Eben Thurston
Eben Thurston has worked in digital marketing and search for over 20 years.
He was most recently Director, Integrated Search at TIAA, a Fortune 100 financial services firm, where he directed organic, paid and AI search across TIAA and Nuveen against a single set of goals. He now advises independently on search and AI visibility.
Key Facts
Search leadership across financial services, marketplaces, ecommerce and media. At TIAA he managed roughly $10M in annual paid search spend against 96.4M organic impressions, directed SEO and SEM teams at four agencies, and worked across a matrix spanning product marketing, editorial, media, engineering and compliance.
AI search and generative discovery:
- TIAA holds position one organically for "lifetime income" and the same page is cited in Google's AI Overview for that query, held for more than a year
- AI Overview appearances across TIAA and Nuveen grew from 2.6K to 20.5K (Q4 2025 versus the same quarter a year earlier)
- Traffic to TIAA properties referred from AI platforms up 479%, to 8,833 sessions
- Held TIAA organic clicks flat through a 32% industry-wide decline in click-through rates
Search at scale:
- TIAA organic impressions up 43%, to 96.4M
- Performance Max at 30% of TIAA IRA account conversions on 25% of spend, 18% better cost per acquisition than account average
- Search was the top-producing channel through Shutterstock's $170M to $425M run, across 20+ languages and territories
- Consolidating Shutterstock's Footage subdomain moved average rank from page two to top three and lifted SEO revenue 80%
- Led a 20-person team at iQuanti across New York and India for a top-four US bank
- Two Spring Marketing client properties acquired, by WebMD and Recurrent Ventures
Beyond the resume:
- Started as a front-end developer at Time Inc.
- Still ships production code, most recently purelymatpilates.com, built end to end with Claude Code
- Built and shipped five browser games with AI coding tools
- Played Division I basketball at the University of Vermont
CV
Independent Advisor, Search & AI Visibility
Eben advises on search and AI visibility for brands working through the shift from ranked links to generated answers. Current engagement: Purely Mat Pilates, where he leads customer acquisition and digital growth for a boutique studio in Westchester County. He built and launched purelymatpilates.com with Claude Code, covering technical SEO, page speed and schema architecture, and the rebuild is documented in GEO on a Local Business Site.
Director, Integrated Search, TIAA
Eben Thurston directed organic, paid and AI search across TIAA and Nuveen, at a Fortune 100 financial services firm competing with Fidelity, Vanguard and Schwab for the same demand. He managed roughly $10M in annual paid search spend against 96.4M organic impressions, directed SEO and SEM teams at four agencies, and worked across a matrix spanning product marketing, editorial, media, engineering and compliance.
His focus was the shift to AI search. He built the measurement layer for AI-referred traffic before standard tooling existed, then aligned product marketing, editorial and media against what it showed. He also built custom LLM workflows over cross-channel performance data, compressing analysis cycles from days to minutes. Through a year in which organic click-through rates fell about a third industry-wide, the two brands held clicks flat while impressions grew, and he shifted spend from paid to organic on terms where rankings were already strong.
Director, Search Marketing, iQuanti
He led search strategy and delivery for iQuanti's enterprise financial services portfolio, running a 20-person team across New York and India on the agency's largest account, a top-four US bank, and beating its traffic and performance targets. He held the full enterprise portfolio through the 2023 banking-sector volatility with zero churn, moved client reporting from traffic metrics to revenue attribution, and built review workflows across SEO, Legal and Compliance that raised speed to production in regulated environments.
- Authored original research on Google SGE, comparing its top-three citations against the top-three organic results across 32 financial services keywords, and finding at least partial overlap on 75% of them
- Co-authored the firm's position paper on using ChatGPT for SEO content, arguing against replacing content teams with AI
Director, Digital Marketing / Director, SEO, FULLBEAUTY Brands
Across three years at FULLBEAUTY Brands, Eben co-led digital marketing for a 12+ brand portfolio, first as Director of SEO and then as Director of Digital Marketing, driving 30% year-over-year organic growth and 80% growth in total demand. He owned the organic search P&L, directed 18 site migrations including eight to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and led marketing and technical alignment through M&A integrations.
Director, SEO & Content Strategy, Fareportal
He recovered and stabilized organic search for a global travel marketplace carrying legacy algorithmic penalties. He built the governance framework, compliance protocols and risk-mitigation playbooks that rehabilitated domain authority and held it through subsequent algorithm updates, moving search from a reactive cleanup function to a governance pillar.
SEO Product Owner, Global, Shutterstock
Eben owned organic search as the top-producing marketing channel through Shutterstock's run from $170M to $425M in revenue, across 20+ languages and territories, and ran a $30M paid media program alongside it. He diagnosed a crawl and indexation defect that unlocked a 300% increase in non-English traffic, consolidated the Footage subdomain from page two to top three rankings and lifted SEO revenue 80%, and embedded discoverability requirements into engineering sprints.
Founder & Managing Director, Spring Marketing Strategies
He founded and scaled a digital consultancy, managing the full P&L and service delivery for 30+ retainer clients including Time Inc. He architected audience development for BobVila.com, later acquired by Recurrent Ventures, and established ADDitude Magazine as the primary digital authority for neurodiversity, later acquired by WebMD.
