Executive Director, Discoverability

We are seeking an Executive Director of Discoverability to build and lead an enterprise-wide capability focused on how a large, complex organization is found, understood, and accurately represented across traditional search engines, generative AI platforms, answer engines, social and community channels, review sites, and emerging discovery environments.

This is a highly strategic build role for a leader who understands that discovery is rapidly evolving beyond traditional search. Increasingly, audiences are forming their first impressions through AI-generated answers, third-party sources, community discussions, and aggregated information rather than navigating directly to an organization's website.

The Executive Director will define the strategy, operating model, standards, measurement framework, and capabilities required to improve visibility and accurate representation across this changing ecosystem. The role will combine expertise across SEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), AI visibility, content strategy, structured content and technical search foundations.

This leader will also establish a continuous experimentation and measurement program, translate emerging technology and audience behavior into practical recommendations, and orchestrate a cross-functional network of content, analytics, digital, technology, marketing, communications, and other specialists.

The ideal candidate operates at the intersection of strategy, technology, content, analytics, and organizational leadership and has the ability to create structure in a discipline where standards and best practices are still evolving.

Hybrid - Based in Phoenix, Arizona (open to relocation)

Compensation: $200,000 - $230,000k

• Define and lead a comprehensive discoverability strategy across traditional search, AI-generated search and answer experiences, emerging platforms, third-party sources, and community environments.
• Identify priority audiences, topics, content areas, and opportunities based on organizational goals and audience behavior.
• Establish standards and recommendations for accurate, consistent representation across search and AI platforms.
• Advise senior leadership on emerging trends, opportunities, risks, tradeoffs, and investment priorities.

• Serve as a subject-matter leader on the rapidly evolving practices shaping discoverability, including SEO, AEO, GEO, generative AI visibility, structured content, and emerging search and discovery behaviors.
• Evaluate how large language models, search engines, answer engines, and other AI systems discover, interpret, synthesize, and cite information.
• Translate changes in algorithms, platforms, technology, and audience behavior into actionable strategies.
• Identify emerging tools, methodologies, and practices that can create a competitive advantage.

• Design and manage a continuous experimentation and measurement program across search and emerging AI platforms.
• Establish meaningful metrics and measurement frameworks in areas where industry standards may still be developing.
• Turn insights into action by determining which findings are valid, prioritizing changes, and scaling successful practices.
• Develop reporting that gives leadership a clear view of discoverability performance, trends, risks, and opportunities.

• Use audience research, search behavior, AI-query trends, and performance data to identify high-value questions and information needs.
• Develop recommendations that improve the clarity, authority, usefulness, and discoverability of content.
• Partner with content teams to reduce unnecessary duplication and strengthen authoritative source content.
• Help ensure information is structured so it can be effectively understood by both human audiences and machine-driven discovery systems.

• Provide strategic direction related to structured data, information architecture, site structure, crawl and index behavior, entity relationships, taxonomy, and other technical foundations of discoverability.
• Partner closely with technology, engineering, digital, analytics, and content teams to translate technical findings into practical improvements.
• Evaluate how information is ingested, interpreted, connected, and surfaced across different discovery platforms.

• Develop a strategy for understanding and improving how the organization is represented across sources outside of its direct control.
• Monitor forums, review platforms, aggregators, social communities, authoritative publications, and other third-party environments that influence search and AI-generated responses.
• Identify inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent representation and develop approaches to improve source-level accuracy and authority.

• Build and lead a cross-functional operating model that creates…