Why siloed search teams cost you money (and what to do about it)

Here's a statistic that should bother you.

Fragmented marketing teams experience productivity losses of up to 40% due to context switching and administrative overhead alone (Surampudi, 2025).

Forty percent. That's nearly half of your team's capacity disappearing into the gap between systems.

And it's not just productivity. Companies with siloed marketing and sales processes see customer acquisition costs increase by up to 36% (Brixon Group, 2025).

The problem isn't that teams are bad at their jobs. It's that they're solving separate puzzles when they should be looking at the same picture.

The silo problem in search

Search marketing has a structural problem.

In most companies, SEO sits with content or product. PPC sits with performance marketing or demand gen. They report to different people, use different tools, track different metrics, and rarely share data.

76% of mid-sized B2B companies have their CMO and sales director reporting to different superiors (Brixon Group, 2025). The same fragmentation happens within marketing itself — search teams split by channel, each optimising their own corner.

But here's the thing: your customers don't see channels. They see one search results page. Organic listings, paid ads, AI summaries, shopping results — all mixed together. The distinction between SEO and PPC exists in your org chart, not in their experience.

"AI has permanently altered the search landscape, making SEO-PPC convergence essential. Marketers who cling to silos risk losing visibility and market share" (Search Engine Land, 2024).

What silos actually cost you

The costs show up in ways that are easy to miss if you're only looking at channel-specific dashboards.

Wasted budget. When PPC doesn't know what's ranking organically, you pay for clicks you could get for free. When SEO doesn't know which terms convert in paid, they chase traffic that doesn't matter. SEO and PPC teams targeting the same keywords without coordination is one of the most common issues (Seer Interactive, 2024).

Slower decisions. Every handoff between teams adds friction. Every "let me check with the other team" adds delay. Companies with poor alignment have sales cycles that are 30% longer on average (Brixon Group, 2025).

Missed insights. 73% of marketing-generated leads are never contacted by sales (Brixon Group, 2025). If handoffs fail that badly between marketing and sales, imagine what's lost between SEO and PPC — teams that often don't even share the same reporting structure.

Conflicting ownership. 83% of companies with significant revenue gaps show patterns of mutual blame between teams (Brixon Group, 2025). The silo doesn't just cost money — it breeds defensiveness.

The data confidence problem

Siloed data makes everyone less confident.

Only 28% of CMOs have substantial confidence in their marketing data. Just 8% believe they can quickly transform data into useful insights. And two-thirds named siloed data as their biggest obstacle (Funnel, 2024).

When your SEO metrics live in Search Console, your PPC metrics live in Google Ads, your analytics live in GA4, and your CRM lives somewhere else entirely, nobody has the full picture. Everyone's working with a partial view, making decisions based on incomplete information.

68% of brands still struggle with siloed data, and 63% purchase marketing technology across different teams without effective collaboration (Acxiom, 2024). The tools proliferate, but integration doesn't follow.

Why AI changes the equation

The AI search era makes the silo problem more acute.

44% of AI-powered search users now say it's their primary source of information — ahead of traditional search at 31% (McKinsey, 2025). About half of Google searches already include AI summaries, and that's expected to rise to 75% by 2028.

In this environment, organic and paid visibility increasingly overlap. AI-generated answers pull from both. A brand that appears consistently across AI summaries, organic results, and paid ads looks authoritative. A brand that appears inconsistently looks fragmented.

But AI also creates an opportunity.

The same technology reshaping search results can help unify how teams work with search data. Instead of switching between five dashboards and trying to reconcile conflicting metrics, a conversational AI workflow can draw from all your data sources at once — answering questions that span channels.

93% of leaders agree improved data collaboration is critical to driving revenue (Forrester, 2024). The barrier isn't awareness — it's execution.

What unified search looks like

When SEO and PPC work from shared data, several things change.

Shared visibility. Both teams see where you're showing up across organic and paid results. If you're ranking organically for a term, you can decide whether to also bid on it. If paid converts well but organic doesn't rank, you know where to focus content efforts.

Shared language. PPC search term data reveals how customers actually describe their problems — in their own words, in real time. That language should inform SEO content, landing pages, and messaging across the business.

Shared learning. When a paid ad test reveals what messaging converts, that insight can flow to organic content. When SEO content attracts a new audience segment, PPC can test targeting them.

The relationship between SEO and PPC teams can be described in three modes: parasitism (one benefits at the other's expense), commensalism (one benefits while the other is unaffected), and mutualism (both thrive through shared optimisation). Only mutualism creates sustainable performance gains (Search Engine Land, 2025).

Where to start

You don't need to reorganise your team or replace your tools. Start smaller.

Share the search term report. Export your PPC search terms and share them with whoever handles content. Not a summary — the actual queries. Let them see how customers describe their problems in their own words.

Track combined visibility. For your most important keywords, note where you appear in organic results, paid results, and AI summaries. Look at them together, not separately.

Ask unified questions. When reviewing performance, don't ask "how's PPC doing?" and "how's SEO doing?" separately. Ask "how visible are we for searches that matter?" The question forces a combined view.

Companies conducting joint customer journey analysis at least semi-annually can increase their lead-to-customer conversion rate by 27% (Brixon Group, 2025). The insight matters less than the joint part — the act of looking at the same data together.

In short

Silos feel efficient. Specialists focusing on their specialty. Clear ownership. Clean reporting lines.

But search doesn't work that way. Your customers see one results page. Your competitors are optimising for unified visibility. And every hour your teams spend reconciling conflicting data is an hour they're not spending on work that matters.

The gap between how you're organised and how search actually works is where money disappears.

Closing it doesn't require a reorg. It requires a shared view — of the data, the customer, and what you're actually trying to achieve.