Fractional AI search strategist (SEO / GEO / AEO) for established B2B SaaS

We are Time Doctor (timedoctor . com), a fully remote B2B SaaS company. Time tracking and workforce analytics for distributed teams. We have a lean marketing team that is fun and fast to work with, but is missing an in-house GEO/AEO expert to drive the next phase of our strategy. We are twelve-plus years old and ran a genuinely advanced SEO program for most of that time. The result is an unusually large asset base: hundreds of blog pages, a deep resources library, real domain authority, and close to a million visits to the site every month. We need one person to help us carry that into AI search. What this role is, precisely This is a strategy and direction role. You are the person who decides what we should do and in what order, and who holds the quality bar on the output. You are not the person producing it. We have technical implementation in-house and we are adding a dedicated execution resource for production work. That means: You do: the visibility diagnosis, the priority call, the measurement design, the content and page briefs, the off-page program design and target list, the pruning and consolidation decisions, and the review of what comes back. We do: on-site implementation, content production, outreach volume, publishing, reporting maintenance. If you have spent the last two years wishing you could stop doing the production work and just make the calls, this is that job. If you need to control every keystroke to feel confident in the outcome, it is not. Your first 30 days - Read our existing 2026 SEO/GEO plan and the pivot already in motion. Tell us where it is right, where it is thin, and where it is wrong. We would rather hear that in week one than in month four. - Give us a diagnosis of where we currently stand in AI answers and why, and the ranked list of what to fix first. - Tell us what measurement we should be running and what we should stop measuring. That is the interview for the long-term engagement, in effect. If it goes well, we settle into a rhythm. The three priorities after that, in order 1. Off-page authority and third-party description. The largest gap we know we have. In AI search, how other people describe you matters at least as much as what your own site says. You design the program: what to place, where, with whom, in what sequence, and what "good" looks like. Digital PR, review and comparison sites, industry roundups and best-of lists, community and video presence, expert commentary. We run the outreach; you set the targets and the bar. 2. Measurement we can trust. Prompt coverage, citation and mention tracking, how accurately AI describes us, competitive share of answer, crawler access, and the line from all of it to pipeline. We want a method that survives a monthly review, not a screenshot of a good day in ChatGPT. 3. The legacy content library. Hundreds of pages and twelve years of accumulated content, some excellent and some a liability. Prune, consolidate, redirect, relaunch. You make the calls and brief them; we execute them. You need to be comfortable recommending that we delete things. Running through all three: North America is our conversion priority, but organic is the only meaningful source of new-business revenue in several other regions, so we cannot simply defund them. The same content library serves all of them, and AI engines do not geo-fence the way Google does. Navigating that tension is part of the job, not a footnote. The bar, stated plainly This field is full of people who spent 2025 doing keyword SEO and spent 2026 adding "GEO/AEO expert" to their profile. We will screen hard for that, so please self-select. To be credible with us you should have a real position on questions like: what actually changed after Google's May 2026 generative AI search guidance and the tactics it named as unnecessary; whether schema still earns citations or just makes people feel productive; how query fan-out and passage-level retrieval change what a "page" is; why AI referral traffic has plateaued while AI influence has not, and what you measure instead; and how you tell a genuine visibility gain from run-to-run model variance. We are not testing whether you agree with a particular view. We are testing whether you have done the work and formed one. Pitches built on llms.txt, bolt-on schema, and "AI-optimized" article volume will not get a reply. Must-haves - Deep SEO background with real ownership of a large site, plus current, demonstrable AI search visibility work. We care more about what you did in the last twelve months than about your total years. - Experience with a large, mature, aging content library. 500+ pages, a decade of history, real traffic at stake. You have made pruning and consolidation calls and lived with the outcome. - Off-page and digital PR judgment. You have run earned-media, review-site, and third-party citation programs and can explain how you knew they moved AI visibility rather than assuming they did. - Measurement rigor. You can design a stable prompt cohort, control for variance across models and runs, cover more than one region and language, and read server logs for AI crawler behavior. You know which tools in this category are worth paying for and where each is weak. - B2B SaaS, sold to business buyers on a considered purchase. Ecommerce and local SEO experience does not transfer here. - You give a direct answer. You say what to do, why, and what would change your mind. If you need three weeks and a discovery workshop before you have an opinion, we are not a fit. - Strong written English and enough overlap with North American hours for a weekly working call. Nice to have - Category-reframing work: moving a brand from how the market describes it today toward how you want it described - Experience with a product carrying a category reputation problem you had to work around - Workforce software, HR tech, or ops software, or anything sold to an Operations, Finance, or IT leader - Multi-region organic experience, especially where one region's search language conflicts with another's What we are not looking for - Agencies or "me plus my team." One person, working with us directly. - Anyone whose deliverable is a report rather than a decision - Content-volume operators and link builders. Off-page here means earned authority and accurate third-party description, not a link package. - Generalist digital marketers listing GEO among fifteen services - Anyone who needs a formal brief before they will engage. We give you context and a problem; you dig in. How we work with you, and what you get - Direct access to our Content and SEO lead and to marketing leadership. A decision maker is in the room, so your recommendations get acted on or explicitly rejected with a reason. Neither of us wastes a quarter waiting for a committee. - Existing stack you can work with from day one: Ahrefs, GA4, Search Console, HubSpot, and LLM visibility monitoring. - Twelve years of content, authority, and traffic to build on rather than a cold start. - We move fast and prefer the smallest testable version of a change over a big-bang project. - We ask for opinions and expect pushback. If you think a decision is wrong, say so with a reason. - Async-first: Slack, Asana, Google Workspace. You are brought into the threads and docs you need, not managed at arm's length. How we will know this is working - Month 1: we have a diagnosis and a ranked plan we believe in, and we have stopped doing at least one thing that was not working. - Month 2-3: measurable movement in how often and how accurately we appear in AI answers for the queries our buyers actually use, and an off-page program running with a real pipeline of placements. - Ongoing: organic and AI-driven discovery contributing measurably to pipeline, not just to traffic. Logistics - Hourly, ongoing, under 10 hrs/week with a weekly cap on the contract so the commitment is predictable both ways. Realistically that is a weekly working call plus a few hours of thinking and writing, front-loaded in month one. - Starting with a 3-month engagement. We want a long-term resource and would much rather build one relationship than re-hire every quarter. - There is a short paid test project in our process. We share details with shortlisted candidates. To apply Skip the template - we want to hear from YOU. We read the short specific proposals and ignore the long generic ones. Answer the five screening questions, and include one link to work you personally did. Anonymized or redacted is fine. One real artifact beats a list of logos. We look forward to hearing from you!