# Working With Dev, Legal and Brand Teams on GEO

> How to work with dev, legal and brand teams on GEO: what each team needs from you, how to make requests they can approve and how to avoid delays.

Source: https://mentionx.ai/learn/careers/working-dev-legal-brand-teams-geo  
Author: Dipuck Jones, founder of MentionX  
Updated: 30 October 2026  
Level: Practitioner

**GEO work depends on developers, legal and brand teams, and each needs something different from you. Developers need specific, testable requests with a clear reason. Legal needs to see claims, sources and risks before content goes live. Brand needs to know changes fit positioning and voice. Make requests in their language, agree turnaround times up front and share results afterwards, so the next request is easier.**

*Checked 3 Nov 2026 (CET). "Our view" marks opinion. Examples are fictional.*

> **Key takeaways**
>
> - Give developers specific, testable requests with a reason and a way to check the result.
> - Send legal drafts with claims highlighted and sources attached, early for sensitive topics.
> - Work with brand on one approved description and consistent facts across every source.
> - Agree turnaround times, run a monthly working group and share credit for results.

*Checked on 31 October 2026. "Our view" marks MentionX opinion. Ledgerline is a fictional company used for illustration.*

## Why does GEO need other teams?

Much of what affects AI answers sits outside marketing's direct control. Developers manage crawler rules, page rendering, structured data and site performance. Legal approves claims about pricing, competitors, results and regulated topics. Brand teams own positioning, naming and tone. If any of them blocks or delays work, GEO stalls.

The good news is that these teams usually want the same things you do: accurate information, a site that works well and a brand that's described correctly. *Our view:* most friction comes from requests that arrive late, vague or without context, not from disagreement about goals.

## What do developers need from you?

Developers need requests that are specific, testable and justified. "Make our site AI-friendly" isn't actionable. "Allow these named crawlers in robots.txt on these paths, because we want our product pages eligible to appear in these assistants' answers" is.

For each request, include:

1. **What to change**, with exact pages, files or templates.
2. **Why**, linked to a business goal and, where possible, an official source such as a search engine's crawler documentation.
3. **How to check it worked**, such as a URL inspection result, a server log entry or a rendered-page test.
4. **Priority and deadline**, honestly stated.

Group small requests into a single ticket where you can. Respect the team's planning process; ask how they prefer to receive work and when their next planning cycle starts.

## Which technical requests come up most often?

Common GEO requests to developers include reviewing robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, making sure key text is in the HTML rather than loaded only by scripts, adding or fixing structured data that matches visible content, improving page speed, fixing broken internal links, setting correct canonical tags and enabling analytics to identify visits from AI assistants.

Before asking, check whether the problem really exists. Use URL inspection tools, a rendered-page view or server logs to confirm. Developers respond better to evidence than to assumptions.

## What does legal need from you?

Legal teams need to understand what a piece of content claims and what supports it. GEO content often includes comparisons, pricing, performance claims and answers to direct questions, all of which can carry risk.

Send legal the draft with claims highlighted, the source for each claim and a note on anything that names a competitor. Explain why the content exists, such as "Buyers ask assistants how we compare with Competitor A, and current answers cite outdated information." Ask early, before the content is finished, if the topic is sensitive.

Agree simple rules with legal for recurring content types. For example: comparison pages must cite public sources for competitor information and be reviewed every six months; pricing must match the live pricing page. Rules like these reduce review time over the long run.

## What does brand need from you?

Brand teams care about consistency. They want the company described in the same way everywhere, using approved names and positioning. That aligns well with GEO, because assistants work better when your descriptions are consistent across sources.

Share your findings with brand: how assistants currently describe the company, where descriptions are wrong or inconsistent, and which sources seem to drive them. Ask for an approved short description, product names and key facts you can use across your site, listings and profiles. Involve brand in decisions about tone on pages written to answer direct questions, which are often plainer than campaign copy.

## How do you agree turnaround times?

Ask each team what's realistic, then write it down. For example, developers might commit to reviewing small technical requests within two weeks, legal to reviewing a standard page within five working days and brand to approving copy within three. Agree a faster route for urgent issues, such as an assistant spreading incorrect safety or pricing information.

Share the agreement with your manager and the other teams' leads. When deadlines slip, raise it early and calmly, with the business impact.

## How do you run a cross-team working group?

Set up a monthly half-hour meeting with a named contact from each team. Review a shared tracker of requests, agree priorities and clear blockers. Share one or two results from recent work, such as an answer that's now accurate because of a developer's fix. Keep it short and regular.

Between meetings, use the tracker rather than chasing people individually. Make request status visible to everyone, so nobody has to ask.

## How do you share credit and results?

After each piece of work, tell the teams involved what changed. A short note such as "After your crawler-rule fix, our product pages are now cited in several answers where they weren't before" shows that their work mattered. Name people in reports to leadership. Teams prioritise requests from colleagues who make them look good.

## From MentionX data: which teams own cited pages

**Method.** Read-only aggregate queries over MentionX scans from 22 August to 29 October 2026 (UTC): 2,217 engine runs (2,154 completed) across 18 anonymised projects and six engines.

