Full-Time
Account Executive Manager
Updated on 9/3/2026
BrightEdge
501-1,000 employees
Enterprise SEO and content marketing SaaS
No salary listed
Chicago, IL, USA
Hybrid
Three days on-site per week required.
 Sales & Account Management (1) |
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- 5–10 years of SaaS sales experience, including at least 1+ years in a frontline management or team lead capacity
- Proven track record of leading Account Executives who close enterprise or upper mid-market level deals
- Strong understanding of complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles within digital marketing, analytics, or MarTech
- Skilled at developing sales talent—coaching reps through discovery, business case development, and negotiation
- Excellent communication, forecasting, and operational rigor
- Experience using Salesforce and sales productivity tools (Gong, Outreach, Clari, etc.)
- Strategic thinker who can balance short-term execution with long-term team scaling
- Must be working in high-velocity sales environment on either a monthly or quarterly quota
- This position is in-office 3 days / week
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of 4 Enterprise and Upper Mid-Market Account Executives to exceed monthly sales targets
- Drive accountability through consistent pipeline management, forecast accuracy, and deal inspection in Salesforce
- Participate in high-value enterprise deals by providing strategic direction, executive presence, and negotiation support
- Conduct regular 1:1s and team sessions focused on skills development, prospecting discipline, and effective value-based selling
- Analyze performance, identify market opportunities, and implement data-driven sales plans
- Recruit, onboard, and ramp new sales hires to ensure rapid productivity
BrightEdge is an enterprise SaaS platform for SEO and content marketing. It helps large businesses improve their online presence by discovering what customers search for, researching keywords, and optimizing content across web and mobile. The platform combines data-driven insights (DataMind), keyword research tools, and Mobile Connect to guide content creation, optimization, and performance tracking. Unlike many competitors that target smaller teams, BrightEdge focuses on big organizations and marketing departments, serving top online retailers, hotel groups, tech companies, and many Fortune 100 clients. Its goal is to boost search visibility, engage customers more effectively, and lift ROI from SEO and content marketing by providing actionable recommendations and real-time performance metrics.
Company Size
501-1,000
Company Stage
Series D
Total Funding
$61.9M
Headquarters
Foster City, California
Founded
2007
Get referred to BrightEdge
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- BrightEdge says 97% of top 20,000 websites lack Markdown for agents, creating demand.
- Arm cut agent payloads 90% after Agent Edge, and verified traffic doubled.
- Bloomfire reported 30% higher direct AI referral traffic after implementation.
What critics are saying
- OpenAI drives 95% of agent traffic, making BrightEdge hostage to one vendor.
- Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic can bundle agent-optimization features into native products by 2027.
- Layoff trackers flagged a June 1, 2026 global cut, signaling cost pressure and churn.
What makes BrightEdge unique
- Agent Edge, launched August 26, 2026, targets AI-agent discovery before competitors.
- AI Hyper Cube and AI Agent Insights unify SEO, AI search, and agent traffic.
- BrightEdge’s 2026 research spans hundreds of millions of queries and billions of datapoints.
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Benefits
Medical / Dental / Vision Insurance
15-23 days Paid Time Off (PTO) annually
Stock Options
401(k)
6 Weeks Paid Maternity Leave
4 Weeks Paid Paternity Leave
Competitive Salaries
SEO Certification Courses
Team Events & Socials
Free Friday Lunches
Fully Stocked Kitchen
Collaborative Work Environments
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 5%1 year growth
↑ 5%2 year growth
↑ 4%97% of top websites aren't ready for AI Agents. BrightEdge launches new platform Agent Edge to change that. Agent Edge helps enterprises optimize the point of interaction with AI agents across search, AI answers and agent-led discovery. BrightEdge, the global leader in AI-powered organic search, today announced its new search solution Agent Edge, designed to help brands understand, optimize and act on the rapidly growing interactions between AI agents and enterprise websites. AI agents are evolving from systems that simply retrieve information into increasingly capable digital assistants that research products, compare options, check availability and take multiple steps on behalf of people. BrightEdge believes these interactions are creating a "Second Web" - a new layer of access that creates a second audience for enterprise content: AI agents acting on a person's behalf, often before that person ever visits the brand's website, not a replacement for the web built for people or search engines. The Second Web and The Point of Interaction At the center of the Second Web is a new point of interaction between the brand and the agent. As AI systems gain more autonomy, the quality of that interaction can influence what information an agent finds, how efficiently it understands a brand and whether that brand ultimately becomes part of an AI-generated recommendation. Yet most enterprises are not prepared for this shift. BrightEdge research found that 97% of the top 20,000 websites are not currently set up to serve AI agents in optimized formats such as Markdown, which can significantly reduce the amount of content an agent needs to process. In separate BrightEdge research analyzing ChatGPT recommendations across nine industry categories from June 2025 to June 2026, ChatGPT was found to be researching more but recommending less: the number of sources it cited per answer nearly doubled (+89%), while the number of brands it recommended fell by around 25%. E-commerce saw the steepest decline, with recommendations dropping from roughly six brands to four, while B2B tech held steady at around four. More than half (61%) of the sites analyzed have implemented schema, an important foundation for helping machines understand website content. But