Assistant Manager - AI & Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Role Overview

This position focuses on leading the AI search optimization (AEO) efforts, especially for a major travel platform. The role requires managing strategy, content optimization, technical readiness, automation, measurement, and cross-team collaboration to enhance AI-driven answer visibility and engagement.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and implement a comprehensive AEO strategy with quantified KPIs including AI answer appearances, brand mentions, and citation metrics.
• Create and update dashboards to track AI search visibility across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI overviews, and other answer engines.
• Analyze AEO ranking and citations within travel and booking platforms, benchmarking against domestic and international competitors.
• Establish and monitor a proprietary "Agentic Readiness Score" to assess content structure and accessibility for AI agents.
• Audit current digital content such as website pages, blogs, and documentation for AI retrieval optimization, including structured data and entity clarity.
• Design content plans targeting AI citations, including building comparison content, FAQs, comprehensive guides, and enriched narratives related to travel bookings.
• Collaborate with content creators to develop authoritative and entity-focused resources serving as AI training and reference material.
• Implement schema markup and semantic HTML enhancements to improve AI content comprehension.
• Guide content architecture to align with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) principles, promoting prominence of the platform’s content in AI queries.
• Partner with engineers to ensure technical AI readiness, including site architecture supporting AI crawler access, API endpoints, robots.txt configurations, and seamless information hierarchy.
• Conduct ongoing technical audits focusing on crawlability, structured data integrity, content freshness, and user experience metrics critical for AI and SEO performance.
• Optimize website performance metrics such as page loading speed, mobile usability, and Core Web Vitals.
• Resolve technical issues that hinder AI visibility including indexing problems and outdated content or schema data.
• Manage comprehensive AI readiness across all digital touchpoints to enable autonomous AI agent interactions for booking and information extraction.
• Work with product and engineering teams to prepare AI-agent-capable booking workflows, ensuring parsing and completion are machine-readable and structured properly.
• Define and maintain technical standards for agentic interfaces including machine-readable sitemaps and agent-friendly navigation.
• Evaluate, implement, and administer AEO tracking tools to measure AI answer visibility and brand presence effectively.
• Create analytics frameworks linking AI-driven visibility metrics to business outcomes such as traffic growth, booking initiation, and product engagement.
• Design and conduct controlled experiments to optimize content structures and tactics enhancing AI answer outcomes.
• Stay updated with evolving AI search ranking factors and translate them into strategic playbooks.
• Lead GA4 analytics integration related to AEO, with focus on custom events, funnel analyses, and attribution across product and booking flows.
• Develop GA4 reporting layers connecting AI visibility with downstream KPIs to demonstrate marketing channel ROI.
• Build AI-powered automated SEO/AEO dashboards consolidating data from multiple sources to provide real-time insights.
• Establish AI-driven workflow automation for content briefs, draft generation, meta tag optimization, and batch content updates involving human quality control.
• Create automated recommendation systems highlighting content gaps, underperforming pages, and SEO improvement priorities.
• Use AI tools and automation platforms to streamline SEO/AEO tasks across content, technical, and reporting domains, aiming to reduce manual effort by over 50% in the first year.
• Enable wider marketing teams with self-serve automation templates for independent SEO/AEO operations.
• Collaborate closely with SEO, performance marketing, brand, product marketing, engineering, and external partners to align and execute AEO strategies.
• Prepare and deliver presentations and insights on AEO outcomes for senior leadership teams.

Candidate Profile and Qualifications

• 5–7 years of SEO experience including at least 1–2 years directly focused on AI search optimization or large language model content strategy.
• Comprehensive understanding of LLM workings including GPT, Gemini, Claude, RAG architectures, knowledge graphs, and entity recognition.
• Proven expertise in architecting end-to-end AI automation workflows using tools like Zapier, Make.com, n8n, or Python scripting.
• Advanced hands-on experience with GA4 analytics, custom event design, funnel modeling, and integration with reporting tools such as Looker Studio or BigQuery.
• Skilled in developing unified dashboards integrating multiple data sources for SEO/AEO reporting.
• Strong technical SEO knowledge including site architecture, JavaScript SEO, crawl optimization, and mobile-first indexing.
• Practical experience applying AI-generated content workflows and SEO optimization tools (Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console) as well as emerging AI tools (Otterly.ai, Profound).
• Excellent communication skills with a record of influencing stakeholders and reporting to senior leadership.
• Experience working with e-commerce platforms and large-scale websites preferred.

Additional Desirable Skills and Background

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical discipline, facilitating better automation and API integration capabilities.
• Experience with content strategies for developer audiences including API documentation and technical tutorials.
• Basic knowledge of AI and machine learning concepts such as embeddings and vector search.
• Programming skills in Python or JavaScript for custom automation and API integration.
• Familiarity with LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI) for production-grade workflow development.
• Experience managing external SEO or content agencies and vendors.
• Leadership ability to mentor and guide a growing AEO team.
• Background in designing and running A/B and content experiments.
• Understanding of advanced AI agentic workflow frameworks and protocols like MCP.