MentionX's anonymised aggregates show the kinds of page engines cited across 9,750 citations:

| Cited URL type | Share of 9,750 citations |
| --- | --- |
| Blog or article | 19.6% |
| Homepage | 10.0% |
| Review page | 2.7% |
| Docs | 2.6% |
| Pricing | 1.9% |
| Wikipedia | 1.6% |

*Our view:* blog posts, homepages, review pages, docs and pricing pages each tend to have different owners. Mapping cited page types to the teams that own them is a quick way to see who your working group needs.

**Limits.** A convenience sample of mostly B2B software projects, run through engine APIs, which can behave differently from the consumer apps. Perplexity, Copilot and DeepSeek figures come from a single day (26 October 2026), so treat them as a snapshot, not a trend.

## Worked example: Ledgerline clears its backlog

*Ledgerline is a fictional accounts-payable tool. Figures are illustrative.*

The GEO owner at Ledgerline, a fictional accounts-payable tool, has seven requests stuck: crawler rules, a rendering issue, a comparison page awaiting legal and inconsistent product names. She meets each team lead for 20 minutes to ask how they like to receive work.

She rewrites the developer requests as two tickets with evidence and checks, sends legal the comparison draft with claims highlighted and public sources linked, and asks brand for one approved product description. The teams agree turnaround times, and a monthly working group starts. Within six weeks, six of the seven requests are done, and she thanks each team by name in the monthly report.

> **Pro move:** Attach the official documentation link to every technical request. It turns "marketing wants this" into "this is how the engine says it works."

## How do you handle disagreements?

Sometimes teams will push back. A developer may worry that allowing certain crawlers adds server load or exposes content. Legal may decide a comparison page is too risky. Brand may dislike plain, direct copy. Treat these concerns as useful information rather than obstacles.

Ask what would address the concern. A developer might accept crawler access for some sections but not others, or after checking server capacity. Legal might accept a comparison page that sticks to public, dated facts and avoids subjective claims. Brand might accept a plain answer at the top of a page if the rest keeps the brand voice. Find the version that meets both goals.

When you can't agree, escalate calmly with both views stated fairly and the business impact of each option. Let the right decision-maker choose, and accept the result.

## What should you do in an urgent situation?

Occasionally an assistant will spread information that's seriously wrong, such as an incorrect safety warning, a fake discount or a false claim about a lawsuit. Agree in advance what counts as urgent and who to contact. Typically you'll need brand and legal to approve a public correction, and developers to publish it quickly.

Document the issue with screenshots and dates, find the likely source, correct your own pages first and contact the owners of any third-party source. Report back to the working group with what happened and what you'd do differently. A clear, rehearsed process turns a crisis into a routine fix.

## How do you build these relationships over time?

Invest in the relationships before you need them. Share interesting findings with each team, such as how assistants describe your product or which of the developer team's pages are cited most often. Ask for their input on GEO priorities. Learn enough about their work to make requests that fit their constraints.

Over time, you want each team to see GEO as part of their own goals, not as marketing's extra demand. When a developer starts flagging rendering issues before you notice them, or legal suggests a better way to phrase a comparison, you've succeeded.

## How do you onboard a new contact on another team?

People move roles, so your contacts will change. When a new developer, lawyer or brand manager joins the working group, give them a short briefing: what GEO is, why it matters to the business, what you've done together so far and what's coming up. Keep a one-page summary ready for this purpose, with links to the tracker, the agreed turnaround times and the content rules legal has approved.

Ask the new contact how they prefer to work and whether anything in the current process frustrates them. A fresh view often reveals a step that can be removed. Introduce them to the results their team has already helped achieve, so they start with a sense of ownership rather than inheriting a list of demands.

## What should go in the shared tracker?

Keep the tracker simple. For each request, record the date raised, the team, a one-line description, the reason, the agreed deadline, the current status and the result once it's done. Add a link to the evidence and to the ticket in the other team's own system, so nobody has to maintain two records.

Review the tracker before each working-group meeting and close anything that's finished. A short, current tracker gets read; a long, stale one gets ignored.

## Common questions

**How do I get developers to prioritise GEO requests?** Make them specific, testable and tied to a business goal, with evidence the problem exists.

**What does legal need for GEO content?** Drafts with claims highlighted, a source for each claim and notes on competitor mentions.

**How does brand help GEO?** By providing one approved description and consistent facts used everywhere.

**How often should cross-team meetings happen?** Monthly, for about thirty minutes, with a shared tracker in between.

## Sources

- Google Search Central, [Introduction to robots.txt](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro)
- Google Search Central, [JavaScript SEO basics](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics)
- Google Search Central, [Introduction to structured data](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data)
- Google Search Central, [AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features)
- OpenAI, [Overview of OpenAI crawlers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots)
All accessed 3 Nov 2026.

## Frequently asked questions

### How do I get developers to prioritise GEO requests?

Make them specific, testable and tied to a business goal, with evidence the problem exists.

### What does legal need for GEO content?

Drafts with claims highlighted, a source for each claim and notes on competitor mentions.

### How does brand help GEO?

By providing one approved description and consistent facts used everywhere.

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Written and reviewed by Dipuck Jones for MentionX Learn. The HTML version of this page: https://mentionx.ai/learn/careers/working-dev-legal-brand-teams-geo