VP, SEO & AI Discovery

About the role

Become a key player in defining and executing Paramount's SEO and AI discovery strategy. Lead the way in maintaining authority and visibility across various platforms, including Google, emerging answer engines, and AI-driven agents.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a portfolio-wide discovery strategy spanning traditional SEO, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and agentic AI readiness.
• Set the vision for how Paramount's news, sports, and entertainment brands maintain authority and visibility as AI mediates more of the user-to-content relationship.
• Manage and grow a team of SEO and discovery professionals, including developing new specialist roles as the discipline evolves.
• Partner with senior leadership across Editorial, Product, Engineering, Data, Legal, and Business Affairs to align discovery strategy with business objectives.
• Provide regular performance updates and forward-looking recommendations to executive stakeholders, including impact narratives that translate AI-era metrics into business outcomes.
• Lead optimization of website content, on-page elements, internal linking, and technical SEO across all properties.
• Develop best practices for keyword research, topical authority, and competitive analysis across news, sports, and entertainment verticals.
• Provide real-time guidance to editorial teams competing for Top Stories, Discover, and time-sensitive organic search results.
• Build the capability to track and grow Paramount's share of citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot.
• Establish content patterns — direct answers, structured comparisons, original reporting, expert quotes, data and statistics — that increase the likelihood of being selected as a cited source by generative engines.
• Lead structured data and schema strategy so our content is machine-parseable and citation-ready.
• Monitor how AI engines describe our brands and properties; identify and correct factual drift or misrepresentation in AI-generated answers.
• Define how Paramount properties present themselves to autonomous agents and agent-powered browsers (e.g., Claude in Chrome, ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet).
• Partner with Engineering and Legal on bot management policy: which AI crawlers we allow, block, or require licensing from, and how those decisions trade off discovery, brand visibility, and content monetization.
• Build a discovery measurement framework that goes beyond rankings and sessions to include AI citation share, brand-mention frequency in AI answers, AI-referred traffic and engagement quality, zero-click visibility, and entity-level brand presence.
• Evaluate, select, and operate the SEO and AI-visibility tool stack (e.g., Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster, log-file analysis, AI visibility platforms, citation trackers, schema validators).
• Track AI search trends, algorithm and model updates, and competitive moves; translate those into actionable strategy shifts.
• Partner with the data and analytics teams to integrate discovery data into broader audience and revenue reporting.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of digital media experience in SEO, organic discovery, or audience development, with a proven track record of facilitating organic growth — preferably in the publishing industry.
• Demonstrated experience adapting strategy to AI-driven search (AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, etc.) and guiding measurable outcomes in that environment.
• Deep knowledge of SEO best practices, search engine algorithms, structured data and schema.org, and the technical mechanics of how generative engines retrieve and cite sources.
• Robust working knowledge of AI/LLM behavior as it relates to retrieval, citation, and answer generation — and a clear point of view on what this means for publishers.
• Hands-on fluency with SEO and AI-visibility tools (Google Search Console, crawlers, log analysis, keyword tools, AI citation trackers, schema validators).
• Experience managing and scaling a team of SEO professionals, including coaching team members through skill expansion into GEO/AEO and agentic AI.
• Experience with content management systems and modern web analytics platforms.
• Exemplary verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to translate technical discovery concepts for editorial, product, and executive audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with editorial, product, engineering, data, legal, and business teams.
• Experience with content licensing or partnership conversations involving AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, etc.).
• Familiarity with bot management, edge/CDN configurations (e.g., Cloudflare, Akamai), and how they affect AI crawler access.
• Experience with App Store / Play Store optimization and other non-web discovery surfaces.
• Experience with multimodal optimization — getting video, images, and audio surfaced and cited correctly by multimodal AI.