VP, Search Engine Optimization

Paramount•New York, NY

3d•$204,000 - $254,000

About The Position

Paramount is seeking an experienced and highly motivated Vice President of SEO & AI Discovery to lead organic visibility strategy across our digital properties (CBS News and CBS Sports). This role owns how our content gets found, cited, and surfaced — across Google, emerging answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot), AI Overviews, voice assistants, and the new generation of autonomous AI agents browsing the web on behalf of users. The VP will define the strategy, build the team, and deliver measurable growth in audience, engagement, and revenue across the portfolio.

Requirements

10+ years of digital media experience in SEO, organic discovery, or audience development, with a proven track record of facilitating organic growth — preferably in the publishing industry.
Demonstrated experience adapting strategy to AI-driven search (AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, etc.) and guiding measurable outcomes in that environment.
Deep knowledge of SEO best practices, search engine algorithms, structured data and schema.org, and the technical mechanics of how generative engines retrieve and cite sources.
Robust working knowledge of AI/LLM behavior as it relates to retrieval, citation, and answer generation — and a clear point of view on what this means for publishers.
Hands-on fluency with SEO and AI-visibility tools (Google Search Console, crawlers, log analysis, keyword tools, AI citation trackers, schema validators).
Experience managing and scaling a team of SEO professionals, including coaching team members through skill expansion into GEO/AEO and agentic AI.
Experience with content management systems and modern web analytics platforms.
Exemplary verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to translate technical discovery concepts for editorial, product, and executive audiences.
Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with editorial, product, engineering, data, legal, and business teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with content licensing or partnership conversations involving AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, etc.).
Familiarity with bot management, edge/CDN configurations (e.g., Cloudflare, Akamai), and how they affect AI crawler access.
Experience with App Store / Play Store optimization and other non-web discovery surfaces.
Experience with multimodal optimization — getting video, images, and audio surfaced and cited correctly by multimodal AI.

Responsibilities

Define and execute a portfolio-wide discovery strategy spanning traditional SEO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and agentic AI readiness.
Set the vision for how Paramount's news, sports, and entertainment brands maintain authority and visibility as AI mediates more of the user-to-content relationship.
Manage and grow a team of SEO and discovery professionals, including developing new specialist roles as the discipline evolves.
Partner with senior leadership across Editorial, Product, Engineering, Data, Legal, and Business Affairs to align discovery strategy with business objectives.
Provide regular performance updates and forward-looking recommendations to executive stakeholders, including impact narratives that translate AI-era metrics into business outcomes.
Lead optimization of website content, on-page elements, internal linking, and technical SEO across all properties — these foundations remain a major input into AI visibility.
Develop best practices for keyword research, topical authority, and competitive analysis across news, sports, and entertainment verticals.
Provide real-time guidance to editorial teams competing for Top Stories, Discover, and time-sensitive organic search results.
Build the capability to track and grow Paramount's share of citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot.
Establish content patterns — direct answers, structured comparisons, original reporting, expert quotes, data and statistics — that increase the likelihood of being selected as a cited source by generative engines.
Lead structured data and schema strategy so our content is machine-parseable and citation-ready.
Monitor how AI engines describe our brands and properties; identify and correct factual drift or misrepresentation in AI-generated answers.
Define how Paramount properties present themselves to autonomous agents and agent-powered browsers (e.g., Claude in Chrome, ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet) - including llms.txt, structured summaries, and agent-friendly navigation.
Partner with Engineering and Legal on bot management policy: which AI crawlers we allow, block, or require licensing from, and how those decisions trade off discovery, brand visibility, and content monetization.
Anticipate the next wave of agentic discovery (commerce agents, research agents, personalized news agents) and position our content to be selected, summarized, and acted on precisely.
Build a discovery measurement framework that goes beyond rankings and sessions to include AI citation share, brand-mention frequency in AI answers, AI-referred traffic and engagement quality, zero-click visibility, and entity-level brand presence.
Evaluate, select, and operate the SEO and AI-visibility tool stack (e.g., Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster, log-file analysis, AI visibility platforms, citation trackers, schema validators).
Track AI search trends, algorithm and model updates, and competitive moves; translate those into actionable strategy shifts.
Partner with the data and analytics teams to integrate discovery data into broader audience and revenue reporting.