GEO Is Fake, Says Everyone. So Why Are So Many Companies Hiring GEO Managers?

Two conversations about Generative Engine Optimization are running in parallel right now, and they cannot both be right.

The short answer up front: skeptics are correct that most GEO tactics overlap with SEO, but wrong that the discipline is fake. Companies including Stripe, SailPoint, AWS, Amgen, and Citizens Bank have created dedicated GEO and AEO roles with salaries reaching $171,000, because being cited in AI answers and ranking in Google have become different problems with different owners. Conductor surveyed more than 250 enterprise CMOs and found 94% plan to increase AEO investment in 2026 and 97% said it already drove measurable impact in 2025. This is not a discourse. It is a hiring cycle.

Here is the longer version.

In the first conversation, on LinkedIn and in SEO Slack groups, GEO is a grift. It is rebranded SEO. It is a land grab by people who showed up to search marketing eighteen months ago. Lily Ray, VP of SEO at Amsive, put it plainly in an EMARKETER interview: there is a ton of hype, and many of the loudest voices entered the space recently, making lofty promises without understanding how search actually works.

In the second conversation, on corporate job boards, GEO is a line item with a salary band.

Who is actually hiring, and for what

Look at the postings themselves, not the commentary about them.

SailPoint, the identity security company, posted a remote Answer Engine Optimization (AEO/GEO) Manager at $101,400 to $170,864. The job description is worth reading closely because it says the quiet part out loud: a meaningful and growing share of SailPoint's prospects no longer start with Google. They start with prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews, and they take those answers seriously. The role owns how the brand and its category narrative appear when buyers ask AI engines about identity and IGA platforms. It runs prompt, platform, and competitor analysis, operates Profound for AEO monitoring alongside Conductor for SEO, and reports to the VP of Digital Marketing. Traditional SEO does not disappear, but the description states plainly that the center of gravity of the role is AEO.

That is a Fortune-adjacent security vendor drawing an explicit line between its old search function and its new one. In my own vertical, that is the tell.

The rest of the board fills in the pattern. Stripe is hiring an AEO and GEO Marketing Manager to own new user acquisition from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. AWS is hiring an AEO Manager to control how AI engines discover, interpret, and cite thousands of pages of documentation, with RSUs on top. Amgen posted a senior manager for GEO and AI answer visibility on a cardiovascular drug brand. Publicis is hiring a VP to lead performance content across SEO, GEO, and AEO. Citizens Bank listed an Answer Engine Optimization Manager at up to $171,000. Experian posted an AEO and SEO Manager at $100K to $174K.

Kaleigh Moore's analysis of the AEO job market found these postings are not a Silicon Valley curiosity. She spotted them across finance (Citizens Bank, Stripe, Vanguard, Lendable), healthcare and pharma (Pfizer, Amgen, AMN Healthcare), retail (Victoria's Secret, J.Jill, Quince), and enterprise tech (Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, HubSpot, SailPoint). Director-level roles at eBay, Victoria's Secret, and Palo Alto Networks sit at the top of the band, with senior enterprise content roles running $150K to $210K per SEOJobs.com data.

Companies do not create this many six-figure titles, across this many industries, this fast, for a grift.

The skeptics are arguing with a strawman

I want to give the skeptics their due first, because they are right about something important.

Most GEO advice is repackaged SEO advice. Clean structure. Real expertise. Technical health. Authoritative content. If a vendor tells you they have a secret trick that forces ChatGPT to recommend you, run. I have spent the past year building GrackerAI, a GEO platform for B2B SaaS (disclosure: my company), and I will say what many vendors will not: there is no magic switch. Anyone selling one is selling noise.

But the skeptics then make a leap that does not hold: since the tactics overlap, the discipline must be fake. That is like saying email marketing is fake because it borrows copywriting principles from direct mail.

A discipline is not defined by its tactics. It is defined by what it measures and optimizes for. SEO optimizes for a ranked list of links. GEO optimizes for inclusion in a synthesized answer. Those are different outcomes, measured differently, with different failure modes.

Here is the pattern I see constantly in the security vertical: a vendor ranks #3 on Google for "best SIEM for mid-market" and is completely absent when a CISO asks ChatGPT the same question. The ranking did not transfer. Something else is going on, and traditional SEO tooling cannot even see it, let alone fix it. SailPoint clearly reached the same conclusion, which is why it split the function.

What to actually look for in a GEO or AEO manager

If the hiring wave has reached your company, the harder question is who to put in the seat. Having watched these roles get written well and badly, here is what separates a real hire from a relabeled SEO req.

Look for someone who thinks in probability, not position. AI answers are nondeterministic. A candidate who talks about their "rank in ChatGPT" from a handful of manual checks does not understand the system. The right person talks about citation frequency and share of voice measured across hundreds of prompts per engine, tracked over time. They know that any single answer is a dice roll and that the signal lives in the aggregate.

Look for per-engine fluency. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews run different retrieval and trust different sources. Someone who treats "AI" as one channel will optimize for an average that describes none of them. Ask a candidate why Perplexity might cite a source ChatGPT ignores. A good answer is specific.

Look for entity and source thinking, not keyword thinking. The unit of optimization moved from the page to the passage, and from the keyword to the entity. Strong candidates talk about entity disambiguation, structured data, and which trusted domains in your category the engines actually pull from. They treat "get cited by the sources the model trusts" as the core job, because it is.

