Will a generative engine optimization manager be your next big hire?

The generative AIGen AI gold rush is pushing companies to hire for a new role. Tech giants Adobe and Apple have both filled positions at their head offices in the US; Caterpillar, best known for providing construction and mining equipment, advertised for one at the end of last year; and financial services firm Capital One posted an opening in January.

The role in question is the generative engine optimization (GEO) manager. Or it might be referred to as a strategist or specialist – GEO is a new field, so there’s no definitive terminology yet. GEO can also be used interchangeably with answer engine optimization (AEO) and, sometimes, generative search optimization (GSO).

As you may have guessed, GEO is all about optimizing a website’s architecture, wording and data for the likes of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and their armies of web crawlers. The easier it is for a chatbot to extract information, the more likely the company will appear in answers.

The emerging role of the GEO manager

The need to hire a GEO manager has come about as companies are demanding better insight into their online visibility and how they appear across traditional search and large language models (LLMs). To help meet this demand, Adobe recently acquired marketing platform Semrush for $1.9bn to expand its product offering with AI search capabilities.

At the end of 2023, Gartner forecast organic search traffic will have halved by 2028 as consumers opt for AI search tools instead.

"Generative engines represent the single biggest shift in marketing I've seen in the last ten years,” says Niall Moran, director of PR at Marketbridge. “According to Forrester's 2026 B2B Buyer Insights report, Gen AI is now the leading source of information in every phase of the buying process.”

Sam Davis, senior director of solutions engineering for EMEA at Yext, says that this shift has rewritten “what it means for a brand to be findable”.

The focus for search engine optimization (SEO) managers has long been on ensuring that content is shaped by experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, or EEAT. This is a set of guidelines used by publishers to determine content’s quality and validity.

Rather than optimizing content for its ranking on a search engine, namely Google, the emerging role of the GEO manager is to oversee that “trusted, well-governed information is consistently understood and reused across multiple generative systems,” says Davis.

He adds that GEO needs to build on SEO’s “essential foundations”. But, regardless of whether a company is selling a product or professional service, success in AI search is determined less by keywords.

What to look for when hiring a GEO manager

AI search isn’t going to make SEO obsolete. The latter will still be key to content discovery as long as there are search engines. But the former is quickly gaining traction as companies seek a competitive edge.

For those looking to up their AI search game, there’s a completely different set of skills potential hires need.

First of all, says Moran, a GEO manager needs to know how website architectures affect crawlability, how AI search can turn content into citable assets, and how AI search can be used to build third-party authority.

On top of this, a GEO manager needs to “think like an orchestrator, not a specialist”. By this means, he means that they’re capable of conducting teams in different departments so that they are all in tune.

"The role requires someone who can translate technical insights into strategic recommendations across teams that have traditionally operated in silos,” Moran stresses.

“They can work with your web developers to ensure product information is properly structured and machine-readable. And, they can guide your content team on creating assets that balance human engagement with discoverability.

Davis points out that a GEO manager should also display stronger data stewardship skills than an SEO manager. They should obviously have a clear understanding of how LLMs interpret and present information as well as more experience of knowledge graph management.

Evolving SEO into GEO

Companies are becoming acutely aware of the importance of GEO. According to Conductor’s 2026 AEO/GEO CMO Investment Report, 97% of 250 top digital leaders saw a positive impact from GEO in 2025, while 94% plan to increase their investment in AI search this year, allocating 12% of their marketing budget on average.

Despite the rapid advances being made in chatbot capabilities, companies investing in AI search shouldn’t expect instant success. It’ll be up to the GEO manager to continue refining the architecture of the company’s website and the quality of its content to improve when and how the company is surfaced in a chatbot’s responses.

Davis concludes: “It’s the companies that build on their existing SEO maturity and evolve it into GEO that are going to be best positioned as AI-first discovery becomes the norm.”