Who Owns AEO? Hiring Lessons From 40 Job Listings

I analyzed 40 AEO-related hiring opportunities to understand what companies expect from their hires, how they divide responsibilities between employees and external specialists, and what the investment should deliver.

I suspect a lot of companies are going to spend money on AI search before figuring out who should be responsible for the results.

According to Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje's 2026 State of B2B GTM Report, 39% of surveyed B2B software and AI companies consider AI search, or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), a core GTM channel, up 11 percentage points from 2025. AI search also topped the list of channels where companies planned to increase investment in 2027.

So I analyzed 40 AEO-related hiring opportunities to understand what companies are asking people to do, who gets responsibility for the results, and how they approach outsourcing.

Seventeen of 20 in-house positions required program ownership, compared with seven of 20 external engagements. Some external specialists were also being hired to handle strategy, technical SEO, content, digital PR, and AI visibility measurement, sometimes within the same engagement.

A company can outsource much of its AEO work. Someone still has to be accountable for what the money achieves.

About the Research

I analyzed 40 publicly advertised AEO-related hiring opportunities collected through October 21, 2026: 20 in-house employee positions and 20 external freelance or fractional engagements. Sources included employer websites and applicant-tracking systems, employer-posted listings, third-party copies, and client-published briefs on Upwork.

I classified each opportunity by employment arrangement, program ownership, commercial accountability, and four areas of work: measurement, content and citations, technical implementation, and off-site presence. I counted responsibilities according to the published descriptions, separating required work from optional or supporting duties wherever the wording made that possible.

The sample was deliberately balanced between in-house and external opportunities to make the groups easier to compare. It does not represent the actual distribution of AEO hiring, and the newer external records are concentrated on Upwork, where budgets, client anonymity, and posting conventions may influence the advertised work. Some positions were historical or had uncertain vacancy status. The data tells us what employers requested, rather than who they eventually hired or how well those people performed.

I also examined the backgrounds of marketing professionals working in AI search and published case studies to understand the skills involved and the business results companies have reported.

Seventeen of 20 In-House Roles Required Program Ownership, Versus Seven External Briefs

The biggest difference in the sample concerned responsibility for the overall AEO program.

Requirement	In-house (n=20)	External (n=20)
Explicit program ownership	17	7
Commercial outcomes specified	16	6
All four AEO workstreams required	6	4

Brex's Director of Organic Growth & Discoverability posting described a role reporting to its Head of Growth Marketing. The responsibilities covered traditional search, AI discoverability, review platforms, communities, and acquisition performance. One person would coordinate those activities and explain their contribution to growth.

Spring Health's AEO & GEO Lead was responsible for improving AI-driven discovery across its B2B and consumer businesses. Modern Treasury's AI Search and Discovery Lead would own AEO strategy, develop content for technical buyers, measure performance, and work with engineering on technical search requirements. Both positions require someone who can influence decisions beyond their immediate team.

External briefs covered a wider range of arrangements. Some clients needed a contractor to complete defined content or technical assignments. Others wanted someone to develop a strategy and manage the work required to deliver it. One developer infrastructure SaaS client advertised a freelance engagement covering the SEO/GEO roadmap, research, citation gaps, external opportunities, implementation, and reporting. That is a sizable remit for someone who may never become an employee.

For startups deciding between hiring and outsourcing, I would separate accountability from execution first. The company can hire specialists to do much of the work, including strategy, as long as somebody internally remains responsible for how the investment contributes to the business.

What decisions will this person be allowed to make without asking anyone?

That is the question I would put at the center of the hiring conversation. A specialist responsible for strategy needs access to data, cooperation from engineering and content teams, and enough authority to influence priorities. Without those resources, the company has created a role with responsibility and very little control over the result.

One AEO Job Description Can Contain Four Different Professions

AEO job descriptions combine responsibilities that would traditionally sit across several marketing and technical functions.

Responsibility	In-house (n=20)	External (n=20)
Content and citations	19	17
Measurement	15	12
Technical implementation	12	15
Off-site presence	7	8

Content appeared most frequently, with 36 of the 40 opportunities requiring work on search-relevant material. Employers wanted product pages, comparisons, documentation, original research, and content built around questions buyers might ask AI systems. The assignments ranged from individual deliverables to ongoing content programs covering several products or customer segments.

Measurement appeared in 27 opportunities. Employers wanted professionals to track prompts, brand recommendations, citations, competitor visibility, and acquisition performance, then use that information to decide what the company should improve.

Configuring the dashboard is the easy part.

