Landwehr: under 5% of AI Search practitioners sit in communications
A Berlin practitioner argues brand perception in LLMs needs comms teams, not just marketing.
Fewer than 5% of the people Malte Landwehr has spoken to about AI Search in recent months work in communications departments. The majority sit in marketing. He posted the observation on LinkedIn on 10 September 2026, ahead of a talk at the German Kommunikationskongress.
His argument is that LLM perception of a brand runs deeper than what marketing owns. He gives two examples. All LLMs he tested describe Tesla cars as fast at the bottom of the funnel, but no LLM recommends Tesla when a user asks for fast cars at the top. For some brands, models still surface scandals from 2010. For others, recent scandals barely appear.
Landwehr's read is that GEO tactics have a ceiling, and that shifting how a brand is described across the funnel needs a consistent communication strategy behind the coverage models are trained on and retrieve from.
Who owns AI Search inside the company
We think the staffing pattern Landwehr describes is the more useful part of the post. Marketing teams are running most AI Search work today. The material that shapes how an LLM talks about a brand at the top of the funnel, including press coverage, analyst write-ups and Wikipedia, largely sits with communications.
Splitting the work between two departments without a single owner tends to produce gaps. One team measures citations on category queries. The other watches earned coverage. Neither sees the full picture of how a model describes the brand end to end.
Before reorganising anything, run Landwehr's own test on your brand. Ask the major models what they say about you at the top of the funnel, in the middle, and at the point of purchase. Note which claims trace to product pages, which to press coverage, and which to sources nobody at the company currently owns. That map tells you where the accountability gap actually is.
From there, the practical move is one named owner for AI Search perception who can commission work from both marketing and communications, rather than two teams each doing part of it.