On 16 September 2026, Hunt Scanlon Media ran a piece about a job board my team built, written by Scott A. Scanlon, their Editor-in-Chief, and Dale M. Zupsansky, their Executive Editor. If you work in executive search, you know what Hunt Scanlon is. If you do not, the short version is that it is the trade press of this industry, and it does not generally write about job boards.

The board is AI-Governance-Jobs.com. It is roughly three months old. The headline number in their piece is 134,499 organic impressions across a 28-day window, with no advertising spend behind it. That is the part most people will react to.

Let me put a finer point on it than the article had room for, because two numbers in one sentence are easy to misread. The 134,499 covers 3 to 30 August, which averages 4,804 impressions a day. Inside that single month the daily rate more than doubled, from 2,945 a day in the first week to 6,517 in the last. As of this week Search Console is showing just under 18,000 impressions in a day.

So the honest framing is not a total, it is a slope: roughly 3.7 times in six weeks, with nothing spent on advertising.

And one caveat that cuts in our favour rather than against it. Every figure above is Google organic only. That is all Search Console measures. It does not count Bing, it does not count DuckDuckGo, and it does not count the answer engines, which is where the growth has actually been sharpest. We built this site for Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation from the first page, on the bet that people in this field would start asking an assistant before they ever opened a search box. That bet paid off, and none of it shows up in the number I just quoted. The real total is higher than the one I can prove, which is precisely why I am quoting the one I can.

The most private job board on Earth

I am going to make that claim plainly, and then give you the one fact that makes it checkable rather than boastful.

Hunt Scanlon put it in print, so it is not me saying it: “The site uses one mandatory Cloudflare cookie for infrastructure security and protection against cyber threats. Additional convenience features, including cookies that remember login sessions, remain inactive unless users choose to enable them.”

One cookie, and it exists to stop the site being attacked. That is the floor. You cannot run a protected website on less and still have a website. Everything else here, including the cookie that would remember you are logged in, stays switched off until a visitor turns it on themselves.

So when I say most private job board on Earth, I am not claiming to have surveyed every job board in the world. I am saying there is very little room underneath us, and that the claim is verifiable in about thirty seconds by anyone who opens their browser’s developer tools and looks. I would encourage a competitor to do exactly that, and then publish theirs.

Search traffic is the old story. This is the new one.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to overclaim and I would rather be believed than impressive. So: when you look for comparable growth curves, the ones that match this shape almost always turn out to have bought their clicks. Paid acquisition produces a line like this routinely. It is not rare. What is rare is the same line with nothing behind it.

We have spent zero on advertising. Not a reduced budget, not a modest budget. Zero. Every impression in those numbers was earned by publishing something a person or a model found worth surfacing.

I will put it as plainly as I can defend it: I have not been able to find another job board that has done this without paying for it. Not one. If somebody can show me one I would genuinely like to see how they did it. Until then that is the claim, and it is a claim about how hard I have looked rather than about all of recorded history.

And the reason is the thing most job boards are still not doing. Ranking in a list of blue links is the old game. The new one is being the source an assistant quotes when somebody asks it what an AI governance role actually involves, or which certification to take, or what the EU AI Act requires of a deployer. Every page on this site was built for that from the first day: real questions, direct answers, structured data, no gating, nothing hidden behind a form. That is Answer Engine Optimisation, and it compounds in a way link-building never did.

Even so, the growth is not the part I find most interesting about any of this. The decision underneath it is.

The decision that actually mattered

We built the site without behavioral tracking. One mandatory Cloudflare cookie, there for infrastructure security. Everything else, including the cookie that would remember your login, stays switched off unless you turn it on yourself.

For a job board that is a strange choice, and I want to be honest about why it is strange. Behavioral data is how job boards retarget you after you leave. It is how they price advertising. It is how they tell an employer what candidates are doing on the site. Giving that up means giving up most of the standard playbook.

Here is what I told Hunt Scanlon:

We wanted to demonstrate that you could build meaningful organic visibility without making extensive user tracking part of the model. The platform was designed around a strict privacy architecture while still giving employers and professionals a way to connect within a rapidly developing talent market.

