AEO Practice Lead / Incubation

A leading global agency and consultancy, building a new Answer Engine Optimization capability for a well-known enterprise brand. This is a consulting engagement with the agency, embedded with the client team, and there's potential to transition to a full-time role on the client side.

Length: 28 weeks

Hourly Rate: $150 (flexible based on experience)

Location: Remote

Hours: 40 hours/week

You'd be joining a leading agency as a consultant, embedded on a new engagement with a well-known enterprise brand that's building an Answer Engine Optimization capability from the ground up. Standing this up has been identified as a strategic priority for their business, so this isn't a short strategy engagement that ends with a recommendation deck. The agency's role is to build the capability, run it, and eventually hand it to the client's own team. Some of the people who build it are expected to go with it.

As Practice Lead, you'll sit inside the agency's incubation team and own day-to-day delivery for the client while building the operating model, methodology, and team structure the practice will run on long after incubation ends. This is a hands-on builder role: part practitioner, part program architect.

You've led an AEO or GEO program before and you've learned from it. You're comfortable defining process where none exists, and you can hold both the client relationship and the internal team accountable to quality and timelines at the same time. You'll partner closely with your client-side counterparts to build trust and a working rhythm, and coordinate across the agency's contributors and senior leadership to keep priorities aligned as the practice takes shape.

The category is young, so some of this you'll figure out as you go. That's expected.

Responsibilities

Own daily delivery leadership for the client's AEO program, setting priorities, unblocking the team, and making sure work ships on time and to standard.

Stay hands-on in the work itself, not just above it. You'll be in the tools alongside the team.

Serve as the primary day-to-day point of contact with client-side counterparts, building trust and a reliable operating cadence.

Define and document the practice's methodology, frameworks, and playbooks so the capability can scale beyond incubation and transfer cleanly to the client.

Establish prioritization and intake processes that balance real-time client requests against longer-term practice-building work.

Coordinate across agency partners (strategy, content, SEO, analytics, and leadership) to keep the work aligned with the client's broader marketing and business goals.

Identify gaps in current tooling, reporting, and measurement for AEO performance, and recommend or build solutions.

Turn early learnings into repeatable processes, training materials, and staffing recommendations for scaling the team.

Communicate progress, risks, and recommendations to agency leadership and client stakeholders.

 

Direct experience leading an AEO or GEO program, start to finish. This is the non-negotiable one.

Hands-on practitioner knowledge of how AI answer engines source and surface content: structured data, schema markup, content structuring for LLM retrieval, citation tracking and measurement.

Solid SEO fundamentals underneath it.

Delivery and program leadership experience in a fast-moving marketing, agency, or consulting environment.