Director of SEO and Agentic Search

About LawnStarter

LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and outdoor services, with over $150M in annual bookings. We are expanding beyond lawn care to become the one-stop shop for all home services. Becoming the most discovered, cited, and trusted brand in our category is how we get there.

About the Growth Team

Growth owns the full acquisition funnel across our brand portfolio, reaching millions of homeowners every year. SEO and organic discovery are foundational to how customers find us. This role leads the team responsible for making that happen at scale, reporting directly to the CMO and operating at the intersection of content, technical SEO, product, and the emerging world of AI-powered search.

The Challenge

The game has changed. Rankings are no longer the prize; recommendation is. When a homeowner asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI who to hire, our job is to be the answer, not just page one. This requires two bets running together: establishing brand presence across every surface where homeowners and machines form trust, and exposing first-party data that AI systems reward and commodity SEO can no longer produce.

We have a talented team and strong brand equity. What we need is a leader who already operates this way and has the results to prove it.

The Role

You will own organic search and AI discovery across our brand portfolio, setting the vision, roadmap, and standards for how we compete in a world where Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Mode are becoming primary discovery surfaces. The team is small by design, consisting of one SEO analyst, a lean research and editorial group, and a no-code publishing platform that gives you direct control of thousands of pages. Several strategic functions sit intentionally unowned, waiting for you to define what to keep, retire, or build. This is a strategic, high-visibility role where you will shape company-wide priorities, partner with engineering, data, product, design, and executive leadership, and serve as the internal authority on where organic discovery is heading.

What Makes This Role Different

• Building a New Playbook: The opportunity requires fresh thinking about how technical SEO, content, structured data, and AI visibility work together in 2026 and beyond.
• Scale and Stakes: Organic drives a meaningful share of our business. The decisions you make here compound across our entire brand portfolio at scale.
• AI Search Frontier: You are not just optimizing for blue links anymore. This role requires genuine expertise in how LLMs and answer engines discover, evaluate, and cite content.
• Leverage: With a small internal core, a no-code publishing platform, and first-party data nobody else in the category can publish, you can move at the speed of a hypothesis without engineering dependency or sprint queues.

Problems to Solve

• Recovering and growing traffic at scale: Diagnosing the root cause of significant traffic decline for one of our brands and executing a recovery plan that addresses algorithm shifts, content quality, technical debt, or AI Search cannibalization.
• Winning in AI-powered discovery: Building a structured, repeatable approach to AI Search visibility to turn it into a competitive advantage before others catch up.
• Going from defense to offense: Flipping the posture to lead in the next era of organic discovery across more verticals than before.
• Defining how to measure AI Search: Building a measurement approach that turns raw signals into a reliable view of AI Search visibility to make decisions and demonstrate progress.

Equal Opportunity

LawnStarter provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics. We comply with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment.