I’ve never had “SEO Manager” on my business card.
But I’ve spent 14 years optimising content for search, managing editorial calendars around keyword clusters, explaining to management why a page that ranked #1 last month is now on page two, building internal links on Saturday mornings, and watching traffic dashboards with the quiet anxiety of someone whose bonus is partially attached to organic sessions.
I did SEO at a brewing e-commerce startup. Then at Lyreco, across 10+ European markets. Then at Boost.ai, a B2B SaaS scale-up and at PIQL, a smaller-start up structure. And I’ve been doing it here on sebastien.no for a while now — voluntarily, with no budget, as a kind of ongoing experiment.
So when I say the role of SEO manager is changing, I’m not saying it as an analyst. I’m saying it as someone who has lived inside the job description without ever quite having the title.
What SEO used to feel like
Ten years ago, being good at SEO felt like having a cheat code.
You knew where the keywords went. You understood internal linking. You could build a content cluster before anyone called it that. You knew that page speed mattered before it was officially a ranking factor. And if you’d done your homework, you could move rankings in a way that felt almost magical — like you’d found a lever nobody else in the room knew existed.
I genuinely loved it. There was something satisfying about the craft of it: the intersection of writing, data, and technical thinking. The feedback loop was slow but clear. You changed things, you waited, the numbers moved.
That feeling lasted for quite a while. Then, slowly at first, it started to change.
The moment the rules stopped being stable
The shift didn’t happen all at once. But there’s a clear before and after.
Before: you could optimise your way to a result. The relationship between your actions (content, links, technical fixes) and your outcomes (rankings, traffic) was comprehensible, even if imperfect. You could build a mental model of what Google wanted and act on it with reasonable confidence.
After: that relationship became increasingly unstable. Algorithm updates started hitting without warning or explanation. Featured snippets started absorbing clicks from #1 positions. Then AI Overviews arrived and started answering queries on the SERP itself.
The data tell the story bluntly. Ahrefs found that AI Overviews reduce position-one organic CTR by 58% — a near-doubling of the 34.5% suppression found earlier in the same year. (Source: Jasper Blog citing Ahrefs) Search Engine Journal reported a 37% year-over-year decline in SEO job listings in Q1 2024 — with commentary pointing not to disappearing demand but to a recomposition of roles: fewer generalists, more specialists who can operate in genuinely complex environments. (Source: Iris Scale citing SEJ)
And yet. The SEO services market is valued at $108 billion in 2026 and projected to reach $343 billion by 2035. (Source: Air Ranking Skool) The role is not dying but mutating.
This awareness is leading to a shift in how businesses approach their digital marketing strategies.
The alphabet soup: GEO, AEO, AIO, LLMO
If you’ve been doing SEO for any length of time and recently started reading industry newsletters, you’ll have noticed that suddenly everyone is inventing new acronyms. Let me be honest about what’s actually useful here and what’s marketing noise.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — you know this one. Optimising for Google, Bing, traditional ranked results. Still relevant. Still necessary. Not going away.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — optimising for direct answer surfaces: featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, knowledge panels. The goal is to be the source Google extracts when it answers a query without a click. This has been growing in importance since Google started showing featured snippets around 2015 and accelerated sharply with AI Overviews.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — optimising for citation inside AI-generated responses from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and others. The term was formalised in a landmark 2024 paper by Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi. GEO is about being the source an LLM trusts when it synthesises an answer, not just the source a user clicks through to.
AIO (AI Optimization) — a broader term for using AI tools to speed up and improve content and optimisation work. Often used to describe the workflow layer rather than the strategy layer.
LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) — another term for roughly the same thing as GEO, used more in technical circles.
Are these all different things? Partially. AEO focuses on extractable answers inside traditional search. GEO focuses on citation inside generative AI responses. In practice, most of the underlying tactics overlap — clear structure, explicit definitions, named sources, topical authority, off-site credibility. The Wikipedia entry on GEO notes honestly that “no consensus definition distinguishing these terms had been established in the academic literature as of early 2026” and that they are “frequently used interchangeably in trade and practitioner contexts.” (Source: Wikipedia)
My take: don’t get lost in the acronyms. Get comfortable with the underlying question they’re all pointing at — how do I get surfaced when someone asks a machine a question in my area? That’s the skill. The labels will keep changing.
