Head of SEO & AI Search

Groupon connects 42 million customers with local experiences (restaurants, events, wellness and travel) and the million-plus merchants who deliver them. The company is moving from a deals marketplace to an experience discovery platform. This Head of SEO & AI Search role is global, with the majority of organic revenue in North America and the rest in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Australia. The role reports to Josef Buryan, Chief Marketing Officer, leads an SEO team of four to five plus a shared engineering squad, and owns the Local index and investment decision city by city and category by category. Locations listed: London; Madrid; Prague.

Responsibilities

Decide the Local estate: which cities get coverage, which categories get a dedicated page, which Local page type owns each intent, what supply threshold makes a page viable, and what gets rebuilt, consolidated or removed, with volume affected, expected click loss, upside and revenue effect stated up front; Design the GEO x Category architecture and internal linking structure so the city to category to deal path is reachable within three to four clicks, with no orphaned pages and no diluted authority; Own the SEO engineering backlog as business owner, writing acceptance criteria, holding backlog reviews and blocking releases that break the standards (page-weight budget, uncompressed-HTML gate under 2 MB, one media player click-to-play, response time); Govern third-party scripts on every page type and own crawler and rendering policy across all markets, including AI crawler policy; Run the content factory as a GenAI production system behind a page template, editorial line and quality gate; Build content that Display, SEM, Influencers and Social can reuse; Drive GEO and AI search at city and category level (AI Overviews presence, machine-discovery endpoints, structured deal data, connectors to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, Reddit and LinkedIn where they move citations); Read and decide from the existing battlefield instrumentation; Lead and hire the SEO team and the shared engineering partnership day to day; Produce the monthly battlefield MBR for the CEO and CFO; Default to AI agents for audits, content production, monitoring and reporting

Requirements

Demonstrated ability to state an index and investment policy for a six-figure Local estate and defend it with numbers, assumptions and a first ticket; Shipping from incomplete data on a messy programmatic or marketplace site with dated, measured brief-to-live work; Writing acceptance criteria, holding backlog reviews and escalating when page weight, HTML size against the 2 MB Googlebot limit, scripts or crawler policy break the standard; Owning SEO on a large multi-market website at 500k+ programmatic pages, including marketplace or local-commerce dynamics (supply density per city and category, local pack behaviour, cannibalisation, prune and consolidate); Running GEO and AI search hands-on at city and category level with a measurement method; Measuring Local with geolocated SERP measurement rather than national rank tracking, and understanding that Search Console aggregation hides city-level divergence; Designing and evaluating a GenAI content production system (structured inputs, research, reusable skills, human checkpoints, QA); Operating AI-native day to day, with the ability to walk through tools, agents and skills and what they replaced; Hiring, developing and exiting SEO talent and holding a shared engineering partnership as backlog owner; Absorbing a crawl audit or battlefield dataset, identifying the three things that matter and stating a decision in minutes; Writing a one-page business view (size, capture, competitor, target, three decisions) in English on the day asked