How was this hiring research assembled?

This is a purposive evidence sample of 14 role records across 13 employers, comprising nine in-house buyer roles and five agency or software-vendor roles. It is not a census, a vacancy-growth index or a representative salary survey.

The research searched employer careers sites, applicant-tracking systems, specialist job boards, industry press, podcasts, YouTube and official guidance. The role tables use employer-controlled pages or employer ATS listings, including indexed primary-page text where rendering was incomplete. Job boards and industry coverage were used principally to discover leads.

The selection prioritises US roles with substantive responsibility for AI search visibility. It excludes generic AI engineering jobs, incidental mentions of AI writing tools, unrelated uses of the abbreviations AEO and GEO, and non-US salary bands.

Read the evidence with four limitations:

• Publication is not hiring confirmation. A listing establishes an advertised requirement; it does not establish that a recruiter is still interviewing, that a hire has started or that spending has occurred.
• An expired role remains historical evidence, not a current vacancy. Experian’s advertisement explicitly says the vacancy has expired and is labelled accordingly below. (jobs.experian.com)
• Many pages do not disclose their original publication date. The research date must not be mistaken for a posting date.
• Employer requirements are not validated optimisation mechanisms. A job description can reveal what an organisation wants to do without proving that its proposed tactics work.

Confidence is strongest for explicitly stated responsibilities and compensation, weaker for live vacancy status, and insufficient for estimating market-wide hiring growth or incremental GEO expenditure.