Look for someone comfortable building light automation. The best of these postings, SailPoint's included, expect a single-headcount function to punch above its weight using custom GPTs, prompt libraries, agent chains, and scripts. This is a builder role now, not a checklist role.

And look for someone who connects visibility to pipeline. A candidate who is satisfied with a rising dashboard number and cannot tie it to AI-referred traffic, lead quality, or revenue will build you a vanity program. The ones worth hiring are already impatient about attribution.

Two things the role does not require: a five-year AEO track record, because the discipline is barely three years old, and deep familiarity with any single vendor's tool. SailPoint's own posting calls direct Profound experience a plus, not a requirement. Hire for the way of thinking. The tools will change twice before this person's first review.

This is the fourth time I have watched this movie

The reason I am confident about the hiring wave is that I have seen this exact sequence before, more than once, over fifteen years in and around enterprise software.

Rewind to cloud, roughly 2010. Serious infrastructure people insisted the cloud was just someone else's computer, a rebrand of hosting with a markup. They were technically half right, and completely wrong about what it meant. Then the job titles appeared: Cloud Architect, then Cloud Security Engineer, then whole platform teams. AWS went from a curiosity to the profit engine of the most valuable retailer on earth. The people who spent 2010 arguing the definition spent 2015 catching up to the people who spent 2010 learning the practice.

Email marketing ran the same loop earlier. It was dismissed as spam with a nicer font, a channel any intern could run. Then deliverability, segmentation, lifecycle automation, and CRM integration turned it into a discipline with its own leaders and its own six-figure salaries. Content marketing separated from copywriting the same way a decade ago, the way AEO is separating from SEO right now. Social media manager was a punchline in 2009 and a board-level concern by 2015.

Every one of those transitions produced the identical two-camp fight. Camp one: this is just [old thing] with a new name, sold by people who arrived last year. Camp two, quieter, on the job boards: here is the salary band. Camp one was always partly correct about the overlap and always wrong about the conclusion. The tactics did overlap. The discipline was still real, because the thing being measured and the surface being optimized had genuinely changed.

GEO is that pattern again, on a faster clock. The term came from a 2023 academic paper by Princeton-led researchers. Within three years, Adobe closed a $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush framed around AI visibility, Profound reached a $1 billion valuation and now serves more than 10% of the Fortune 500, and Stripe, AWS, SailPoint, and Amgen all posted dedicated roles. The naming is still a mess, GEO and AEO and LLMO used interchangeably, but naming chaos is what category birth looks like. Before "SEO" won, the practice was called search engine positioning, placement, and submission. The vocabulary settles after the money moves, never before.

Where this actually lands

The forward view is straightforward if you have watched the prior cycles. AI-mediated discovery keeps taking share of the research journey. TechCrunch reported AI referral traffic up roughly 357% year over year heading into 2026, and EMARKETER projects 31.3% of the US population using generative AI search this year. Google is not disappearing; Datos still puts it near 95% of traditional search share. But "traditional search" is exactly the qualifier that is shrinking, and the high-consideration B2B journey is moving fastest of all.

For anyone selling technical software, the debate is already a luxury you cannot afford. My data at GrackerAI shows 4 in 10 B2B security buyers now start vendor research inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude. When they ask for shortlists, the engines answer with three to five brand names. Either yours is in the answer or it is not, and the engines are forming durable opinions about your category right now, under whatever acronym.

Call it GEO, AEO, or AI visibility. The name will settle itself, the way cloud and content marketing did. The shortlist will not wait for it.

Here is my question for you: if a GEO manager landed on your team next month, what is the first number you would ask them to move, and would anyone in your marketing org today know how to measure it? I would genuinely like to hear where teams are landing on this.

FAQ

Which companies are hiring GEO and AEO managers in 2026?

Companies hiring dedicated GEO and AEO roles in 2026 include Stripe, SailPoint (AEO/GEO Manager at $101,400 to $170,864), AWS, Amgen, Publicis, Citizens Bank (up to $171,000), and Experian ($100K to $174K). Kaleigh Moore's analysis found postings across finance, pharma, retail, and enterprise tech, including Vanguard, Pfizer, Victoria's Secret, eBay, Palo Alto Networks, and HubSpot.

What should you look for when hiring a GEO or AEO manager?

Hire someone who thinks in probability rather than position (citation frequency and share of voice across hundreds of prompts, not a single "rank"), who has per-engine fluency across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and AI Overviews, who thinks in entities and trusted sources rather than keywords, who can build light automation like custom GPTs and prompt libraries, and who connects visibility to pipeline. A long AEO track record is not required because the discipline is only about three years old.

Is GEO just rebranded SEO?

Roughly 80% of GEO tactics overlap with SEO fundamentals like clean structure, expertise, and authoritative content. The disciplines differ in what they optimize for: SEO targets ranked links, while GEO targets inclusion in synthesized AI answers. Companies like SailPoint and Stripe created separate GEO roles because the outcomes diverged, the same way content marketing separated from copywriting a decade ago.

Has this kind of skepticism happened with other tech shifts?

Yes. Cloud computing was dismissed as "someone else's computer," email marketing as "spam with a nicer font," and social media management as a punchline, before each produced dedicated disciplines with six-figure leadership roles. Each transition featured the same two-camp fight: skeptics correctly noting tactical overlap with older practices, but wrongly concluding the new discipline was fake.

Deepak Gupta is a serial entrepreneur and cybersecurity researcher. He founded LoginRadius and now builds GrackerAI, a GEO platform for B2B SaaS. He writes about AI, security, and B2B growth at guptadeepak.com.