Senior Manager, GEO Strategy & AI Search Activation

Overview

Senior Manager of GEO Strategy & AI Search Activation at Kaplan, providing strategic vision, technical leadership and off-page activation to maximize visibility across Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI search platforms for higher education university clients and Kaplan test prep and professional education product lines.

What you'll do

• Formulate, deploy and manage Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and off-page search strategies to position Higher Education client institutions and Test Prep product lines as preferred, trusted sources across generative AI models.
• Build programmatic GEO authority across core academic and professional verticals, ensuring institutional entities and brand authority are accurately recognized and reinforced in LLM knowledge bases and Knowledge Graphs.
• Operationalize a multi-tiered publisher engagement model, identifying target sites, routing high-profile media opportunities to internal or client PR/communications teams, and directly outreaching to publications and education portals.
• Conduct sentiment audits across influential third-party websites, education portals and industry platforms to identify content inaccuracies, outdated product information or negative brand drivers, and execute targeted publisher outreach to correct data errors and enhance brand positioning across search results and AI models.
• Monitor, analyze and report on AI performance metrics, including AI visibility scores, sentiment scores, citation share, share-of-voice and citation placements across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews using enterprise platforms such as Profound and Ahrefs.
• Incorporate foundational SEO and content marketing best practices (including keyword intent mapping, metadata optimization, internal linking, on-page optimizations and content freshness) into all GEO initiatives and cross-functional web projects.
• Partner with internal Content Marketing teams to optimize existing pages and close competitive content gaps with net-new content, structuring owned assets for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) extraction while embedding proprietary data and Subject Matter Expert (SME) insights to meet Information Gain criteria.
• Serve as an authoritative GEO champion across the organization, building partnerships across SEO, Affiliate, Product Marketing, Legal, Creative, Editorial and Web teams to align messaging and execute integrated AI search strategies.
• Strategically utilize AI tools, prompts and automated workflows (e.g., Claude, Gemini, Python scripts) to accelerate target discovery, sentiment categorization and performance reporting while maintaining strict standards of human oversight.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree with a focus in Marketing, Communications, Information Technology, Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Minimum of 6 years of experience managing organic search (SEO), digital outreach or content marketing strategies for multi-website portfolios.
• Minimum of 1 year of direct, hands-on experience in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI search strategy.
• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional project workflows and executing off-page outreach campaigns.
• Deep familiarity with the emerging landscape of generative search, Large Language Model (LLM) retrieval mechanics, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) concepts and entity-based SEO frameworks.
• Strong grounding in core organic search methodologies (including keyword research, search intent mapping, metadata, on-page optimizations, content marketing best practices and internal link architecture).
• Advanced proficiency with enterprise search and AI tracking platforms, including Profound, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and Looker Studio.
• Proven track record of securing brand mentions, guest contributions and high-authority citations across industry publications, news outlets and niche education portals.
• Exceptional communication, stakeholder management and critical thinking skills, with a proven ability to translate complex AI search concepts into actionable business priorities for cross-functional teams.

Nice to have

• Experience in the higher education or test prep/professional licensure industries.
• Functional understanding of core technical SEO elements (crawling infrastructure, JavaScript rendering and structured data/JSON-LD schema).

Details

• Remote position, nationwide in the USA.
• Full-time employee role; Salary Grade B, $64,819 to $162,047, with final compensation based on qualifications, experience, education, skills and market data.
• Benefits include a company retirement contribution plan, tuition assistance and discounts, health benefits eligible from day 1, and paid time off including holidays, vacation, personal and sick time, plus one volunteer day and one diversity and inclusion day.