Visibility Is the New SEO
Lindsay Boyajian Hagan is VP Marketing and Co-Head Revenue at Conductor, the AEO and SEO platform she has helped build for nearly a decade. She led Conductor’s post-WeWork management buyout, its $150M in capital raises, and the repositioning of SEO from a tactical corner of the marketing stack to the most strategic pillar in the business.
“The average AI search prompt is 23 words. Brands with strong content foundations are positioned.”
Lindsay Boyajian Hagan is VP Marketing and Co-Head Revenue at Conductor, the all-in-one AEO, SEO, and real-time website monitoring platform. She has been at Conductor for nearly a decade, having joined as Senior Product Marketing Manager in May 2017, before being acquired into WeWork, leading the post-WeWork spinout transition as Senior Director of Marketing, and building through the VP Marketing and Co-Head Revenue role.
Lindsay’s career began with her own startup, followed by the augmented reality company Augment in Paris, which she ran US expansion for from an NYC office. That foundational experience of taking a Salesforce-backed tech startup into a new market shaped her approach to product-led B2B growth. At Conductor, she has been present through every major transition: the WeWork acquisition, the management buyout, two significant capital raises ($150 million in total), two post-M&A integrations with ContentKing and Searchmetrics, and the launch of the Conductor AI platform for AI engine visibility.
Her core argument about the current market moment is structural. The average AI search prompt is 23 words. In traditional search, it was five. AI engines are taking ownership of much more of the customer journey: the research, the shortlisting, the recommendation, and increasingly the purchase. Brands that have invested in good content foundations and strong SEO are well-positioned because that content is what AI models are drawing on. Brands that have not are watching web traffic fall by between 5% and 30% with no clear playbook. AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, is what Lindsay calls the new strategic priority, and it is now a CEO-level conversation rather than an SEO team concern.
“SEO teams used to be the janitors. They cleaned up after the content team. with AEO that team is now the most strategic pillar in the business.”
“Fortune 500 CEOs are calling saying AI visibility is their number one priority.”
Lindsay’s central argument is that the shift from traditional search to AI engines is not a marginal change in traffic patterns. It is a structural change in where the customer journey begins and ends. AI engines are taking ownership of research, synthesis, shortlisting, and recommendation. Brands that are not cited in the AI answer are effectively invisible at the moment of consideration. The companies best positioned are the ones with deep, credible, topic-authoritative content because that is what the AI models draw on. The AEO conversation has moved from the SEO team to the boardroom because the stakes are now existential.
“I am looking for full-stack marketers who are already using AI in their own workflows.”
Lindsay’s hiring shift over the last two years is a direct response to what AI has done to the scope of the marketing function. N8N hackathons on the team, individual exploration of every AI tool, willingness to test and iterate: these are now baseline expectations rather than advanced skills. The marketer who treats AI as a threat is falling behind the marketer who treats it as the most powerful productivity tool they have ever had access to. She distinguishes this from replacing expertise: the human knowledge of the audience, the strategy, the brand voice are still essential. AI makes the execution faster and broader. The full-stack marketer is the one who can do both.
“Every brand has amazing wisdom in its people. We help brands turn that wisdom into content that performs.”
Lindsay’s product narrative for Conductor is built around a belief that the most valuable content asset any brand has is the expertise and experience of its own people. That wisdom is not in the tools. It is in the heads of the practitioners, the engineers, the founders, the customer success managers who have solved the same problem hundreds of times. Conductor’s job is to help organisations surface that wisdom, translate it into content that answers the questions their prospects are asking, and make sure that content shows up in the AI engines that are now mediating the customer journey. The people mission, helping marketers grow their careers alongside the customer mission, is how that brand value compounds over time.
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