The users of this particular board are Chief AI Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Privacy Officers, Chief Risk Officers and Chief Compliance Officers. Privacy officers, compliance leads, internal auditors, and the people who write AI governance policy for a living. Reading the terms of service is literally their job.

What Jonathan pulled out of it

Jonathan Malchow Vega, Director of Digital Strategy on our team, wrote about the coverage on his Substack in a piece called A job board that chose not to track its users. He put the thing more sharply than I did:

A site built for people who audit data practices is a poor place to run data practices that would not survive an audit.

He then made a second point that has stayed with me, and it is the one I would put in front of anyone running a search practice. A job board in a young field has a description problem before it has a distribution problem. The roles are new. The titles are unstable. The frameworks move faster than the vocabulary does. Whether “AI assurance” and “algorithmic audit” belong in the same bucket is not a filing question. It decides whether a qualified person ever sees the role.

Anyone who has tried to fill a newly invented executive position recognizes that problem immediately. It is the same problem, and it does not go away because you have a bigger database.

We set out to build the most private job board on Earth. I am comfortable saying we did, and I am comfortable being shown otherwise.

What the article did not have room for

Hunt Scanlon covered the jobs and the privacy architecture. A trade piece has a word count, so a good deal of what we actually built did not make it in. For the record:

• Free certification practice questions. 652 of them, covering eleven professional examinations, at the practice question bank. No account required, no email gate, no paywall.
• Study games. Actual games, not flashcards with a new coat of paint, over at the GRC Careers study games hub.
• Career guides. Three separate libraries: AI governance career guides, cybersecurity career guides, and the skills series inside them.
• The essay library. Written by practitioners rather than by a content team, at GRC Careers Insights.
• Career intelligence tools. Salary and market tooling at the career intelligence hub.
• The roles themselves. Hand reviewed, never scraped, each one carrying a good-faith salary range under a published pay transparency policy. Browse the directory.

There is also a French edition. My co-founder Stephan Pochet and I published our own account of the Hunt Scanlon coverage in French, because a meaningful share of our readers are in France and Belgium and the EU AI Act is their law, not their foreign policy story.

Why a mission-driven recruiter is writing about corporate jobs

This is the question I get most, and it is a fair one. I have spent twenty-eight years placing nonprofit executives. Most of the roles on the new board are corporate. Banks, health systems, technology companies. So what am I doing there.

The answer goes back to where I started. I began my career at Isaacson, Miller, and the idea I took from Arnie Miller has shaped everything I have built since: the work is civic infrastructure. You are not filling a seat. You are putting a person in charge of something a society depends on, and the quality of that decision shows up in people’s lives for years afterward. That is why the searches matter. It was never about the sector on the business card.

Look at these new roles through that lens and they are the same work.

People are frightened of artificial intelligence, and they are not wrong to be. Companies are deploying it fast, nowhere faster than in hiring, which is the one place where a bad model decides who gets a chance at a living. Courts have already made clear that guardrails are not optional. Somebody has to build them. Somebody has to sit in the room and say this model cannot go live until we know what it does to the applicants it rejects.

That somebody is a Chief AI Officer. A Chief Information Officer. A Chief Information Security Officer, a Chief Privacy Officer, a Chief Risk Officer, a Chief Compliance Officer. Below them an AI ethics analyst, a privacy analyst, a governance analyst, an internal auditor who learned to read a model card. They are the people who decide whether an algorithm that touches your mortgage, your medical record or your job application has been tested for bias before it reaches you. They protect customer data. They are the reason a company’s worst instinct gets caught before it becomes policy.

If that is not civic infrastructure, I do not know what is. It is the same job Arnie described, in a new place.

And the field is badly short of people. A whole profession appeared in about two years and nobody staffed it in advance. Apple needs these professionals. So do the Habitat for Humanity affiliates all over the United States, the moment they use a system that scores applicants for a home. So does the food bank running eligibility through software it did not build and cannot inspect. The Fortune 50 and the fifteen-person nonprofit have landed on the same problem at the same time, and there are not enough people who can solve it for either of them.

That is the gap the board exists to close. It is not a detour from mission-driven work. It is the current address of it.

