{
  "name": "Sale Solution — AI-search role map",
  "description": "Career paths for the AI-search disciplines (SEO, GEO, AEO, AI search, citation engineering, AI visibility), as a dependency graph of skill modules by seniority. Multi-vertical: industrial e-commerce, home services, dental.",
  "source": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse with attribution and a link back to the source URL.",
  "paths": [
    {
      "slug": "aeo-specialist",
      "title": "AEO Specialist",
      "kind": "role",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/aeo-specialist/",
      "prerequisites": [
        "seo-specialist",
        "geo-specialist"
      ],
      "leadsTo": [
        "ai-search-specialist"
      ],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Pull the real questions buyers actually ask",
          "skill": "Build the list of questions your buyers type into an AI assistant, from real sources, not from a keyword tool.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Check whether you are the answer right now",
          "skill": "Run your buyer questions through the AI assistants and record, for each one, whether you are the answer, a footnote, or absent.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Spot which pages can be lifted as a clean answer",
          "skill": "Read one of your pages the way an engine does and judge whether a single self-contained passage answers the question without setup.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Make a page answer one question cleanly",
          "skill": "Restructure a page so one question gets one self-contained answer up front, with the supporting detail below it.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Fix the pattern once, across the whole site",
          "skill": "Work at the template level so one structural fix lands across every page built from the same pattern.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Mark up the page so engines trust the answer",
          "skill": "Add the right structured data and Q&A markup so engines can read the answer with confidence, and put spec data in HTML they can parse.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Measure answer-share, not rankings",
          "skill": "Track answer rate, mention rate, and share of voice across several engines against named competitors, on a schedule.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Govern what the machine says about you",
          "skill": "Run a standing process that catches when an AI states your facts wrong or credits a rival, and gets it corrected.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 9,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Set the standard the rest of the search program runs on",
          "skill": "Make answer-accuracy and answer-share a defined standard with owners and a measurement framework, so AEO is not one person's side project.",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "ai-search-specialist",
      "title": "AI Search Specialist",
      "kind": "role",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/ai-search-specialist/",
      "prerequisites": [
        "seo-specialist",
        "geo-specialist"
      ],
      "leadsTo": [],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Get the fundamentals solid before you touch AI search",
          "skill": "Do the classic SEO work everything else sits on: on-page basics, internal links, and a site that crawls cleanly (bots can move through your pages without hitting dead ends).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Understand how AI engines pick a source, not just how Google ranks",
          "skill": "Explain in plain terms how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews retrieve and cite sources, and how that differs from Google ranking a list of links.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Run a prompt audit and find out what AI says about you now",
          "skill": "Build a small set of real buyer questions, ask them across the main engines, and record where you're mentioned, cited, or absent next to competitors.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Run rankings and AI visibility as one roadmap",
          "skill": "Manage classic SEO and AI-search work from a single plan, because the technical groundwork for both is mostly the same data and the same page templates.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Use AI to produce at scale without shipping duplicate content",
          "skill": "Use AI tools to draft and clean up content at volume, while killing the near-duplicate pages that engines have nothing to choose between (duplicate content means pages so alike a search engine treats them as copies).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Win the questions only you can answer",
          "skill": "Find the high-intent questions with no good AI source yet, and publish your answer as flat, crawlable HTML an engine can lift.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Make sure engines and crawlers can actually reach you",
          "skill": "Find and clear the blockers that hide a site from AI engines: login walls, broken rendering, and bot rules that turn away the crawlers (the bots that fetch your pages to ground a cited answer).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Report blended visibility and brief leadership through AI Overviews loss",
          "skill": "Put Google rankings and traffic next to AI mention and citation share in one report, and explain to leadership what AI Overviews actually took and what it replaced (citation share is how often the AI answer names or links you versus competitors).",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "geo-specialist",
      "title": "GEO Specialist",
      "kind": "role",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/geo-specialist/",
      "prerequisites": [
        "seo-specialist"
      ],
      "leadsTo": [
        "aeo-specialist",
        "citation-engineer",
        "ai-search-specialist"
      ],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Understand how an AI answer actually gets built",
          "skill": "Explain, in plain terms, how an AI assistant turns a question into a sourced answer. It pulls a handful of pages it can find and trust, lifts passages from them, and names a few as sources. Being one of those named sources is the whole job.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Run a prompt audit so you know your starting point",
