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. 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

You are building a new playbook, not optimizing an old one, requiring fresh thinking about how technical SEO, content, structured data, and AI visibility work together in 2026 and beyond. You will manage multiple major brands with millions of users and real revenue stakes, where organic drives a meaningful share of our business. AI Search is the frontier; you are not just optimizing for blue links but gaining genuine expertise in how LLMs and answer engines discover, evaluate, and cite content. You have leverage through a small internal core, a no-code publishing platform, and first-party data nobody else in the category can publish, allowing you to move at the speed of a hypothesis without engineering dependency.

Problems to Solve

We are facing significant traffic decline on one of our brands, where rankings have slipped from positions 3-5 to page 2. Diagnosing the root cause—whether algorithm shifts, content quality, technical debt, or AI Search cannibalization—is the first order of business. Simultaneously, we must win in AI-powered discovery as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity become primary surfaces. We are shifting from a defensive posture to an offensive one, aiming to dominate the next era of organic discovery. Finally, we need to define how to measure AI Search, turning raw signals from log data and crawler activity into a reliable view of visibility to drive decisions.

Hiring Process

We are looking for a leader who sees around corners, understands external visibility as foundational, and operates with a business mindset. You must be technically fluent, willing to ship, and AI-native. This is not a pure individual contributor role, nor is it a research-and-recommend role; we need clear points of view and execution. If you are comfortable rolling up your sleeves alongside a small team while setting direction, this is the right fit.

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.