Is AI Killing SEO Jobs?

In this week’s episode of Voices of Search, original host Benjamin Shapiro – Founder and CEO of I Hear Everything – sat down in the hosting chair once again to dig into what’s really happening in the SEO job market with Previsible’s own Tyson Stockton. Drawing on Previsible’s SEO job study and his experience hiring roughly 80 SEOs, Tyson explains why the industry is changing rather than shrinking.

The conversation covered how job titles are shifting toward AEO and GEO, why hiring has slowed at some organizations, and what separates the candidates who get hired from the ones who get screened out.

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

• SEO jobs are being renamed and reshaped rather than eliminated, with one in five SEO listings now asking for AEO or GEO skills
• Executive attention on AI search has put SEO in the spotlight, while measurement gaps leave many companies unsure what to hire
• Higher-paying roles tend to sit in-house at enterprise companies, usually with a hybrid location requirement
• Nobody has years of AEO experience, so candidates win by translating existing work like crawl log analysis and experimentation
• Interviewers listen for how your tactics have shifted recently, not for a decade-old résumé
• Curiosity and the ability to speak in business results matter as much as technical skill

The Jobs Are Still Here, Under New Names

Over the last 12 months, 720 job postings opened with GEO or AEO in the title. Roles like GEO manager didn’t exist two years ago, and one in five SEO job listings now asks for those skills. Searches for legacy job titles make the field look smaller than it is because the same skills now appear under new names, even in PR roles.

The naming itself is still up in the air. Benjamin admitted he couldn’t tell AEO and GEO apart, and Tyson maintains that it really depends on who you ask. AEO seems to be settling in on the answer engine side, while GEO describes a specific type of AI. Tyson would rather stop debating the difference and agree on a broader umbrella such as AI discovery, with SEO, AEO and GEO as facets inside it.

Whatever the label, Tyson’s read lines up with Previsible’s 2025 SEO job study, which showed a shift in the types of jobs rather than a meaningful drop in their number. As the practice spreads across more of the organization, that shift has only gotten more prominent. In his view, SEO has always meant optimizing data retrieval systems, whether the system is Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT, so the underlying game has stayed familiar.

“Your career is changing,” Tyson said. “You have to lean into it.”

Executive Attention Brought Hiring Uncertainty With It

That same attention has complicated hiring. For years, SEO sat in a dark room off to the side. Now CMOs and CEOs are asking their teams what the company is doing about AI search, often prompted by what they see on LinkedIn. Tyson noted that executives tend to read the new titles as a signal of how current a candidate is, much like choosing between a modern car and an older one, even when the day-to-day work looks similar.

Measurement makes the hesitation even worse. Benjamin pointed to his conversation with Previsible co-founder Jordan Koene, where organic traffic is down around 30%, ChatGPT adds only a point or two, and revenue holds steady while direct traffic climbs. With no leading indicator to point to, companies struggle to define the role they are hiring for.

“Within the organizations, they don’t know how to report on it,” Tyson said. “They don’t know how to show success.”

Some teams drag their feet on hiring, and others turn to an outside agency. More are moving toward blended AEO and GEO roles that cover the same ground under one title.

Where the Higher-Paying Roles Are Landing

Tyson contrasted this moment with COVID, when search picked up momentum as everyone stayed home and volumes rose. This shift brings more uncertainty, and the location picture has changed along with it. The post-COVID years opened up high-salary roles that were fully remote, but Previsible’s studies now point to in-house positions at enterprise companies, usually with a hybrid location requirement, as the most likely home for six-figure mid- to upper-level roles. 

He framed the choice between that path and agency work as a matter of career stage:

• Earlier in a career: An agency delivers more reps across a variety of businesses, which matters while the pace of change is this high.
• Later in a career: In-house enterprise roles bring the perks, benefits, and security, along with a bureaucracy that takes real time to navigate.

Getting Past the Screen Without Faking AEO Experience

Most larger companies now run some form of AI candidate screening, which means applications get reviewed systematically and some are rejected automatically. Tyson recommends applying the same thinking you bring to your SEO work to your LinkedIn profile and résumé—read the qualifications in the posting, since AEO or GEO experience is likely in there, and make sure your materials match what the system is looking for.

