absorb it. Understand what it means emotionally. Then, through clear, honest communication that doesn’t gloss over the challenges, begin moving forward together — not just in how your organization operates, but in how it thinks.
This isn’t the end of the communication. One meeting isn’t the finish line — it’s the starting point. As you move forward, you have to keep your finger on the pulse. That means being ready to:
- Spend more time explaining a change you thought was straightforward.
- Spend more time talking with your team as they work through new challenges.
- Adjust your course when you realize your team needs something different from what you expected.
- Stay open to ideas that make you uncomfortable.
I can’t list every possibility. The point is that if your approach is too programmatic or rigid, you’ll miss what your people actually need.c about organizational change in the extreme environment, you are missing the point itself.
Again, we’re helping people face new challenges and adapt to change. That’s one of the hardest things people do.
Your team, like you, will feel vulnerable.
That’s because change means stepping into the unknown, and the unknown doesn’t come with a clear, linear path.
So flow with it. Build — and trust — your intuition about when to move, how far to move, and how fast to move. Let the process and the solutions emerge. Don’t force them.
Communication is a muscle
To flow with change, you have to treat communication like a muscle. It has to be built. It’s also one we naturally avoid using, and many organizations don’t encourage it, which only makes the problem worse.
It’s much easier to drop a message in Slack than schedule a 15-minute conversation. From a communication standpoint, Slack is like attending a webinar instead of an in-person conference. The information may be the same, but the connection isn’t.
Communication is connection. Invest the time to build that muscle. It doesn’t have to be a highly structured process with a defined end goal. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is get people together, talk, and see where the conversation leads.
We often assume communication exists to produce a specific outcome: We’re communicating so we can execute a project that generates more leads.
But what if the goal is simply to build the communication muscle? In that case, the conversation itself — when it’s meaningful and relevant — is the outcome.
If you want your teams to work more closely across functions, whether to improve LLM visibility, integrate AI workflows, or tackle anything else, you have to model the kind of communication you want to see.
The only way to do that is to build the muscle over time. The stronger your communication habits become, the more naturally your teams will rely on them.
It’s like going to the gym. If you’ve been lifting consistently, you’re going to flex those muscles the first chance you get.
Communication works the same way. When you build that muscle across your organization, people start using it because they know it’s there — and they know what it enables.
Create opportunities for people to talk. Create opportunities for vulnerability. Create opportunities for people to understand the needs of teams beyond their own.
And expect regression.
This is a dance between people developing new agency and their natural defenses pushing back against the uncertainty and vulnerability that change creates.
It’s like any relationship. When you’re trying to build healthier ways of communicating, people will naturally fall back into old habits until the new ones take hold.
Expect that regression. Embrace it. Then keep moving forward. Keep building the new way of communicating and the muscle behind it. Over time, it’ll become the default.
Honesty and the risk of reinforcing old thinking
If you want to build the communication muscle that enables cross-functional work, you have to create an environment where people can be honest.
That sounds simple, but as Billy Joel famously sang, “Honesty is such a lonely word.”
If building the communication muscle means accepting a process that zigs and zags, it also means being open to new ways of thinking and feeling as your team works through change.
Your job is to make honest conversation possible.
Unfortunately, that’s not a given.
Organizations have a long history of doing the opposite. Too often, they’re remarkably bad at creating space for open, honest dialogue.
Once an organization develops this dynamic, it’s difficult to undo. On the surface, organizations ask for honesty and feedback. Underneath, they often discourage both through powerful pressures to conform.
Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver, whose leadership style was rooted in honesty, put it well:
- “No promises to anybody. And no lies. Those two go together; if you lie to one player, it gets around instantly. You cease to exist.”
Unspoken expectations of conformity are like an ember in a dry forest. Eventually, they burn through everything.
As a leader, you have to take the first step into the unknown. If you can’t do that, you can’t create the conditions for genuine communication.
If you don’t, your teams will pick up on the unspoken pressure to align with your thinking. Some people will conform immediately, and the rest will follow. What you’ll end up with is reinforced groupthink that prevents the organization from addressing its real problems openly and effectively.
Communication is the only way to develop new ways of thinking and working that challenge the existing culture. The last thing you want is a groupthink environment. When people feel pressure to conform — and in my experience, that pressure almost always comes from leaders’ unspoken expectations — they stop trusting their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas and fall back on the group’s way of thinking.
If that happens, your effort to move the organization toward less siloed, more cross-functional work is dead before it begins.
You have to create an environment where people feel free to think, feel, and disagree openly. Your team needs to know they can challenge your ideas without risking your approval.
Like any healthy relationship, it requires genuine give-and-take grounded in empathy for the other person’s perspective and experience.
Without that level of honesty, any cross-functional initiative will eventually snap back to old patterns. You might get it off the ground, but five months later, you’ll be right back where you started.
Hindsight will be 20/20
Transitioning a team to a new way of thinking — and, by extension, a new way of working — is difficult. Doing it while adapting to a technology that’s still evolving is even harder.
Five years from now, organizations will likely structure teams around native AI workflows, LLM visibility as a cross-functional challenge, and whatever comes next.
Until then, the only way through is together. That means fostering communication that’s honest, vulnerable, empathetic, and strong.
There will be mistakes and setbacks. Leading people through change is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.
There’s no clean solution to the problems created by today’s organizational structures. There’s only the slow work of talking, collaborating, and gradually expanding how teams share ownership of the challenges in front of them.
Five years from now (or 10, or 12, not here for exact numbers), you’ll look back and realize what a pioneer you and your organization were.
https://searchengineland.com/llm-visibility-starts-with-better-internal-communication-484913