Principal Product Manager - Answer Engine Optimization; AEO

Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting-edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success.

To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win.

We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us.

We create and deliver tailored marketing strategies for Expedia Group’s brands, focusing on establishing strong connections and cohesive experiences for travelers and partners. We leverage our functional expertise and creative excellence to build trust and loyalty for our brands through innovative marketing approaches and technology.

Expedia Group is seeking a highly technical, builder‑mindset Principal Product Manager to own Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). As AI agents increasingly mediate how travelers discover and choose, AEO has rapidly become a primary channel for reaching them. AEO ensures EG’s brands, supply, and content are surfaced and cited by horizontal AI agents that retrieve and synthesize information on behalf of travelers.

This is a senior individual contributor role, designed for a builder. The Principal PM will own the channel‑level thesis, roadmap, technical execution, measurement, and performance outcomes end to end. The role carries a dotted line into a dedicated engineering pod and is empowered to move quickly. This role reports to the Head of Organic & Agentic Search.

• Own the AEO strategy, roadmap, and outcomes end to end, sequencing investment across the full retrieval stack.
• Map the full AEO journey: from how LLMs are trained and source data, to how live retrieval surfaces select and rank content, to how bots land on EG gateways and assets. Use the journey to identify where intervention compounds.
• Translate the evolving LLM and answer‑engine landscape into clear strategic prioritization decisions.

• Monitor the frontier AI ecosystem continuously: model releases, product updates, and roadmap signals from frontier labs and answer‑engine platforms.
• Track industry news, academic research, and emerging protocols relevant to retrieval, agent behavior, and answer‑engine mechanics.
• Build and maintain a structured point of view on where the answer‑engine market is heading, what changes mean for EG, and which shifts demand action versus observation.
• Develop relationships with frontier labs, answer‑engine platforms, and AI‑native peers to maintain primary‑source signal rather than relying on secondary coverage.
• Synthesize research, market signal, and EG’s own data into theses that inform channel strategy, product investment, and the broader organization’s view of agentic search.

• Drive optimization across the live retrieval path, from web and agent indices through to landing on EG surfaces.
• Identify and pull the high‑leverage levers across gateway configuration, filetype strategy, and content structure that govern bot access and comprehension.
• Lead technical enhancements on filetypes, sizes, indexation, bot definitions, permissions, and gateway routing to maximize accessibility for both model training and live retrieval.
• Own optimization of the AEO bot journey end to end.

• Define and operate the AEO measurement system, including bot crawl analytics, indexation tracking, AI visibility metrics, and downstream traffic and revenue signals.
• Establish leading and lagging indicators that ladder to channel North Star metrics, with rigorous, decision‑grade measurement.
• Own AEO performance in internal and external forums,…