Director of Organic Search & AI Discovery
Location: Remote UK, with occasional travel to the Head Office, Sheffield.
Hours: Full-time (37.5 hours per week)
We are looking for an exceptional Director of Organic Search & AI Discovery to build the next generation of our organic acquisition engine.
This role goes well beyond traditional SEO. You will own our visibility across Google Search, AI-powered search experiences (including AI Overviews and AI Mode), ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, YouTube, Reddit, and emerging discovery platforms. You'll combine deep technical expertise, product thinking, AI, experimentation, and operational excellence to create a sustainable competitive advantage in organic growth.
You will lead a high-performing global team, partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data, Growth and local marketing teams and continually redefine how we acquire customers through organic discovery.
We're looking for someone who is intellectually curious, relentlessly experimental, commercially minded, and obsessed with staying ahead of where search is going - not simply reacting to where it has been.
Key Responsibilities
Search Strategy & Organic Growth:
- Own and execute the global Search & AI strategy, aligning organic growth initiatives with business objectives and customer acquisition goals.
- Develop a scalable roadmap to increase qualified organic traffic, revenue contribution and market share across priority markets.
- Build a culture of experimentation, continuously identifying new opportunities and testing ways to outperform competitors.
AI Search, GEO & Technical Excellence
- Lead our strategy for visibility and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) across AI-powered search experiences including Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and emerging AI discovery platforms.
- Own technical SEO excellence across site architecture, crawling, indexing, rendering, structured data, Core Web Vitals and scalable platform improvements.
- Drive entity optimisation, semantic search, internal linking and information architecture strategies that improve discoverability across both traditional search engines and AI systems.
Content, Authority & Brand Discovery
- Build a scalable content and authority strategy that strengthens organic authority, topical expertise and brand trust
- Partner with Content, Brand and PR teams to create assets that earn attention across search engines, AI systems and the wider web.
AI, Automation & Data-Driven Operations
- Transform SEO operations through AI, automation and scalable systems.
- Leverage LLMs, AI agents and internal tooling to improve research, analysis, content workflows, technical optimisation and reporting.
- Build measurement frameworks that track organic performance, AI visibility, customer acquisition impact and commercial ROI.
- Use data and analytics to identify opportunities, prioritise investments and continuously improve performance.
Organic Growth Beyond Google
- Expand organic discovery beyond traditional search engines, across
- YouTube, Reddit social search and emerging platforms
- Ensure the company is visible wherever customers are searching for information, solutions and recommendations.
Leadership & Cross-Functional Influence
- Build, mentor and develop a world-class Search & AI team with high standards of execution, curiosity and innovation.
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data, Growth and local marketing teams to embed search thinking into company-wide initiatives.
- Communicate strategy, insights and performance clearly to executive stakeholders, translating complex search concepts into business outcomes.
Experience
- 8–12+ years leading SEO or Organic Search at scale within high-growth digital businesses.
- Proven experience building and executing international SEO strategies across multiple markets.
- Demonstrated success navigating major Google algorithm updates and periods of significant industry change.
- Deep expertise across Technical SEO, Information Architecture, Entity Optimisation and Content Strategy.
- Strong understanding of GEO, AI search and LLM-powered discovery
- Experience improving visibility across AI-powered discovery platforms alongside traditional search.
- Proven experience leveraging AI, LLMs and automation to transform SEO operations.
- Strong understanding of semantic search, information retrieval and knowledge graph concepts.
- Experience working closely with Engineering teams on large-scale technical implementations.
- Experience developing SEO products, internal tools or scalable automation workflows.
- Deep knowledge of Google Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog and enterprise SEO platforms.
- Commercially minded, with a strong understanding of how organic growth contributes to business performance.
Benefits
In return for everything you can bring, we can offer you an exciting role in a fast-growing and dynamic business, with plenty of career opportunities. Here’s a couple of the things that make Twinkl a great place to be:
- A friendly, welcoming and supportive culture. We believe work should be fun and always put people before the process
- Diversity, inclusion and belonging - our Employee Network Program includes working groups for LGBTQ+, People of Colour, Disabilities (visible and invisible), Women in Tech and Working Parents.
- From day 1 - Westfield Health, 33 annual leave days per year (pro-rata) inclusive bank holidays, a "Me" day each year, a charity day each year and Twinkl subscriptions
- Quarterly company awards programme
- Seasonal events
- Referral scheme
- Cervical and Prostate screening
- Company sick pay after 3 months of service
- After probation - cycle-to-work scheme
- Long-term service reward - Life insurance, enhanced pension contribution, enhanced maternity pay, enhanced adoption pay and enhanced paternity pay, long service award, long service annual leave