schema alone does not create an agent-optimized experience. Only a small fraction of sites have taken the additional step of serving content specifically designed for AI agent consumption, with early adopters including WordPress, Cloudflare, Linktree and Zendesk. "AI agents are getting dramatically better at doing the work people once had to do themselves," said Jim Yu, CEO and co-founder of BrightEdge. "They are researching, comparing and taking action on our behalf, making the point of interaction between an agent and a brand increasingly critical. The companies that can understand and optimize those interactions will have a significant advantage as this second audience grows." Giving AI Agents a Faster Path to the Right Information Traditional websites were built for people and browsers, often requiring AI agents to process complex HTML, JavaScript, navigation and other elements that add little value to machine research. Agent Edge recognizes agent requests at the CDN layer and serves content in a format designed for how agents process information - minimizing wasted tokens and maximizing the value of the information delivered in each request. Aug 27, 2026 Prev Next 1 of 43,483 Agent Edge then uses BrightEdge intelligence to anticipate the questions an agent is likely to ask next and enrich the content with relevant, data-informed answers - building on the content brands have already invested in rather than requiring them to create a separate experience from scratch. Instead of forcing the agent to return repeatedly to fill in missing context, Agent Edge gives it a more complete response up front, reducing unnecessary processing and minimizing the number of requests needed to complete its research. In an early deployment with Arm, the semiconductor and software design company behind billions of devices, BrightEdge reduced the payload served to AI agents by approximately 90%. Within weeks, verified AI agent traffic to optimized content more than doubled and, on some pages, tripled. Another early Agent Edge customer, Bloomfire, saw a 30% lift in direct AI referral traffic following implementation, demonstrating how optimizing the agent experience can translate into measurable discovery and traffic gains. "We've spent years thinking about how people move through our content. Now we also have to think about how agents move through it," said Brian Zander, VP of Marketing for Bloomfire and early user of Agent Edge. "Agent Edge helps us understand where those interactions are happening, what information agents need, and how to make that experience more efficient without rebuilding the site around a new channel." Agent Edge puts the content brands have already invested in to work for AI agents without requiring a separate content operation. Like offering a translated menu to a traveler, it presents the same trusted information in a format designed for how agents consume it. From there, Agent Edge creates a continuous loop that helps brands: * Reveal the invisible audience: See which AI agents are interacting with the brand, what they are trying to access and how that behavior is changing. * Shape the interaction at the source: Optimize the point where agents meet the business, so they get the right information in the right format with less friction. * Turn existing content into an agent advantage: Extend the value of content brands have already created instead of building a separate AI content operation from scratch. * Connect agent performance to the broader search strategy: Bring agent interactions into the same intelligence layer as SEO and AI Search, so brands can optimize across all three rather than manage them in silos. Together, these capabilities give brands a way to actively shape performance across the Second Web while connecting it back to the search and AI investments already driving visibility today. Building for a Web That Is Still Taking Shape Agent Edge extends BrightEdge's Optimize Once, Win Everywhere vision by bringing agent-led discovery into the same platform brands already use to optimize traditional search and AI answers. Because these capabilities operate on one platform, the same content, data and intelligence can inform every surface - helping brands avoid fragmented strategies as search and agent behavior continue to evolve. "The Second Web will not be built all at once," Yu added. "It will emerge interaction by interaction as agents take on more responsibility for researching and acting on behalf of people. Our goal is to give brands one connected platform to understand and optimize those interactions as they evolve."
BrightEdge has launched Agent Edge, a platform designed to help enterprises optimise interactions between AI agents and their websites. The company's research found that 97% of the top 20,000 websites are not configured to serve AI agents in optimised formats such as Markdown. Separate research analysing ChatGPT recommendations across nine industries from June 2025 to June 2026 showed the AI researched more but recommended fewer brands. The number of sources cited per answer nearly doubled, whilst brand recommendations fell by roughly 25%. E-commerce saw recommendations drop from approximately six brands to four. BrightEdge found that 61% of sites have implemented schema markup, but only a small fraction serve content specifically designed for AI agent consumption. Early adopters include WordPress, Cloudflare, Linktree and Zendesk.
BrightEdge, an AI-powered enterprise SEO platform, reports that AI agent requests have reached 88% of human organic search activity and projects AI agents will surpass human-driven search by the end of 2026. AI agents currently account for approximately 15% of total website traffic, with 95% driven by OpenAI. The company warns that most brands remain unprepared for this shift. Only 19% of websites have specific directives for ChatGPT-related bots, whilst traditional analytics platforms like Google Analytics don't track this activity, leaving companies without visibility into how AI agents interact with their content. BrightEdge estimates that even if 80% of companies optimise correctly, the remaining 20% represents $40 billion in lost search opportunity. The company recently introduced AI Hyper Cube and AI Agent Insights to help organisations understand how brands appear in AI-driven search experiences.
