Anthropic’s latest job posting has the SEO industry abuzz. They may as well have titled it Search Gawd. The truth is, it’s everywhere.
To be transparent, I’ve written this job description a few times and interviewed for it. I’ve yet to see any of these roles get filled, but I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Sometimes the title is Head of SEO. Sometimes it’s Director of AI Search, VP of Search, Director of SEO, AEO and GEO, or — wait for it — Agentic Commerce GEO Consultant.
Lots of titles. The assignment is basically the same: own technical SEO, understand paid search, shape content, partner with engineering and product, build measurement, prepare for AI-mediated discovery, explain it to leadership, and turn it into growth.
The predictable reaction is that this is a lot of jobs rolled into one. An entire agency behind a single employee badge. Fair, but it misses the point.
Companies have been looking for this person for years. Generative search is just forcing the issue.
This is not an Anthropic problem
This morning’s search on the job boards:
- Victoria’s Secret: Director, AI & Organic Search (AEO, GEO, SEO), $152K–$216K.
- Publicis / Starcom: VP, SEO (Performance Content).
- Accenture: Agentic Commerce GEO Consultant.
- SailPoint: AEO/GEO Manager.
- AirOps: Senior SEO Manager spanning SGE, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini.
- Responsive: Senior Manager, Web Strategy — SEO, GEO, plus Next.js, React, Vercel, DNS.
- Danaher, Experian Health, Amazon News: some version of SEO + AEO + GEO.
- Anthropic: SEO Lead, $255K–$320K.
Different industries. Different price points. Same job, unwittingly all looking for the same person.
Even the titles are arguing with the job descriptions
Agency X is hiring a “Director, SEO/SEM” whose responsibilities contain no SEO — just paid search, SEM platforms, vendor management, and a team of seven.
Consulting firm Y is hiring a “Director, SEO/AIO,” where AIO appears to be an in-house acronym no one bothered to define.
An indy agency’s “VP/Director, SEO” lists paid search, paid social, and pharmaceutical marketing among the nice-to-haves.
A token research firm is hiring a “Director, SEO & AEO” whose responsibilities actually describe SEO and AEO work — rare enough to be worth mentioning.
If the company can’t agree on what the role is before posting it, the candidate has no chance of meeting expectations that were never written down.
The taxonomy says one thing. The JD says another. The recruiter screens for a third. The hiring manager interviews for a fourth. The ATS filters out anyone worth a shit.
Looking for the missing link
You need someone who can see across technical search, content, PR, product, engineering, analytics, performance media, and brand — and understand that those functions were never as independent as the org chart suggested.
Search has always exposed the seams. A technical problem can look like a content problem. A content problem can be a product problem. A visibility problem may be an authority problem, not an optimization problem. Paid search often surfaces a messaging problem before brand research does.
Generative discovery makes those dependencies impossible to ignore. When results become answers, SEO stops being a traffic function.
At the risk of going full Yoda to avoid AI-slop speak: found, information is, only if infrastructure allows it. Content makes it understood. Brand makes it trusted. Product turns discovery into use — or it doesn’t.
You’re not asking one person to execute every task. You’re asking one person to understand how the pieces connect. That person exists. Your chances of finding that person through a conventional scoring system are slim by design.
The résumé will not look the way you expect
The value of this candidate isn’t captured by years under an SEO title or a checklist of software. The value is judgment:
- Knowing which technical issue matters and which is noise.
- Recognizing when the content team can’t solve the content problem.
- Knowing when to spend, when to automate, when to wait, and when to tell leadership to stop doing that.
That judgment is hard to capture on a résumé. The candidate may have moved through agencies, publishing, product, consulting, and operating roles. Their career may look less focused than a specialist’s. That’s precisely why they can do the job.
Your ATS will screen them out. Your recruiter will flag them as “non-linear.” Your hiring panel will note they haven’t held the title before. Well, the title didn’t exist before. No one can agree on what to call it.
You can see how this search is already going sideways.
A less charitable possibility
Some of these processes may be less about filling a role than learning from the people willing to interview for it.
Senior candidates diagnose. They explain how they’d structure the function, where the organization is weak, what the first 90 days should look like, which tools they’d buy, and which work they’d kill. Invite enough of them in, and a company can collect competing organizational models and strategic priorities without hiring any of them.
Perhaps that isn’t the intent. But when a role stays open for months, gets repeatedly reposted, changes title and scope, and produces interviews that feel more like advisory sessions, candidates are entitled to ask what the company is actually buying: talent acquisition or knowledge harvesting?
The solution isn’t a shorter job description
The breadth is real, so cutting half the bullets doesn’t make the work disappear. Decide what you want. Is it:
- A specialist who will execute?
- A leader who will build a team?
- An executive who can connect search, content, product, brand, and performance?
- A consultant who can tell you which one you need?
Those are different jobs. Pretending they’re one role and waiting for a unicorn isn’t a strategy.
A closing note, since you asked
I would, however, be very good at the job. So would a handful of others who’d get screened out for the same reason.
The Anthropic job? Not getting it.
Five years under a title that didn’t exist five years ago — I don’t have them. My résumé reads like the job spec itself, in exactly the shape an ATS is built to reject. It’s an easy system to game. So easy that anyone worth their salt knows how.
The missing link is real. Generative search didn’t create it; it just made it harder to ignore. Before you hire someone to connect these systems, make sure your company can recognize them, hire them, and let them do the job.
The company that figures out how to recognize the candidate—not just write the job description—quietly wins the next decade while everyone else argues on LinkedIn about whether GEO is a word.
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