What the market is actually asking for in 2026
A study of 1,175 US SEO job listings from April 2025 to March 2026 found something revealing: 54.9% of job descriptions included AI-related keywords — references to ChatGPT, LLMs, GEO, AEO, automation — but only 11% of job titles made any reference to AI. (Source: Search for Hire)
In other words: companies know they need this skill set. They just don’t know what to call the person who has it.
New titles are emerging — the Semrush analysis of 3,900 job listings names “AI SEO / GEO Specialist,” “AI Search Specialist,” “Head of Organic Growth,” and “Digital Experience Strategist” as categories appearing with increasing frequency. (Source: Air Ranking Skool citing Semrush) The Previsible report on 10,000+ listings found a 21% increase in AI-related skill requirements year over year, with AI, UX, and data analytics among the fastest-growing. (Source: Previsible)
What this means practically: the pure SEO manager role — the person who manages keyword research, on-page optimisation, and reports organic traffic monthly — is being squeezed. Not because companies don’t need SEO. Because they need someone who does SEO and understands GEO and can connect both to commercial outcomes and knows how to work with AI tools in the workflow and can explain it all to a non-technical stakeholder.
That’s a different job. It’s a harder job. And it pays more when you can do it well: 12% of SEO positions now offer $100,000+ salaries, concentrated at the senior/strategic level. (Source: Previsible)
What changed for me personally
I want to be specific, because vague “the industry is evolving” takes are everywhere and not very useful.
Here’s what actually shifted in my own practice over the past two years:
I stopped optimising primarily for rankings. The ranking was never the goal — visibility was. And in 2026, visibility increasingly means citation in AI responses, not position one on a SERP. So my content is now written with both in mind: structured clearly enough for a machine to extract, specific enough to be cited rather than paraphrased, deep enough on a topic to be a go-to source rather than a supplementary one.
I started paying attention to what AI says about my topics. I test my own subject area in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude regularly. What questions do they answer? What sources do they cite? Where am I missing? This is a new kind of competitive analysis that didn’t exist three years ago.
The writing itself became more important, not less. There’s a version of the “AI killed SEO” story where the implication is that SEO just gets automated. I’ve found the opposite. As AI floods the content landscape with generic material, the premium on writing that is genuinely specific, experience-based, and honest has gone up. My personal experience — including failures, including things that didn’t work — is the one thing AI cannot generate. That’s the moat.
I think about off-site presence differently. GEO/AEO work requires being present and credible across the wider web — in communities, in guest articles, on LinkedIn — not just ranking on your own domain. That’s always been part of good SEO. Now it’s also the input to whether an AI considers you a trustworthy source.
So… Is the SEO manager role dying?
My original version of this article, written in early 2025, ended with a fairly confident “yes, probably.”
I’ve nuanced that view.
The narrow version of the SEO manager role — pure technical optimisation, ranking-focused, disconnected from content strategy and business outcomes — is genuinely shrinking. AI handles more of the routine work. The tactics that used to require specialist knowledge (keyword research, basic on-page optimisation, site audit analysis) are increasingly accessible to generalists with the right tools.
But the broader version — someone who understands how people find information, can make content visible across both traditional and AI-powered discovery, connects that visibility to actual business results, and knows how to measure what’s actually moving — that role is not shrinking. It’s becoming more central.
The SEO manager of 2026 is also, whether they have the title or not, a GEO manager. They’re thinking about AI citation alongside organic ranking. They’re writing for machines that read and humans who trust. They’re tracking brand presence in AI responses alongside keyword positions in Google.
And honestly? I find that more interesting than what the job used to be.
I said at the top that I’ve done this for 14 years without the title. The honest follow-up is: that’s also part of why I find this transition less threatening than some people seem to.
The title was never what made the work useful. The work was useful because it helped people find things — products, information, companies — that were actually relevant to them. That problem hasn’t gone away. The surfaces have changed. The measurement is harder. The terminology is messier than it needs to be.
But the underlying job — make good content visible to the right people, through whatever channel they’re using to look — is exactly what it always was.
If you’re an SEO manager reading this: you’re not obsolete. You’re in the middle of a transition that rewards exactly the kind of cross-discipline, context-aware thinking you’ve been building for years. Add GEO to your vocabulary. Test your content in AI systems. Start thinking about citation alongside ranking.
And maybe update your job title.
I write about B2B growth, zero-budget marketing, and what I’m actually learning in the field — every two weeks at sebastien.no. Find me on LinkedIn.
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