Technical implementation also appeared in 27 opportunities, with 15 external briefs requiring it compared with 12 internal positions. The work included crawlability, rendering, structured data, and site architecture. The split suggests that clients are willing to buy specialist technical expertise, which gives companies another option when an existing team lacks the skills or time to handle the work.

Off-site presence appeared in 15 opportunities. Clients asked for industry publication placements, guest contributions, digital PR, backlink research, independent reviews, citation-gap analysis, and broader efforts to improve their visibility outside their websites. Some expected the same person to handle these activities alongside content production, technical recommendations, and reporting.

That's a lot to put on one person.

Companies want their brands to appear across more of the sources that influence AI discovery, which explains the growing interest in off-site work. The effectiveness of individual tactics is a separate question. An employer requesting schema markup, citation building, or another AEO technique is specifying the work it wants done, not proving that the technique improves AI recommendations.

My bigger concern is the scope of these roles. Technical SEO, content strategy, analytics, and digital PR involve overlapping knowledge, and each requires time and sound judgment. A senior marketer can coordinate all four. Expecting them to personally execute everything at scale will leave important work unfinished.

I would rather hire a strong program owner supported by specialists than someone with a fashionable title and an impossible job description.

Thirty-Two of 40 Opportunities Combined SEO and AEO

Dedicated AEO positions accounted for only four opportunities in the sample. Most employers added AI search to established SEO or broader marketing responsibilities.

Role classification	In-house	External	Total
SEO + AEO	16	16	32
Dedicated AEO	1	3	4
Broader marketing role with AEO	3	1	4
Total	20	20	40

Traditional SEO provides much of the foundation for AI discovery, including technical accessibility, information architecture, content strategy, competitive research, and performance analysis. AI search adds work around generated recommendations, prompt sets, cited sources, and buying journeys that may never produce a direct website visit. Companies need to develop those capabilities, though building an entirely separate department is not necessarily the best way to do it.

Webflow's account of its AEO strategy describes an established SEO team expanding its work into AI-driven discovery. Its AEO/SEO Lead, Vivian Hoang, explained how the team approached content improvements, third-party visibility, automation, and measurement. Webflow brought in AirOps for content automation, and Graphite published a case study detailing its work with Webflow on AI search visibility and signups.

For a startup with capable SEO and content teams, I would favor internal ownership with specialist support where the skills or capacity are missing. The existing team understands the product, the customers, and the company's acquisition strategy, which gives it a useful foundation for deciding which recommendations deserve attention.

Other employers are building similarly broad roles. ElevenLabs' B2B SEO/AEO position covers organic growth, content, landing pages, and measurement. StackAI's Digital Marketing Manager role includes AEO and GEO alongside paid acquisition, demand generation, and website conversion.

Neither structure is one I would copy without examining the team responsible for delivery. A startup with one marketing generalist faces different problems from a company with dedicated SEO, content, and engineering resources. Hiring the same title will not give them the same capabilities.

Commercial Accountability Appeared in 16 Internal Roles and Six External Briefs

Sixteen of the 20 internal positions specified business outcomes, compared with six of the 20 external engagements. Those outcomes included qualified traffic, leads, demos, signups, conversions, pipeline, and revenue, giving some candidates a clearer idea of what success should look like.

Amenitiz's SEO & GEO Manager posting specifies responsibility for organic growth across five languages, with new monthly recurring revenue identified as the north-star metric. Watershed's AEO/GEO & Web Lead posting connects AI visibility and website optimization to marketing-qualified leads and pipeline.

I prefer that level of commercial clarity. AEO software can track recommendations, citations, brand mentions, and competitor presence, giving teams more information about how they appear in AI-generated answers. A company still needs to connect that information to acquisition and customer value before deciding how much to spend.

Fix the brief first. Write the business objective into the agreement before discussing deliverables, and make sure the outcome reflects what the specialist can influence. A contractor hired to resolve crawlability problems should be evaluated on the quality and measurable impact of that work, not held responsible for the entire sales pipeline. The client should understand why the problem deserves attention and what would justify funding the next phase.

Otherwise, it is entirely possible to receive an impressive visibility dashboard and still have no idea whether another month's budget is warranted.

AEO Expertise Is Developing Through SEO, Content, and Adjacent Marketing Functions

The professional backgrounds I examined show several routes into AI search work, including established SEO, content strategy, technical marketing, and advisory roles.

Kevin Indig moved from SEO and growth leadership at companies including Shopify, G2, and Atlassian into independent advisory work spanning organic growth and AI visibility. His website includes a testimonial from Ramp's former Head of Growth, Sri Batchu, describing how Indig helped develop the company's SEO strategy and supported permanent SEO recruitment.

