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September 24, 2026

Ten Job Titles, Two Right Answers Each

On 14 September 2026 I counted ten growth, SEO and AI-search job titles twice — once by exact phrase, once by keyword match — and pulled every published salary figure for each. One title returned zero postings on one board and 10,000+ on another. Two salary sources disagree by 3.5x on the same title. The living version lets you check all ten.

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By Mitchell Miller · ~4 min read · job market / measurement / AI search

TL;DR

  • 0 against 10,000+. "Growth Operations Engineer" returned zero results on SimplyHired's exact-phrase US search on 14 September 2026 — the page says so in a sentence — while LinkedIn's public guest search claimed 10,000+ for the same three words on the same day.
  • $101,752 against $359,824. Two salary sources publish a median for "Growth Engineer". They are 3.5x apart. Glassdoor's figure rests on 38 self-reported salaries.
  • 12.2% to 20.3% in six months. The share of SEO job ads naming AI search, GEO or AEO nearly doubled between December 2025 and June 2026, across a study of 328,650 marketing postings — and those postings carry a median $117,500 against $97,500 for ones that don't.

Open the artifact, not the summary

Click any of the ten titles for every board count, every published pay figure and every dated signal, then jump to its section. The sources drawer dates all 21. Open the full-screen version if the frame is cut off.

The floor

Nineteen. That is how many US postings SimplyHired returned for the exact phrase "director of SEO" on 14 September 2026. Built In returned zero. Reading: the title most often used for senior organic-search ownership is, as a literal string employers type, rare.

The ceiling

LinkedIn's public guest search returned 3,000+ for the same words on the same day — 158 times the exact-phrase count. Its own topic page, for the adjacent phrase, returned a much tighter 74. Reading: job board counts are not one measurement. A round ceiling and a literal count answer different questions, and only one of them is countable.

The zero

Nine of the ten titles have a floor. Growth Operations Engineer has none: SimplyHired states plainly that it could not find any such job in the United States, while LinkedIn showed 10,000+. Reading: this is job-description language, not a title people are hired under. It describes work accurately and costs you the search.

The disagreement

Ask what a growth engineer salary is and you get four answers. ZipRecruiter returns $101,752 on one of its own URL slugs and $146,868 on another. GTME Pulse, working from Levels.fyi, lands at $160,000. Glassdoor says $359,824 from a sample of 38. End to end, the published band for this one title runs $84,000 to $503,754. Reading: do not average these. The spread is the finding, and it is widest where the title is least standardised.

The one that is actually growing

GTM Engineer jobs are the only title in the set with a growth rate measured on the title itself and quotable from its live source. GTME Pulse states, as the page reads today: "GTM Engineer job postings grew 205% year-over-year from 2024 to 2025," and "As of March 2026, there are more than 3,000 open GTM Engineer roles across major job boards." (Rome Thorndike, March 2026; re-checked 14 September 2026.) Its exact-phrase floor is 146, the second-highest here. Reading: when the floor and the trend agree, the title is real.

The payoff

Now the number that pays for the other five. In a study of 328,650 marketing postings collected over twelve months, 720 carried AI search, GEO or AEO directly in the job title — and 28% of those were Director, Head, VP, Principal or Lead, against 15% for standard SEO titles. Across 13,779 postings with advertised salaries, naming AI-search skills was worth a 20.5% median premium.

Reading: AI search job titles are not a junior specialism being bolted onto marketing. They are being hired at the level where budget is set, and they pay more before anyone has agreed what to call them. That is the window, and windows close when the vocabulary settles.

How to read these numbers

  • The LinkedIn figures are placeholders, not counts. All ten titles returned a round "X,000+" from the public guest search, including titles with one real posting or none. They do not track rarity, so every gap shown is a lower bound rather than a measurement.
  • The floor is a literal count. Exact phrase, United States, one board, one day. A zero is a real zero, and a floor, not a total: adjacent titles are not in it.
  • Nothing is averaged. Where sources disagree on pay, the artifact shows both ends and prints the distance. Two titles have no title-specific pay data at all; their figures are proxies from an adjacent title, marked thin data wherever they appear.
  • There is no Google Trends data here. The public explore page rate-limited during the research window, so relative interest is absent from every title rather than present for some.
  • One count is not a count of titles. The Head of AEO/GEO figure of 435 counts postings where AEO and GEO both appear anywhere, so it is labelled mentions, not titles and held out of the ranking rather than allowed to top it.
  • One claim was withdrawn, not caveated. A widely-repeated 127% growth figure for RevOps traces to one trade article citing a report with no link and no methodology. That dataset could not be reached, so the figure appears nowhere on the artifact.
  • Two measurements and a signal. The outer rings count how many jobs exist and what they pay, each as a floor and a ceiling. The inner ring is a dated signal, not a measurement: one title in ten has a growth rate measured on the title itself, one has a dated count of AI-search titles, four carry a whole-category figure, and the other four say not measured, or claim pulled.

FAQ

How many Director of SEO jobs are open in the US?

Nineteen matched the exact phrase on SimplyHired on 14 September 2026, and zero on Built In. LinkedIn's guest search showed 3,000+ for the same words, but that is a loose keyword match, not a title count. Treat the literal count as a floor and the keyword count as an upper bound on a different question.

Why do salary sites disagree about growth engineer pay?

Because they are measuring different populations under one label. ZipRecruiter's national averages, Glassdoor's self-reported sample of 38, and Levels.fyi-derived total compensation including equity are three different things. For Growth Engineer they land $101,752, $359,824 and $160,000. Read the band, not a single figure.

Which growth or AI-search job title is actually growing?

GTM Engineer is the only one in this set with a growth rate measured on the title itself. Its cited source states that GTM Engineer postings "grew 205% year-over-year from 2024 to 2025" and that "as of March 2026, there are more than 3,000 open GTM Engineer roles across major job boards" (GTME Pulse, March 2026, re-checked 14 September 2026). Six of the ten titles have no dated growth figure at all, and three of the rest measure a whole category rather than the title.

Sources

Every figure above, and every figure on the artifact, carries its source and retrieval date in the artifact's sources drawer. The load-bearing ones:

The remaining nine sources — Salary.com, Robert Half, Growth.Talent, Agents for Hire, CRM Today, JobsPikr, ALM Corp citing Semrush, GTM 8020 and Kalungi — are listed with dates inside the artifact.

Share this with someone who is about to pick a job title for their resume. Send them the living version and let them check their own title: /viz/growth-title-market/

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Selections may be reviewed in aggregate to understand which paths are getting interest.

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