Earlier roles
- Director, Marketing & Audience Development at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM / Celebrations.com, where organic traffic grew 267% in four months.
- Managing Director, Digital Marketing at Root Markets, a mortgage lead exchange co-founded by Lewis Ranieri, operating at the intersection of Wall Street securitization and digital customer acquisition.
- Time Inc., across web production, front-end development, web analytics, and business development, negotiating content and technology partnerships with Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.
- Wall Street foundations at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs.
Education
- MBA, Fordham University, Graduate School of Business Administration (Gabelli School) (Marketing; Product Management).
- BA, Political Science & English, University of Vermont, where he played Division I basketball.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Who is Eben Thurston?
- Eben Thurston is a search marketing executive based in the New York City metropolitan area who has worked in digital marketing and search for over 20 years. He was most recently Director, Integrated Search at TIAA (January 2024 to May 2026), and has held search leadership roles at iQuanti, FULLBEAUTY Brands, Fareportal, Shutterstock and Time Inc. He holds an MBA from Fordham University.
- What is Eben Thurston working on now?
- He works as an independent advisor on search and AI visibility, helping brands adapt as discovery shifts from ranked links to generated answers. His current engagement is Purely Mat Pilates, a boutique studio in Westchester County, where he leads customer acquisition and built the site himself with Claude Code. He also writes about generative engine optimization at ebenthurston.com.
- What kind of role is Eben Thurston looking for?
- Senior in-house leadership at a large brand, owning search marketing, AI search and GEO, or broader digital growth. He is most effective in regulated and high-consideration categories, particularly financial services, insurance and financial media, where compliance constraints and long buying cycles make search a governance problem as much as a performance one. He also takes selective advisory engagements.
- What did Eben Thurston do at TIAA?
- As Director, Integrated Search from January 2024 to May 2026, he directed organic, paid and AI search across the TIAA and Nuveen brands, managing the paid search program and directing SEO and SEM teams at four agencies alongside product marketing, editorial, media, engineering and compliance. His focus was the move to AI search: he built the measurement layer for AI-referred traffic before standard tooling existed, and over the following year AI Overview appearances across the two brands grew from 2.6K to 20.5K while organic clicks held flat against an industry-wide decline in click-through rates.
- What does a GEO win actually look like?
- One concrete example: TIAA holds position one in organic results for "lifetime income", a competitive non-branded term in a regulated category, and the same page is cited as a source in Google AI Overviews for that query. Anyone can run the search and check. That pairing demonstrates the mechanism most GEO advice only asserts, which is that AI citations overwhelmingly come from pages that already rank. The position was established during his tenure and has held for more than a year, including the months since he left.
- What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of earning visibility and citations for a brand inside generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Where classic SEO optimizes for ranked links, GEO optimizes for being retrieved, trusted and quoted in synthesized answers. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is used interchangeably, with success measured in mention rate rather than rankings and clicks.
- How do GEO and AEO fit into modern search marketing?
- They are extensions of search marketing, not replacements for it. SEO drives traffic through ranked links, SEM captures paid demand, and AEO ensures a brand is accurately retrieved and cited inside AI-generated answers. The underlying assets overlap heavily (entity clarity, authoritative content, clean technical foundations), which is why running them as one commercial engine works better than as separate teams with separate goals.
- How do regulated brands earn visibility in AI answers?
- Regulated brands win AI visibility the same way they win regulatory trust: verifiable, compliance-approved claims published in machine-readable form. That means pre-rendered HTML that AI crawlers can actually read, structured data that removes ambiguity about the entity making each claim, fact-dense content mapped to real user prompts, and review workflows that keep every extractable statement inside approved language. Constraint, handled well, becomes a citation advantage: answer engines favor precise, attributable sources.
Insights
- AI Overviews Grew Eightfold. Organic Clicks Held Flat.
- GEO on a Local Business Site
- How This Site Is Built for Answer Engines
Selected posts on LinkedIn:
- Purely Mat Pilates: a one-instructor studio site rebuilt for search and AI
- The biggest growth opportunity in ecommerce history: how commerce evolved, and where it goes next
- SEO and AI Search (GEO/AEO): the 75% overlap in modern search visibility
- Managing Paid and Organic Search as a single P&L
- The Modern Marketing Funnel: the AI synthesis layer and "Share of Model"
Projects
Eben Thurston builds AI-assisted web apps as working experiments in AI-driven ("vibe-coded") software development. All are single-file simulations built with vanilla JavaScript and canvas, physics first, collected in the Physics Sandbox:
- BallFlight: a golf setup and swing sandbox: club, attack angle, face and path drive real ball-flight physics.
- FreeThrow: a basketball shot-mechanics and make-percentage sandbox, built by a former Division I player.
- Powder: first-person backcountry snowboarding where the board follows the rider's gaze.
- Intercept: a missile-defense game about leading a ballistic track and timing the blast.
- Intercept: Strategic: the slow version, where scarce interceptors make triage the game.
Profiles
Eben Thurston is active on these platforms:
Contact
Email eben.thurston@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.