          "skill": "Run a prompt audit (asking the engines the same questions your buyers ask and writing down what comes back). Note who gets mentioned, who gets cited by name, and where the brand is simply absent. This is your before picture.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Prove the AI crawlers can reach your pages",
          "skill": "Confirm the AI crawlers (the bots that fetch pages for AI answers, like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot) can actually load the pages you care about. This is the precondition for everything else, and it's usually the first thing you check for a new client.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Make your key content something an engine can lift",
          "skill": "Put the facts that matter into plain HTML the bot reads on arrival, not behind a PDF or a JavaScript widget it has to run first. Serving the finished HTML up front is called server-side rendering. An engine can only quote what it can read.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Build a consistent entity picture of the brand",
          "skill": "Make the core facts about the business line up everywhere an engine looks: your own pages, manufacturer pages, directories, and reference sites. That means who you are, what you sell or treat, which brands you carry, and where you operate. Facts that agree across sources is how an engine decides you're trustworthy. The plain name for this is entity consistency.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Roll out structured data at template scale",
          "skill": "Add structured data (a hidden, machine-readable summary of the page, usually written as JSON-LD) so search and AI engines know exactly what each page is. Apply it through the template, not page by page. On a big site the unit of work is the template, so one fix lands on every page built from it.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Measure what you can't rank for",
          "skill": "Track the metrics that fit AI search instead of rankings: how often the brand gets mentioned, how often it gets cited by name, and its share of voice (its slice of the answers compared to named competitors). Run a fixed set of real buyer prompts on a schedule and watch those numbers move.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Set the strategy, govern accuracy, and teach the org",
          "skill": "Decide how effort splits between classic SEO and GEO, own the measurement framework, govern what the engines say about the brand (especially where wrong answers are dangerous), and teach the rest of the organization how AI search works. At this level GEO is a leadership and teaching function, not just execution.",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "seo-specialist",
      "title": "SEO Specialist",
      "kind": "role",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/seo-specialist/",
      "prerequisites": [],
      "leadsTo": [
        "technical-seo-specialist",
        "geo-specialist"
      ],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Find the queries that actually bring buyers",
          "skill": "Do keyword research (finding the exact words people type into search) and tell the high-intent queries from the curiosity ones.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Match each page to what the searcher wants",
          "skill": "Read search intent (what the person is really trying to do) and put the right kind of page in front of it.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Write the title and description that wins the click",
          "skill": "Write the title tag and meta description (the blue headline and gray summary in search results) so people click yours over the others.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Fix the template, not the pages one by one",
          "skill": "Treat the template (the reusable layout behind a whole set of pages) as the unit of work. One fix improves every page built from it.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Kill the duplicate content the catalog creates",
          "skill": "Find and fix near-identical pages (duplicate content) so engines do not see your site as a pile of copies.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Build the pages that should exist (and link them)",
          "skill": "Find the gaps where buyers search but you have no page, build those pages, and connect them with internal links (links from one page on your site to another).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Make the catalog buildable: SEO depends on the product data",
          "skill": "Work with the product data so the pages SEO needs can be built at all. The system that holds it is the PIM (product information management, the central store for every product's attributes).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Own the program, prove it, and get cited in AI answers",
          "skill": "Set the search strategy for the whole site, report on the numbers that matter, and extend the work to AI search so engines quote you, not just rank you.",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "ai-visibility-analyst",
      "title": "AI Visibility Analyst",
      "kind": "specialization",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/ai-visibility-analyst/",
      "prerequisites": [],
      "leadsTo": [
        "geo-specialist",
        "ai-search-specialist"
      ],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Build a prompt panel from questions your buyers actually ask",
          "skill": "Assemble a prompt panel (a fixed set of real buyer questions you run on a schedule) so you can watch what the answer engines say over time, not just once.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Read the visibility tools and know what each one actually counts",
          "skill": "Use the AI-visibility tools well enough to pull a number, and know what each one means by \"visibility\" before you quote it to anyone.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Catch the answers that are wrong about your business",
          "skill": "Log every AI answer that's wrong or credited to the wrong source: the fact stated incorrectly, the engine, the prompt, and the correct fact beside it.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Measure mentions, citations, and share of voice, and know the difference",
          "skill": "Track three separate things against named competitors: how often you come up (mentions), how often you're the linked source (citations), and your slice of the answers overall (AI share of voice).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Diagnose why a competitor wins the answer and you don't",
