Director of Organic Growth & AI Discovery

Hi, We're Centerfield!

Supercharged customer acquisition. Centerfield delivers outcome-based digital marketing solutions and personalized omnichannel experiences for the world’s leading brands. Powered by our proprietary Dugout platform, Centerfield acquires customers at scale for leading residential service, insurance, e-commerce, and B2B brands. Centerfield’s digital experiences and digital brands, such as Business.com and BroadbandNow.com , reach more than 150 million in-market shoppers annually. Centerfield is headquartered in Silicon Beach and is proud to be recognized by Built in LA as a Best Place to Work in Los Angeles.

The Opportunity...

Centerfield is hiring a Director, Organic Growth to drive organic performance and AI-search visibility across our portfolio of 10 digital brands. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who understands search deeply, from traditional SERPs to AI Overviews and LLM answer engines, and can turn that understanding into traffic, visibility, and gross profit. You will turn agreed business priorities and client commitments into roadmaps, assignments, and completed work.

Reporting to the VP, Content, you will lead the Organic Growth and Web Publishing team and work closely with Content, Sales, Corporate Marketing, Product, Engineering, Communications, and our AI & Automation team. We are looking for a leader who can diagnose a performance problem, develop the team, and make a clear recommendation to senior leadership, sometimes all in the same day. You have a strong bias to action. You make calls with imperfect data, and you have no patience for reporting that does not lead to a decision.

How You'll Contribute...

Execute organic growth roadmaps across the portfolio

Develop and execute per-site organic growth roadmaps across all 10 brands (SEO, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization), within portfolio priorities agreed with the VP, Content and Presidents. Recommend what gets created, refreshed, consolidated, or retired, and turn approved priorities into work tied to qualified traffic, conversions, and gross profit.

Write and maintain practical guidance for SEO, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, and update it as the evidence changes.

Diagnose organic performance declines and algorithm or AI-platform changes. Separate a reporting bug or technical problem from a broader shift, and lead specific recovery plans with accountable owners, built with the Content Leads rather than handed to them.

Shape the technical search roadmap with Product and Engineering across crawlability, indexation, information architecture, internal linking, structured data, and site templates.

Translate technical findings into clear requirements for Engineering, and verify the impact of completed work.

Build search and discovery considerations into content planning, publishing workflows, and site changes.

Run focused tests with Content and Communications to understand how authoritative content, YouTube, social, community participation and earned mentions contribute to discovery.

Make performance clear and actionable

Maintain accurate operational reporting using agreed measures for organic traffic, engagement and conversions, AI visibility (citations and share of voice), sponsorship deliverables, delivery quality and capacity. Distinguish visibility signals from attributable business outcomes, and supply delivery and performance data for commercial leadership's business reviews.

Improve reporting accuracy and consistency with analytics and technical partners.

Lead weekly operating reviews and monthly reviews by business segment, turning findings into recommendations for Content, Product, Communications, and Sales.

Maintain practical internal guidance for organic and AI search. Educate the teams doing the work on algorithm changes, AI-search developments, tools and results through concise updates and a monthly best-practices session that changes what people do the following week.

Develop the existing team and coordinate execution

Develop the existing organic growth and publishing organization through coaching, clear objectives, and regular feedback. Build stronger analytical judgment, management capability and accountability for completed work.

Turn the roadmap into clear assignments, realistic timelines and measurable objectives for each person on the team.

Align priorities with Content Leads and business leaders before work begins. Resolve routine sequencing and staffing tradeoffs within agreed roadmaps and capacity. Escalate conflicts that change portfolio priorities, require additional budget or headcount, or put client commitments at risk to the VP, Content, and the relevant business owner. Bring evidence, options, and a recommendation.

Present performance, risks, and recommendations to senior leadership.

Improve operations and automation

Manage the Organic Growth tool stack and vendor relationships within the approved budget. Evaluate tools on usefulness, adoption and performance, and recommend renewals or changes supported by measurable value. Obtain leadership approval for additional investment or commitments outside the approved budget.

Establish clear workflows and quality standards across scoping, publishing, and delivery, while protecting editorial credibility.

What We're Looking For...

Deep search expertise. You typically have 7+ years in organic growth for a content publisher, affiliate, or lead-generation business. You have a record of translating organic growth into business results, including diagnosing technical issues and responding to major performance changes.

Practical AI-search experience. You have done AEO and GEO experimentation and measurement (with Profound or a comparable platform). You understand how AI Overviews and LLM answer engines select their sources, and you have a clear view of what the evidence can and cannot prove.

Hands-on analytical judgment. You work directly in Google Search Console, GA4, Looker Studio, crawl tools such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Semrush, and AI-visibility platforms. You can tell a reporting bug from a ranking loss in hours rather than weeks, and you write remediation plans someone else can execute.

Technical depth. You understand crawl, indexing, structured data, and CMS platforms such as WordPress well enough to set the roadmap with Engineering and know when a fix is real.

Team leadership. You have led and developed teams, including managers. You can coordinate specialists across editorial, product, and technical functions, getting priorities agreed before work starts and holding the line when they change.

Clear communication. You write recommendations that fit on one page and can tell a performance story to senior leadership. You can defend a recommendation while staying close to execution.

Execution through change. You are comfortable working through ambiguity, implementing agreed priorities and workflows, and helping the existing team adopt new tools and responsibilities. You provide recommendations on capacity and process improvements; broader organizational design and changes to the operating model remain with senior leadership.

Bonus Points...

Experience with sponsorship or advertiser-funded content programs, or in agency and services businesses.

Experience monetizing organic audiences beyond affiliate revenue through AEO or GEO programs and content partnerships.

Using AI and automation (for example, n8n, Airtable, or Zapier) to make growth, reporting, or publishing workflows more effective across multiple brands.

Conference speaking or published thinking on AI search.

Multi-brand experience across verticals such as home services, insurance, senior care, security, e-commerce, or B2B.

Experience partnering with editorial teams on content quality, authority, and audience needs.

Familiarity with discovery opportunities acr