BrightEdge launches AI Hyper Cube, pulling back the curtain on how brands show up in AI Search. As generative AI reshapes the buying journey, AI Hyper Cube reveals the hidden AI conversations shaping demand SAN MATEO, Calif. - MARCH 10, 2026 - BrightEdge, the global leader in enterprise SEO and AI-driven organic search intelligence, today announced AI Hyper Cube, a new platform designed to help brands understand and influence how they appear across AI-powered search and discovery environments like ChatGPT, Gemini, and other generative AI engines. "The companies that win in the next era of search will be the ones that understand how they appear in AI search and why," said Jim Yu, CEO at BrightEdge. "It's no longer just about visibility in search results. Brands need to know where they show up in AI-driven customer journeys, how those systems evaluate them, and which sources shape those outcomes so they can influence recommendations and capture demand." BrightEdge also introduced "AI Agent Insights," a new capability that gives brands visibility into how AI agents interact with their websites. AI Agent Insights helps marketers understand which AI systems are visiting their digital properties, what they are doing, and where they encounter technical friction, including blocked pages, broken paths, and other barriers that may limit visibility in an increasingly agent-driven web. Together, AI Hyper Cube and AI Agent Insights give organizations both an external view of how AI platforms represent their brands and an internal view of how AI agents access and experience their digital presence. A New Search Capability for the New Search Era However, most marketing and search tools were built for a pre-AI search environment, leaving brand leaders with little visibility into the hundreds of thousands of AI prompts shaping their category - including: * Which AI prompts mention their brand * What sources AI systems rely on when generating recommendations * How competitors appear alongside them in AI responses * Whether AI-generated narratives about their brand are positive, neutral, or negative * Where AI is amplifying older issues (e.g., outdated reviews, legacy news, historical controversies) into today's buying journey BrightEdge research shows that AI engines frequently rely on a concentrated set of sources when generating recommendations. In some industries, the top five publishers and platforms account for a quarter of all citations in AI-generated recommendations, significantly shaping how brands appear in AI responses. AI Hyper Cube addresses this, making AI-driven decisions visible, showing the prompts that matter, the sources that drive outcomes, and where brands appear or are missing across the AI customer journey. Rather than simply identifying platforms that matter, AI Hyper Cube pinpoints the exact content influencing AI recommendations. This allows companies to identify opportunities to win citations, influence recommendations, and strengthen brand presence in AI-driven discovery, while also diagnosing reputational and revenue risks. With AI Hyper Cube, organizations can analyze how they appear across the full AI-driven customer journey, answering three critical questions: * Which conversations are BrightEdge part of? * Who is starting these conversations? * How can BrightEdge get more visible and with the right story? This analysis helps brands identify where they are strong or missing across different stages of the journey and take more precise actions to influence AI recommendations and capture demand. By transforming AI search from an opaque environment into a measurable channel, AI Hyper Cube helps companies identify where they do and do not appear across the AI-driven research journey. The platform then translates those insights into actionable strategies across SEO, content, digital PR, and marketing - enabling brands to strengthen visibility in AI-driven discovery while continuing to optimize for traditional search performance. Transparency in the Algorithm Built on BrightEdge's extensive data platform, spanning hundreds of millions of queries and billions of data points across industries, AI Hyper Cube analyzes how brands appear across AI-driven discovery. For the first time, marketers can see which conversations drive demand at each stage of the AI customer journey, where their brands appear or are missing, and how AI systems evaluate them relative to competitors. AI Hyper Cube also reveals the exact sources shaping AI recommendations, enabling brands to understand precisely what content influences AI responses for important prompts. BrightEdge analysis shows that in some industries, the top five sources account for more than a quarter of AI-generated brand recommendations, and that citation visibility among those sources can shift by as much as 100% month-to-month, underscoring the need for continuous monitoring as AI systems evolve. With this level of visibility, organizations can identify where they are strong or underrepresented across the journey and prioritize actions across SEO, content, digital PR, and partnerships that will influence AI recommendations and capture demand. BrightEdge Spark: New Event Series on the Future of AI Search To mark the launch of AI Hyper Cube and explore the future of AI-driven discovery, BrightEdge is hosting Spark, an event series bringing together marketing leaders, AI experts, and digital strategists to discuss how generative AI is transforming search and brand discovery. The first Spark event will take place in San Francisco on March 10, followed by a second event in New York, on March 12. These events will feature discussions on how AI is reshaping search behavior, new data insights into AI-driven discovery, and demonstrations of how AI Hyper Cube helps brands navigate this new landscape. Additional information can be found at https://www.brightedge.com/Spark26-live About BrightEdge BrightEdge is the global leader in enterprise SEO and AI-powered content performance. For more than 18 years, BrightEdge has helped thousands of brands and digital marketers, including 57% of the Fortune 500, transform online opportunities into measurable business results. Its industry-first platform integrates the most comprehensive dataset in search, combining insights from traditional SEO, digital media, social, and content with cutting-edge generative AI capabilities, including its deep learning engine DataMind and AI Catalyst platform. Trusted by enterprises, mid-market companies, and leading digital agencies, BrightEdge continues to set the standard for innovation in search and AI, enabling brands to win by becoming an integral part of the digital experience. Tue, 03/10/2026 - 12:00
Ahead of Apple's WWDC, BrightEdge data reveals mobile AI web search remains open frontier.