Vivian Hoang at Webflow developed AI search expertise within an existing search function. Mike King at iPullRank approaches AI discovery through technical search, information retrieval, content, and digital PR. Content marketing and community experience can also be valuable, especially where discovery depends on original research, credible publications, and conversations outside a company's website.

I would be reluctant to reject a strong technical SEO professional or content strategist because their resume lacks several years of experience under an emerging title. Instead, ask them to explain a discovery problem they investigated, the evidence they gathered, the changes they recommended, and what happened afterward. Their answers should reveal how they think about buyer behavior, how they work with other teams, and whether they can make useful decisions from imperfect data.

Someone who can do those things is more valuable than someone whose main credential is familiarity with every new AI search platform.

Webflow and Ahrefs Reported Commercial Results, but Neither Proves the ROI of an AEO Hire

Webflow reported that AI's share of total new signups rose from 2% in October 2024 to 8% in June 2025. The share increased fourfold. Absolute AI-attributed signup volume may have changed by a different amount because the proportion also depends on how other acquisition channels perform.

For a marketing leader, a growing contribution to product signups is a more useful result than an increase in citations alone. I would want to know how much acquisition the program influenced, what the work cost, and whether the resulting customers were commercially valuable before approving a larger budget.

Ahrefs' analysis of AI search conversions provides another example. In an article originally published in June 2025, Patrick Stox found that AI referrals accounted for 0.5% of website visits but 12.1% of signups during the measured 30-day period. Visitors referred from AI search converted at approximately 23 times the rate of traditional organic search visitors, making conversion quality a more useful question than referral volume alone.

Neither company's reported figures isolate the financial return from hiring a particular AEO employee or external specialist. I would use the results to make a case for investigating AI search as an acquisition channel, with the investment tied to measurable work rather than promises of similar conversion rates.

Attribution makes that assessment harder. In How to Measure AI Search Visibility When Attribution Falls Short, published in October 2026, Louise Linehan explains how someone might discover a company through an AI-generated answer and later reach its website through direct or traditional search traffic. The original interaction may never appear in the company's referral reports.

An AEO measurement program should therefore cover brand recommendations, cited sources, AI referral traffic, qualified conversions, and pipeline or revenue where the data supports attribution. Record the interventions, their costs, and the relevant comparison periods too, because a rising visibility score means something different when the company has doubled its spending to produce it.

An Average AEO Salary Would Describe No Actual Role

Twenty-four of the 40 opportunities disclosed compensation: eight permanent positions and 16 external engagements. The figures span multiple currencies, countries, seniority levels, and employment arrangements, from leaders responsible for entire programs to freelancers handling individual assignments.

Comparing pay requires separating permanent employees from fractional consultants and project-based freelancers, then accounting for location, experience, working hours, and scope. A consultant hired to build an operating model should not be priced against someone completing a technical audit. The responsibilities, expected results, and amount of internal support required will determine what either engagement is worth.

The cheap option is rarely the cheap option if the company ends up paying someone else to finish the work.

How I Would Staff AEO From Zero to a Repeatable Program

For an early-stage startup, I would begin with one accountable internal owner who understands the product, customers, and acquisition strategy. Their first assignment would be to identify the questions buyers ask AI platforms, establish visibility baselines, investigate competing recommendations, and choose the content or technical problems worth addressing.

The next step is a limited set of experiments that gives the team enough evidence to decide where it needs help. An external specialist could build the measurement framework, solve technical problems, develop content, or support off-site visibility. The company should retain control over priorities, implementation decisions, and what happens after the engagement ends.

As AEO starts contributing to acquisition, the staffing needs may change. A company could expand an SEO leader's responsibilities, recruit a dedicated AEO owner, or invest in additional content and technical capacity. I would make those decisions based on the work that needs consistent attention and the outcomes that justify keeping people on it.

Hiring a senior generalist to negotiate every engineering request, write every article, secure external coverage, and explain the entire budget is an expensive way to discover the limits of one person's working week. Give the person a manageable remit and the support needed to deliver it.

Three arrangements concern me most: an external specialist with no internal counterpart, a permanent employee with accountability but no authority, and a team reporting citation growth without knowing whether it influences customer acquisition. Each leaves the company spending money without a clear line of responsibility.

Three Questions Before Approving an AEO Budget

For a founder, CMO, or VP of Marketing considering an AEO investment, I would want answers to three questions:

1. Which business outcome are we trying to improve, and what evidence will convince us the investment is working?

2. Which capabilities can our team provide, and where do we need specialist expertise or additional capacity?

3. What will we stop, reduce, or reorganize to make room for the work we are commissioning?