Staff Data Scientist, SEO & AEO

More and more people start their search for a therapist on Google or in an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. We want Headway to be the most trusted place to research and find mental health care in both. You will be the data scientist who tells us what is working, why, and what to do next.

This is a senior individual contributor role supporting Patient Growth. You will report to a Data Science manager and work hand in hand with cross-functional partners including product, growth marketing, engineering, content, and design. Your core focus is driving new patients from search (SEO) and AI answers (AEO) and the surfaces that drive them: our homepage, directory pages, provider profiles, and earned media (PR, Affiliates, Reddit, YouTube, etc.).

Example questions you will own:

• Which bets are worth making, and how will we know if they worked?
• What should we stop doing because it is not paying off?
• How do we show up and get cited in AI answers?
• When traffic or patients changed, what moved them?
• Lead our measurement and testing strategy and execution. Combine our own data (e.g. Google Search Console, clickstream data, bookings) with outside sources (e.g. Ahrefs, agency partners) for a single source of truth. Design matched market and A/B tests.
• Answer key business and product questions. Which bets are worth making, and how will we know if they worked? What should we stop doing because it is not paying off? How do we show up and get cited in AI answers? When traffic or patients change, what drove the change?
• Automate the analysis loop. Build AI agents and workflows to tell us what’s working, what changed, what we should do next. Feed the results back into how we pick and write content.
• Raise the bar. Set standards for how organic growth gets measured across the team, and help partners and agencies separate signals from noise.

WHAT WILL MAKE YOU SUCCESSFUL

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