In my previous article, “Closing the Digital Performance Gap,” I made the case that web effectiveness is a business issue, not a marketing metric. The website is no longer just a reflection of your brand – it is your brand. If it’s not delivering measurable business results, that’s a leadership problem, not a team problem.
But there’s a deeper issue underneath that: Who actually owns web performance?
The truth is, many companies don’t have a good answer. Or they think they do until something breaks. The SEO team doesn’t own the infrastructure. The dev team isn’t briefed on platform changes. The content team isn’t looped in until after a redesign. Visibility drops, conversions dip, and someone asks, “Why isn’t our SEO team performing?”
Because they don’t own the full system, no one does.
If we want to close the digital performance gap, we must address this root problem: lack of accountability.
The Fallacy Of Distributed Ownership
The idea that “everyone owns the website” likely stems from early digital transformation initiatives, where cross-functional collaboration was encouraged to break down departmental silos. The intent was to foster shared responsibility across departments – but the unintended consequence was diffused accountability.
It sounds collaborative, but in practice, it often means no one is fully accountable for performance.
Here’s how it typically breaks down:
- IT owns infrastructure and hosting.
- Marketing owns content and campaigns.
- SEO owns visibility – but not implementation.
- UX owns experience – but not findability.
- Legal owns compliance – but limits usability.
- Product owns the content management system (CMS) – but doesn’t track SEO.
Each group is doing its job, often with excellence. But the result? Disconnected execution. Strategy gets lost in translation, and performance stalls.
Case in point: For a global alcohol brand, a site refresh had legal requirements mandating an age verification gate before users could access the site. That was the extent of their specification. IT built the gate exactly to spec: a page with the statement to enter your birthdate and three pull-down options for Month, Day, and Year, and a check of that date to the U.S. legal drinking age. UX and creative delayed launch for weeks while debating the optimal wording, positioning, and color scheme.
Once launched, the website traffic, both direct and organic search, dropped to zero. This was due to several key reasons:
- Analytics were not set up to track visits before and after the age gate.
- Search engines can’t input a birthdate, so they were blocked.
- The age requirement was set to the U.S. standard, rejecting younger, yet legal visitors from other countries.
Because everything was done in silos, no one had considered these critical details.
When we finally got all stakeholders in a room, agreed on the issues, and sorted through them, we redesigned the system:
- Search engines were recognized and bypassed the age requirement.
- The age requirement and date format are adapted to the user’s location.
- UX developed multiple variations and tested abandonment.
- Analytics captured pre- and post-gate performance.
- UX used the data to validate new landing page formats.
The result? A compliant, user-friendly, and search-accessible module that could be reused globally. Visibility, conversions, and compliance all increased exponentially. But we lost months and millions in potential traffic simply because no one owned the whole picture.
Without centralized accountability, the site was optimized in parts but underperforming as a whole.
The AI Era Raises The Stakes
This kind of siloed ownership might have been manageable in the old “10 blue links” era. But in an AI-first world – where Google and other platforms synthesize content into answers, summarize brands, and bypass traditional click paths – every decision across your digital operation impacts your visibility, trust, and conversion.
Search visibility today depends on structured data, crawlable infrastructure, content relevance, and citation-worthiness. If even one of these is out of alignment, you lose shelf space in the AI-driven SERP. And chances are, the team responsible for the weak link doesn’t even know they’re part of the problem.
Why Most SEO Advice Falls Short
I’ve seen well-meaning advice to “improve your SEO strategy” fall flat – because it assumes the SEO team has control over all the necessary elements. They don’t.
- You can’t fix crawl issues if you can’t talk to the dev team.
- You can’t win AI citations if your content team doesn’t structure or enrich their pages.
- You can’t build authority if your legal or PR teams strip bios and outbound references.
What’s needed isn’t better tactics. It’s organizational clarity.
The Case For Centralized Digital Ownership
To create sustained performance, companies need to designate real ownership over web effectiveness. That doesn’t mean centralizing every task – but it does mean centralizing accountability.
Here are three practical approaches:
1. Establish A Digital Center Of Excellence (CoE)
A CoE provides governance, guidance, and support across business units and regions. It ensures that:
- Standards are defined and enforced.
- Platforms are chosen and maintained with shared goals.
- Learnings are captured and distributed.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) are consistent and comparable.
2. Appoint A Digital Effectiveness Officer (DEO)
Think of this like a Commissioning Authority in construction – a role that ensures every component works together to meet the original performance spec. A DEO:
- Connects the dots between dev, SEO, UX, and content.
- Tracks impact beyond traffic (revenue, leads, brand trust).
- Advocates for platform investment and cross-team prioritization.
3. Build Shared KPIs Across Departments
Most teams optimize for what they’re measured on. If the SEO team is judged on rankings but not revenue, and the content team is judged on output but not visibility, you get misaligned efforts. Create chained KPIs that reflect end-to-end performance.
Characteristics Of A Performance-Driven Model
Companies that close the accountability gap tend to share these traits:
- Unified Taxonomy and Tagging – so content is findable and trackable.
- Structured Governance – clear roles and escalation paths across teams.
- Shared Dashboards – everyone sees the same numbers, not vanity metrics.
- Tech Stack Discipline – fewer, better tools with cross-functional usage.
- Scenario Planning – AI, zero-click SERPs, and platform volatility are modeled, not ignored.
Final Thought: Performance Requires Ownership
If you’re serious about web effectiveness, you need more than skilled people and good tools. You need a system where someone is truly accountable for how the site performs – across traffic, visibility, UX, conversion, and AI resilience.
This doesn’t mean a top-down mandate. It means orchestrated ownership with clear roles, measurable outcomes, and a strategic anchor.
It’s time to stop asking the SEO team to fix what they don’t control.
It’s time to build a framework where the web is everyone’s responsibility – and someone’s job.
Let’s make web performance a leadership priority, not a guessing game.
More Resources:
- Why Your SEO Isn’t Working, And It’s Not The Team’s Fault
- Industry Pioneer Reveals Why SEO Isn’t Working & What To Refocus On
- AI Search Changes Everything – Is Your Organization Built To Compete?
Featured Image: SFIO CRACHO/Shutterstock
