Why Performance and Narrative Marketing Are Colliding in the Age of AI

For the last decade, digital marketing teams have split along a familiar fault line.

On one side, performance-driven roles: SEO, analytics, user experience design, conversion optimization. These teams optimize for discoverability, click-through rates, and measurable outcomes.

On the other, narrative disciplines: PR, content marketing, social media, product marketing. These teams focus on perception, positioning, and long-term relevance.

They’ve coexisted, sometimes collaborated, often operated in silos.

That arrangement no longer makes sense.

What’s Changed?

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming the default entry point for product discovery. From ChatGPT to Perplexity to voice assistants, people are increasingly bypassing search engines and landing pages in favor of asking questions directly to AI.

These models aren’t evaluating your content the way a user or a legacy search engine would.

They form an understanding of your brand based on:

• Your presence in authoritative, third-party sources
  
  

• The structure, clarity, and coverage of your owned content
  
  

• Consistency in how your brand is associated with specific topics
  
  

• Signals from user behavior across different interfaces and formats

In short: LLMs synthesize across structured and unstructured data, earned and owned channels, technical performance and narrative relevance. 

If you want your brand to have visibility in LLMs, you have to change the way your teams operate, at both the strategic and tactical level.

Practical Implications for Teams

First of all, don’t expect your SEO team to just “take care of it” alone. 

Here are four practical steps:

Stop rowing in opposite directions.

Here’s the kind of misfire we see all the time: the content and SEO teams are writing posts about “best men’s travel shoes,” while PR is pitching sustainability stories about your recycled packaging, and the social team is hyping your Pride Month collab. They’re all valuable, but they’re not signaling a cohesive topic authority to LLMs. 

What topics do you need to own in AI-generated answers? What questions should you be the go-to brand for—whether a user types them into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or your own search bar? 

Once you’ve mapped those high-priority topics, you can make your plan of attack in the next step.

Build a shared “topic authority” tracker

Prioritize the key topics your brand should be associated with and weigh-in dates when you’ll come together and assess your progress. Assign specific contributions, by team, towards your authority across each topic. 

For example, say you’re an insurance brand who wants increased visibility for your employer-sponsored health plans. While your PR team is pitching stories on how employers can offer portable benefits for independent contractors, your social media team can reinforce their efforts, by engaging on socials with journalists and outlets covering the gig economy. 

Appoint an LLM visibility lead

This isn’t about channel ownership—it’s about aligning all levers that influence AI discoverability. You need a project manager to enforce this new cross-functional playbook, at least until everyone adjusts. Ideally this person comes from within your SEO team, because they’re starting with the most knowledge on what LLMO will entail.

Create integrated reporting flows

PR teams should share earned media, expert quotes, and placement data. SEO teams should track where and how the brand appears in AI responses. UX teams should share search trends to refine topics and targeting.

Budget Allocation Should Also Change

Think about the last time you saw a CEO quoted in a trade publication. That quote isn’t just good PR, it’s now part of how machines learn who to trust in your category.

Meanwhile, your brand’s paid search campaign ends when the budget runs out.

In this new paradigm, the ROI math changes:

• $100K in digital ads might reach a slice of your audience this quarter.
  
  

• A quote in a respected industry article could influence every AI-powered query for years.

That’s not a metaphor. It’s happening today. Allocate budget accordingly.

Final Word

The shift to AI interfaces is the most significant transformation in digital discovery since the launch of Google. 

The most effective organizations will break down the silos of performance and narrative marketing now, treating them as mutually reinforcing task forces rather than separate disciplines.

The sooner we adapt, the better our chances of showing up where it matters most: in the answers themselves.