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Career paths intomodern AI-search.

Free reading lists for the roles that actually exist inside a B2B technical e-commerce team in 2026 — SEO, content strategy, citation engineering. Written by the operator running the client work, not by an influencer selling a cohort.

What these are

Reading lists, not courses. Written by the operator.

Each path is a structured walk through one role inside the new search stack — SEO, content strategy, citation engineering — written by the same person who runs paid client work. Same vocabulary, same trade-offs, no marketing gloss.

By.
Working operators currently shipping in industrial e-commerce — not platform influencers selling cohort courses.
Not.
A bootcamp. No live calls, no Discord, no recruiter pipeline. We don’t hire from these paths.
For.
Practitioners who learned SEO five years ago and want to know what changed when AI Overviews arrived.
Path shapev1.0
Format
Reading-first, ungated
Length
8–15 hours per path
Cadence
Self-paced, no deadline
Cost
Free — no signup

Note

Every chapter ends with a “test it on your own site” prompt. The point is the work, not the certificate.

The library

7 paths. All free, all self-paced.

Each path is a structured reading list with check-yourself prompts at the end of every chapter. No video lock-ins, no email-gate, no upsell ladder.

  1. Mid · Self-paced

    Read first

    AEO Specialist

    For · SEO/content leads owning answer-share and the accuracy of what AI says about safety-critical products

    For SEO and content leads moving from rankings to answer-share: being the answer an AI assistant gives when a buyer asks, and making sure that answer is right. In pressure ratings and chemical compatibility, a wrong answer is a liability, not a vanity metric.

    Open the path

  2. Mid · Self-paced

    AI Search Specialist

    For · the single search hire at a mid-size distributor — one program for rankings AND AI visibility

    One person, two jobs that are really one. At a mid-size distributor you are the whole search function: keep category pages ranking on Google, and get the catalog cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. Not a GEO-only specialist. Not an SEO who pretends answer engines don’t exist. The hybrid who does both.

    Open the path

  3. Entry · Self-paced

    AI Visibility Analyst

    For · analysts and SEOs running AI-visibility monitoring — the realistic first job in AI search

    The realistic first job in AI search, except it isn’t a job. It’s a function: you run the prompt panel that tells a distributor what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini say about its products right now — who gets cited, who gets ignored, where the answer is flat wrong about a pressure rating or a part number. The report it produces is the wake-up call that sells the fix.

    Open the path

  4. Mid · Self-paced

    SEO Specialist

    For · SEOs at industrial distributors working 100K-SKU catalogs

    SEO for an industrial distributor is the SEO you know, bent around a catalog no generic SEO has ever touched. The unit of work is the template, not the page — one fix lands across 200,000 SKUs. And the money queries are part numbers your keyword tool swears have zero volume.

    Open the path

  5. Entry → Senior · Self-paced

    Technical SEO Specialist

    For · Technical SEOs and SEO engineers on large or multi-location sites

    Technical SEO is the plumbing that decides whether search bots and AI bots can find, read, and trust your pages. This path is the role at scale: what to master from Entry to Senior, whether you run a big distributor catalog, a multi-location home-services site, or a dental group with several offices.

    Open the path

  6. Mid · Self-paced

    Citation Engineer

    For · GEO and content engineers

    Getting AI engines to name your domain as the source. The citation-focused slice of GEO — not local-SEO “citation building” — built on the reference data a distributor already owns but never publishes.

    Open the path

  7. Mid · Self-paced

    GEO Specialist

    For · SEOs moving into AI search

    For SEOs who already rank on Google and now have to get the catalog cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. Schema, entities, crawler access, visibility testing — on an industrial catalog, not a blog.

    Open the path

15 minutes. The one constraint.

Book a 15-minute strategy call. No sales pitch — we’ll name the single constraint capping your growth right now and the one change with the highest payback.