Role: SEO Manager, search and AI answersFull interview loop

For a company that already gets a real share of its demand from search, hiring the person who owns it in Google and in AI answers: what the site serves to crawlers, where the company is cited and where it is not, how either is measured, and what the channel costs. It assumes the manager works with web engineers and a content team rather than alone, and that an executive above them decides the budget.

Round one puts a live answer engine in front of the candidate in its first minutes and a predecessor's dashboard after it, and asks for a metric defined precisely enough to hand to an analyst on Monday. Round two is one AI answer that cites four sources and not the company, a proposal from the web team to fund or kill, and a fixed quarter to spend. Round three is run by the engineer who owns the site's templates: one URL whose raw HTML disagrees with what Chrome shows, and a test that stayed green through the defect. Round four is a role-play with the executive who has already decided to cut the budget, and the decision goes against the candidate partway through.

Measurement is read three times, each time against an instrument that looked fine: an AI visibility score that rose while the company lost its category, a test that passed for eleven weeks while every page was broken, and a forecast the executive repeated to the board. Crawling and retrieval is read once from the answer's side, in which pages an assistant actually read, and once from the site's, in what a crawler that runs no JavaScript receives, as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot run none. Prioritization is read in what the candidate concedes, funds and cuts. Executive communication is read once against a chief marketing officer's explanation of the traffic, and once in the meeting where that officer decides. Cross-functional delivery is read in the team the candidate names for each item on their plan, and in what they ask the engineer for.

Round three was written for an SEO engineer, and its third section asks the candidate to dictate the test that should have caught the defect. It is in this loop because the employers hiring SEO managers now ask the manager for technical depth too. If your SEO manager will hand technical work to an engineer rather than do it, score the diagnosis and what they ask the engineer for, and treat the assertions they dictate as a bonus.

The loop does not read content strategy on its own, or how a candidate checks what an AI tool recommends before it ships. If your SEO manager also owns the editorial calendar, add the Content Strategist round What You Would Stop Publishing as a fifth.