          "skill": "Take a prompt where a competitor is cited and you're absent, and explain in one line why, so the diagnosis points straight at a fix.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Turn the monitoring into a prioritized fix list",
          "skill": "Convert the panel's results into a ranked list of fixes the GEO or content work can execute, ordered by stakes and effort, not by what's easiest to spot.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Define what AI share of voice means for this business",
          "skill": "Set the measurement framework (what counts, against whom, on what cadence) and report it to a buyer who has never seen an AI-visibility number before.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Govern the accuracy of what engines say, as a repair loop, not an audit",
          "skill": "Run accuracy governance as an ongoing loop: monitor what engines say about high-stakes facts, get the wrong ones corrected at the source, and re-check that the correction stuck.",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "citation-engineer",
      "title": "Citation Engineer",
      "kind": "specialization",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/citation-engineer/",
      "prerequisites": [
        "geo-specialist"
      ],
      "leadsTo": [],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Write a fact an AI can lift cleanly",
          "skill": "Take one claim on a page and rewrite it so an AI can extract it whole, with the answer right next to the question, no hunting through paragraphs.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Mark up the fact so a machine reads it for sure",
          "skill": "Add schema markup (hidden labels in the page code that tell a machine what each fact is) so a price, a rating, or a service is unambiguous, not just guessed from the words.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Confirm the AI crawlers can even reach the fact",
          "skill": "Check that the bots behind AI answers, like GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot, are allowed to fetch the page, and that the fact loads in plain HTML without a login or a click.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Structure facts at template scale, not page by page",
          "skill": "Apply the clean-chunk and markup pattern through the template that builds thousands of pages, so a fix lands once and corrects every page it touches.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Build the outside corroboration that earns trust",
          "skill": "Seed and align the facts about your brand across third-party sources, so an AI sees the same claim in more than one place and treats it as true.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Build the reference asset competitors can't fake",
          "skill": "Create and maintain the citable dataset only you can produce, like a cross-reference table or a compatibility guide, structured so AI reaches for it as the source.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Run citation as a program, not a list of fixes",
          "skill": "Decide which facts and queries are worth winning, monitor where the brand is named (and where competitors are), and feed that back into the next round of work.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Catch and repair what the AI gets wrong",
          "skill": "Watch for hallucinations and stale facts (an AI stating something false or out-of-date about the brand), trace them to a source, and fix the source so the answer corrects itself.",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "slug": "technical-seo-specialist",
      "title": "Technical SEO Specialist",
      "kind": "specialization",
      "level": "Entry → Senior",
      "url": "https://salesolution.net/career-paths/technical-seo-specialist/",
      "prerequisites": [
        "seo-specialist"
      ],
      "leadsTo": [
        "geo-specialist"
      ],
      "modules": [
        {
          "n": 1,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Find every page that should rank, and make it reachable",
          "skill": "Make sure bots can actually reach every page you want found, and that none are orphaned (stranded with no links pointing to them).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 2,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "See which bots actually visit you",
          "skill": "Read your server logs (the record your site keeps of every visit) to see which bots reach which pages.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 3,
          "level": "Entry",
          "title": "Check that AI bots can reach your pages",
          "skill": "Confirm the AI crawlers can actually load your important pages. This is usually the first thing you hand a client.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 4,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Keep junk pages from wasting crawl budget",
          "skill": "Stop the site from creating thousands of near-empty pages that waste a bot’s crawl budget (the limited time it spends on your site).",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 5,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Make sure a bot can read the page",
          "skill": "Put your key content in HTML the bot reads on arrival, not behind JavaScript it has to run first. (Serving the finished HTML up front is called server-side rendering.)",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 6,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Be fast, especially on phones",
          "skill": "Keep pages fast on a mid-range phone, where most local and home-services searches happen. The yardstick is Core Web Vitals (Google’s page-speed and stability scores).",
          "weight": "flexible"
        },
        {
          "n": 7,
          "level": "Mid",
          "title": "Mark up the page so engines understand it",
          "skill": "Add structured data (a hidden, machine-readable summary of the page) so search and AI engines know what the page is.",
          "weight": "core"
        },
        {
          "n": 8,
          "level": "Senior",
          "title": "Don’t lose your rankings in a site rebuild",
          "skill": "Carry your rankings safely through a replatform (a full site rebuild on a new platform). It is the riskiest moment in the job.",
          "weight": "core"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}