AEO Specialist

Strategic Education•Washington DC, DC

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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
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
Must be able to meet critical thinking and problem solving aspects aligned to job duties, as well as effectively communicating with co-workers.
Able to access information using a computer.

Nice To Haves

Higher education or regulated-industry marketing experience a plus, not required

Responsibilities

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