And the nonprofits are hiring these roles too

I have run ExecSearches since 1999. Nonprofit executive search is the work I know best, and nothing about that has changed.

But the two things are connected, and the connection is not a marketing line. Nonprofit boards are now hiring for roles that did not exist three years ago. A foundation needs someone who can answer for how a grants model uses an algorithm. A health system needs a chief compliance officer who can read an AI risk assessment without outsourcing the judgment. A university needs a privacy lead who understands both FERPA and a model card.

Those searches are already landing on my desk. Building a board for that market taught me the vocabulary of it, and the vocabulary is most of the job.

And the lesson I would give away for free: everything Hunt Scanlon reported came from publishing material that was genuinely useful to people who were not yet ready to apply for anything. The free practice questions are the clearest case:

The candidates using the free study material this month are the shortlist in eighteen months. That is the whole thesis, and it is why none of it sits behind a paywall.

Search practices tend to treat content as a business development expense. It is closer to pipeline construction, and it compounds.

Frequently asked questions

What did Hunt Scanlon Media report about AI-Governance-Jobs.com?

That the platform reached 134,499 organic impressions over a 28-day period roughly three months after launch, with no advertising, and that it did so while deliberately minimizing user tracking. The piece was contributed by Scott A. Scanlon and Dale M. Zupsansky and published 16 September 2026.

What does “privacy-first job board” actually mean here?

One mandatory Cloudflare cookie for infrastructure security. Convenience cookies, including session memory for logins, stay inactive unless a user enables them. No cross-site behavioral tracking, and no sale of visitor behavior to employers.

Does a job board lose money by not tracking users?

It gives up retargeting and behavioral ad pricing, which for most boards is a large share of revenue. We traded that for organic search visibility and for trust with an audience whose profession is auditing data practices. For this specific market it has been the better trade.

How many roles are on the platform?

713 live governance, risk, and compliance roles at the time Hunt Scanlon reported, alongside 613 resource pages. Every posting is hand reviewed rather than scraped.

Do job postings there include salary?

Yes. Each posting carries a good-faith salary range under a published pay transparency policy, rather than “commensurate with experience.”

Is the study material really free?

Yes. 652 practice questions across eleven certifications, with no account, no email capture, and no paywall.

What are the four career tracks?

AI governance and management, responsible AI and ethics, AI risk and security, and AI compliance and audit. They are separated because the reporting lines, technical requirements, and day-to-day responsibilities genuinely differ, not because four buckets look tidier than one.

What does this have to do with nonprofit executive search?

Nonprofit and mission-driven employers are now hiring compliance, privacy, and AI governance leaders, frequently for positions their organizations have never filled before. The title vocabulary in that market is unsettled, and an unsettled vocabulary is a search problem long before it is a technology problem.

Where can I follow GRC Careers?

Start with the GRC Careers LinkedIn page. The rest of the network:

• The jobs — AI-Governance-Jobs.com, with job alerts and the newsletter.
• Stephan Pochet’s essays — GRCcareers.ai, in English and in French. His newest French piece: IA et audit interne, la nouvelle frontière.
• Certifications — certification guides and eleven free study games at grc-careers.org.
• Consultants and firms — post an RFP at grccareers.org.
• Essays and analysis — GRC Careers Insights.

Who runs the platform?

GRC Careers LLC. F. Jay Hall, Sr. is Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and has run ExecSearches.com since 1999. Louise Bertrand is VP, Governance, Risk, Compliance, Internal Audit and Training, previously KPMG Risk Consulting, Columbia University, Harvard University and Hospital for Special Surgery, now also President and CEO of Transparency GRC. Stephan Paul Pochet is Co-founder and VP of Operations, a credentialed GRC practitioner still practising today. Jonathan Malchow Vega is Director of Digital Strategy, based in Spain, working in English and Spanish. Karen Alphonse is VP, Policy, Regulatory Compliance and Candidate Development, and Counsel to the CEO, Harvard and Columbia, and writes the most-read articles on the network.

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Read the original: AI Governance Jobs Platform Builds Early Momentum Through Privacy-First Model, Hunt Scanlon Media, 16 September 2026. And Jonathan’s response: A job board that chose not to track its users.