2026-07-01
SEO is evolving into GEO. Here's what 415 open roles tell us about search marketing in the AI era.
415 open SEO & GEO roles. 210 companies. The search marketing job market as AI rewrites how people find things — from live ATS data.
The search marketing industry is being rebuilt from scratch. Google's AI Overviews. ChatGPT with search. Perplexity. The blue-link era isn't dead, but it's no longer the whole game — and the companies hiring for search roles know it.
I track SEO, GEO, and AI visibility roles daily from public ATS feeds. Here's the market as of July 1, 2026.
What is GEO — and why does it matter now?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is 25 years old. You know what it is. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is what happens when the answer to a search query is no longer a list of links, but a paragraph generated by an AI. Getting cited in that paragraph is the new ranking.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the same idea applied to standalone AI assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. Companies that figure out how to make their content appear in AI-generated answers are the ones building durable organic reach in the new search landscape.
Search marketing roles increasingly demand fluency in all three: classic SEO, GEO for AI search results, and AEO for pure AI assistants. The title might still say "SEO Manager" but the job description now includes entity optimization, structured data, and LLM citation strategy.
The data: 415 open SEO & GEO roles across 210 companies
415 active roles. 210 companies. 36 new roles added in the last 7 days.
Smaller than pure engineering niches, but highly specialised — these are roles where the intersection of search expertise and AI literacy is genuinely rare.
Who's hiring most aggressively
| Company | Open SEO/GEO roles |
|---|---|
| INFUSE | 62 |
| WPP Media | 23 |
| Air Apps | 20 |
| Jellyfish | 7 |
| Brainlabs | 7 |
| Xometry | 7 |
| Brafton | 7 |
INFUSE at 62 roles is striking — they're a B2B content and demand gen agency that's scaling aggressively into AI-driven search marketing. WPP Media at 23 reflects the agency world's urgent need to retrain and hire for GEO capabilities. Brainlabs is a performance marketing agency that has publicly positioned itself around AI-native search.
The presence of Xometry (industrial marketplace) and Air Apps (mobile app monetisation) shows that GEO-aware search marketing is now a requirement at product companies, not just agencies.
What they pay
Of 415 roles, 98 (23.6%) have a published salary range. Among USD roles:
- Median: $130,000/year
- 25th percentile: $101,875
- 75th percentile: $165,000
Search marketing pays meaningfully less than pure engineering — this is the market reality. The premium over traditional marketing roles comes from the AI fluency component; the gap versus engineering roles reflects that most SEO/GEO work doesn't require a CS degree. Senior GEO strategists at top agencies and AI-first companies are starting to break into the $150k–$200k range, but the market hasn't repriced fully yet.
The 23.6% salary disclosure rate is low, which is typical for marketing roles where compensation negotiation is more common.
Freshness: 36 new roles in the last 7 days
A slower weekly growth rate than AI engineering niches, but steady. The SEO market is large, mature, and being disrupted — not exploding but fundamentally shifting.
What this tells us about the SEO/GEO market
1. Agencies dominate the hiring. INFUSE, WPP Media, Brainlabs, Jellyfish, Brafton — half the top 10 are agencies. In-house SEO teams at product companies tend to be small; agencies absorb the bulk of the specialist hiring volume.
2. The GEO/AEO skills premium is real but not yet fully priced. Knowing how to optimise for AI answer engines is genuinely scarce, and the few practitioners who can demonstrate results are getting above-market offers. But the market hasn't standardised on titles or levelling for this skill yet, which makes it hard to see in salary data.
3. 210 companies means this is a niche market, not a mass one. SEO/GEO specialists compete against fewer candidates for each role. That's a better position than being one of 50,000 applicants to a "Software Engineer" role.
4. The search engine optimisation skill is being de-valued; the content strategy / AI answer engine skill is being re-valued. If your expertise is purely in technical SEO for blue-link rankings, the market is slowly contracting. If you understand how LLMs cite sources and how to structure content for AI consumption, you're in the early innings of a growing specialisation.
The board
latchhire.com/board/seo_geo — updated daily. Every role links to the original posting.
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Data pulled 2026-07-01. Active roles only. Salary USD only. "New in 7d" = first seen in the past 7 days.