The obvious problem is that the practice is barely two years old, so no one can claim a decade of AEO experience. Tyson sees that as a framing issue more than an experience gap. Google has been an AI company for over 10 years, and much of modern AEO grew out of long-standing SEO work. The better approach is to pull out the work that already lines up and describe it for today’s needs:

• Crawl log analysis: Studying bot activity now covers GPT, Claude and Perplexity alongside Google, including cases where OpenAI pings a page from a mobile device and shows up as direct mobile traffic instead of a ChatGPT referral
• Experimentation: Testing has always been fundamental to SEO and matters more now, especially in newer content formats
• AI systems experience: Earlier AI content and automation work counts, even if those tools were not as strong as today’s
• Genuine interest: In a cover letter or on LinkedIn, showing that you would research this space whether or not you got the job signals the pioneering mindset hiring managers want

“Those activities that you’ve been doing, you can dress up in a way that’s relevant for the needs of today’s arena,” Tyson said.

What Interviewers Listen For

Tyson has been involved in hiring most of Previsible’s SEOs over the past six years. His first interview question is the most generic one, asking what motivates a candidate and where they want to go. That is an opening to show you want to stay ahead of the industry, for example, because your current company is not pushing hard enough on AEO. Beyond that, he wants detail that is not over-polished, from someone who can riff and pivot into a new example when a follow-up comes.

Two lines of questioning sort candidates quickly:

• Changes to daily work: Hearing that the industry has not changed a candidate’s work at all is an obvious miss
• Specific tactics: Naming things like content chunking or query fan-outs signals real hands-on work and invites more questions rather than fewer

Tyson’s own answer shows what a good response sounds like. The fundamental practice of getting content in front of the right model and seeing how it’s interpreted has stayed the same, but the number of algorithms that matter has multiplied. Crawl logs used to matter for Google alone, and now he looks at GPT, Claude, and Perplexity too.

Recent activity carries the most weight. Tyson would rather hear about the last several months than a 10- or 15-year career, and the tactics worth discussing now reach well beyond a site’s own pages. A decade ago, his attention stayed inside the four walls of his own website. Today, backlinks, citations, and external placements are back in play because credibility on an outside site validates the content on your own.

“It’s less about which tactic you are going to bring up and more about how that has shifted and changed,” Tyson said.

Revenue Is the Language Executives Understand

Candidates also need to show what their work did for the business. The classic interview formula of result, action, and rationale gets harder when AEO data is thin and there are few impressions or clicks to point to. When pressed on the problem, Tyson noted that marketing has been here before. Billboards and TV ads were never perfectly attributable either, and impressions and other KPIs still exist.

The better move is to tie the work to the trajectory of the business. SEO teams spent years pushing average keyword rankings and visibility reports at executives, and those reports rarely changed outcomes. Tyson sees a healthy reset in returning to the metrics executives already care about.

“It’s a nice refresh to stick to the traditional business KPIs, speak the same language, and spend more time on the activity that actually will drive a change rather than just looking through the rearview mirror,” Tyson said.

That language has to travel, too. SEO is spreading across the organization, so strong candidates can talk to content, PR, marketing, engineering and data science teams in terms each of them understands.

Curiosity Carries More Weight Than a Proven Playbook

Benjamin summed up the conversation in plain English: For more than a decade, SEOs could lean on a consistent playbook that worked at one company and then the next. The industry is turning into something different from the one practitioners knew, and a hunger to learn is what replaces that playbook.

Tyson’s last bit of advice for anyone moving toward an AEO-focused role was also kept simple, as it should be: Show eagerness and curiosity about the shifting market. As a hiring manager, he wants someone driven to work through ambiguity without being pushed, because the work is about to change faster than it ever has.

“I have to feel that you are motivated and driven to navigate a space of ambiguity,” Tyson said.

The SEOs Who Keep Learning Will Keep Getting Hired

Across the job data, the hiring conversation and the interview advice, the picture stays consistent. The work is still optimizing data retrieval systems, the titles are catching up to the new places those systems live, and the companies hiring for it are still working out how to measure success.

Candidates who connect past work to today’s needs, speak in business results, and show real curiosity hold a clear advantage over those waiting for the old playbook to return. 

SEO jobs are still here, and the professionals who adapt to the new work will be the ones who get them.

Voices of Search is a daily SEO and content marketing podcast hosted by Jordan Koene and Tyson Stockton. The show delivers actionable strategies and data-driven insights to help marketers navigate the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization and content marketing. New episodes air weekly, covering everything from technical SEO to AI discovery, featuring industry leaders and practitioners sharing real-world frameworks and proven tactics.

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