AEO Specialist

We're looking for a hands-on specialist to own AI search visibility and performance analytics for our organic and AI-driven discovery programs. This is a hybrid role: half analytical (reporting, KPI tracking, performance insight) and half strategic (advising on insight-based optimizations). This role will report into the Director of SEO & AEO supporting our US Higher Education group.

This role suits someone who wants deep technical and strategic exposure to the emerging AI-search landscape - a strong track for someone early-to-mid career in SEO who wants to specialize in the AI-search side of the discipline.

• Partner with Digital Solutions to implement and maintain structured data, schema markup, and entity modeling to support visibility across search engines, AI Overviews, and answer engines
• Monitor citation presence, brand mentions and competitive share of voice across AI-generated answers using platforms such as Athena
• Conduct AI bot analysis – crawl behavior, retrieval patterns – to understand how LLMs access and use our content to recommend optimizations
• Partner with Content Strategists to structure pages (FAQ schema, answer-first formatting, topical clusters) for extractability by both traditional and generative search systems
• Stay current on evolving AI search behavior and flag emerging platforms or ranking factors worth testing

• Own day-to-day reporting across SEO, AEO, and AI-visibility performance (organic traffic, rankings, citation share, LLM mention frequency)
• Build and maintain dashboards using Adobe Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and Athena
• Translate raw performance data into clear insight for cross-functional stakeholders – not just "what happened" but "what to do about it"
• Track KPIs tying organic/AI visibility to business outcomes (leads, program page conversions, enrollment funnel entry where attributable)
• Partner with content agency to recommend structured tests as applicable
• Support quarterly and annual performance reviews with trend analysis, testing outcomes, and prioritized recommendations

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Data Analytics, Communications, or related field
• 3-5 years of experience in SEO, analytics, or digital marketing performance roles
• Working knowledge of structured data/schema markup (JSON-LD preferred) and willingness to get hands-on with implementation
• Proficiency with Adobe Analytics, GA4 and Google Search Console required; experience with Semrush or similar platforms strongly preferred
• Familiarity with AI-visibility tools a plus – willingness to learn required
• Comfortable working with data: building reports, spotting trends, communicating findings to non-technical stakeholders
• Higher education or regulated-industry marketing experience a plus, not required

• Genuine curiosity about how AI search and answer engines work – this space changes monthly, and the role requires staying ahead of it, not just keeping up
• Detail-oriented enough to implement schema correctly, but able to zoom out to "does this move the KPI"
• Clear written communicator – this role produces reporting that non-technical stakeholders will read
• Comfortable operating without a fully mature playbook; AI-search best practices are still being written industry-wide
• Collaborative – this role sits at the intersection of SEO, Content, Development/Authoring, and Analytics, and needs input/buy-in from all of them regularly

• Technical AEO (structured data, schema) implemented across priority pages yielding measureable improvement in AI visibility
• A standing reporting cadence (monthly/quarterly) that cross-functional stakeholders actually…