Jay Egger
What I Do
I do SEO and AI search, and I care most about the part after the click: whether the visit turns into a sale, a signup or an application. I've done it on both ends. At Static Media and Dotdash it was publishers, where the job is getting a lot of people to the right article. At SBG Funding it's business financing, where there are fewer visits but each one is worth a lot more. Day to day that's search strategy, landing pages, content, AI answers, and the Python and SQL that tie it all back to revenue.
Recent
- SBG Funding · Senior SEO Manager · 2024–present: Organic search for a business financing company, where search brings in about $1.5M a year in revenue we can trace. When a 2026 Google update took out most of our lifestyle traffic, applications went up anyway, because we'd moved the work to pages built to convert. The best of those pages gets visitors to start an application about twice as often as the average landing page, applications from AI answers tripled in three months, and I rebuilt the tracking so 48% more applications get credited to search. The monthly reporting runs itself (Python, BigQuery, GitHub Actions).
- Static Media · Senior Director, Growth & Strategy · 2021–2024: Ran SEO and content strategy across 21 sites, including Tasting Table, Slashgear and House Digest. Organic traffic grew 239% to a peak of 103M monthly sessions while we went from 8 sites to 21 through acquisitions. Launched House Digest from zero to 22M monthly sessions, grew Tasting Table 1,690% and Slashgear 667% after we bought them, and led E-E-A-T work across the network.
- Dotdash · Senior Analyst, Growth & Strategy · 2019–2021: SEO for The Spruce Eats (45M monthly sessions) and Simply Recipes (22M). Built Trend Bot, a Python tool on the Google Trends API that flags what to write about while searches are still climbing, which the team still uses.
Off the clock
I'm a huge reader (right now that's the Western canon, Homer to Woolf, and I'm logging every book). I also play Riftbound and League of Legends, and naturally built things for both: a collection manager and an in-game coach. Otherwise it's pool league, board games, and usually rap on.
Writing & research
I publish original research when I can. Most recently I checked the robots.txt files of 2,500 websites to see how they handle AI crawlers: about half the sites that block AI training also block ChatGPT search. I also built a free checker so you can see where your own site stands.