AI Search Director (AEO/GEO) — Contract-to-Hire

Your Role

Fantasy is launching a new strategic AI search offering for enterprise brands. We need a Director+ who can operate at executive altitude and own our Generative/AI Search (AEO/GEO) offerings: set the vision, stand up pods, ship work weekly, and mature the service into a scalable program that drives revenue and authority. You’ll own client strategy and satisfaction, orchestrate partners/tools, and collaborate across Product, Content, Engineering, and Data to expand AEO/GEO and adjacent agentic services. Starts as contract with a path to full-time.

What You'll Do

• Enterprise Strategy & Thought Leadership: Shape the future of AEO at an enterprise scale and make Fantasy the go-to partner in the space.
• Leading engagements end‑to‑end: discovery, benchmarking, roadmap, and iterative execution; presenting to senior stakeholders and securing buy‑in.
• Defining KPIs and reporting: visibility/coverage, citation accuracy, sentiment trends, content freshness, time‑to‑insight, and ROI; guiding internal teams in building dashboards and narratives.
• Building our center of excellence: documenting frameworks (intent graphs, IA for AI), playbooks, templates, and training modules; mentoring internal team.
• Representing Fantasy as a strategic voice in the AEO space—helping define what best-in-class looks like.
• Executional Excellence & Optimization: Solve for today while building toward what’s next.
• Diagnosing and improving answer engine performance: visibility, citations, content accuracy, and entity authority; identify opportunity zones and quick wins; benchmark competitors.
• Translate insights into workflows: content engineering, entity/knowledge graph improvements, and technical remediation plans (delivered via partners).Build/refine topic configurations and QFN-style query sets, prioritizing non‑branded queries for category insights and branded terms for sentiment analysis.
• Identify opportunity zones and quick wins for clients—drive impact early and often.
• Operational Enablement & Ecosystem Orchestration: Build the machine that builds the future—internally and across client ecosystems.
• Operating platform‑agnostic; evaluating and running leading tools like Profound, AirOps, Graphite and similar systems; codifying tool selection principles.
• Standing up pods and rhythms; defining roles, setting cadence, sustaining momentum; delivering QBRs and executive-ready materials.
• Coordinating partners; ensuring alignment between agencies, platforms, and internal teams for measurable implementation.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years in SEO with a proven pivot into AEO/GEO/AI Search; deep experience with intent modeling, entity optimization, and answer engine behaviors.
• Track record leading enterprise programs across multiple LOBs; adept at executive stakeholder management and monthly subscription/retainer models.
• Hands‑on practitioner who can turn data into actionable recommendations within days; deliver early wins while building durable systems
• Platform/operator mindset: experience evaluating and integrating tools like Profound/AirOps/Graphite (or equivalents) and synthesizing outputs into strategy.
• Enablement leader: has built cohort trainings, role definitions, templates, and operating cadences that leave clients more self‑sufficient.
• Executive communication: concise storytelling, strong decks, and the ability to simplify complexity and drive decisions.
• Experience with LLM-centric content engineering: structured content, schema, knowledge graphs, and prompt‑safe content patterns.
• Familiarity with technical remediation pathways and collaboration with dev teams.