Will the AEO Panic Kill the $68B SEO Industry?

All right. So right now there's this big panic with AEO right now. People are panicking about AEO. SEO budgets are going down overall. And this guy Eli Schwartz, I know, well known in the SEO space, he tweeted this, says the AEO panic is the best thing that happened to SEO budgets in years. Every CMO right now is trying to figure out who owns AEO. Good. Let them fight about it. For years, SEO got stuck to reporting to marketing, treating like finishing department on assembly line structure never made sense because real SEO lives inside the product. You know what's interesting, Neil? When I worked at a few companies doing SEO early in my career, actually when I first met you, I think I was 24 years old and I would sit with the product people and they would treat me like a piece of garbage, right? I was on the— I was the SEO strategist sitting in product meetings and helping with the product, right?

Yeah.

And I thought I was helping with product. They, everything I said, they waved me off like I was garbage and I loved it. But point is, I think now the way, even, I don't know if you're seeing this with your outbound, but when we reach out to people for outbound for AEO, everyone's like, yeah, we definitely need AEO. We have our SEO agency for this. Yeah, but we need AEO. AEO, AEO. So let's talk about this AEO panic right now.

Well, let's first go back to the product thing that you mentioned in which when you first started doing SEO for companies, you would have to deal with product. We found something similar for most of the tech companies, like the tech startups, the ones who grew, became unicorns. For traditional businesses like a Procter Gamble or a Unilever, we don't see that and we've never seen that. But even today, we still see a lot of SEO sitting under product for really tech-focused companies that are engineering-led and product-led.

And just to be clear, this is me working at a company that was engineering-led, just so everyone knows.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I figured that as well once you said that. We haven't at this moment, because we get enough leads globally. Our leads are down like everyone, but the quality of the leads are higher. And what we're seeing right now is we're not really seeing a shift in SEO budgets budgets yet. We're seeing AEO budgets increase. We're not seeing AEO budgets being massive yet because every single enterprise business and even most SMBs and mid-market businesses, they all ask the same question, track the ROI. And you and I both know this, dude, when people search on, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini, Majority of the times they're not clicking on over, they're just either going directly to your website or they're Googling your name, brand name, and then clicking on your website. But the conversion is really AI-assisted or heavily AI-driven. The tracking is just very difficult. Even with SEO, the tracking is not perfect either with it.

Yeah, so when, by the way, when we say what the AEO panic is, when we are fielding these calls or what, let's say we're talking to marketing executives, it's more so the AEO panic is, Oh my God, our competitors are ranking so well on AEO. They have so much more share of voice. What do we do? What do we do? And then when they get on a phone call with you, it's like, yeah, you know, don't worry, we got the SEO stuff covered, right? And but it's like AEO. And I'm like, okay, so to your point, how are you supposed to track success on this? Oh, yeah, we just want more share of voice, more share of voice. I'm like, great. So you have no idea how this ties in with your ROI, right? And so—

Yes.

But it also doesn't help. Like if you're selling this stuff, it doesn't help you to say, oh, AEO and SEO go hand in hand and SEO is still very much the foundation. They don't want to hear it. So the panic is Right now, this is this new thing and it seems like they, but they don't want to accept that they're really, they're still very tightly together.

We are seeing a shift in it. A lot of our pitches were pure GEO-focused because customers wanted it to be pure GEO-focused. We're seeing right now, if we don't incorporate technical SEO in the GEO pitches, we're much more likely to lose it and we're seeing it in our data. We're also seeing customers having confusion in the whole space, kind of like SEO, you know, 15, 20 years ago, in which companies are coming to us and they're saying, yeah, can we just, you know, so when you're quoting them and you're creating a proposal for them and a presentation and breaking down what you're going to do, they're just like, can we just pay a tool like Profound and it just does it for me and we pay, you know, $1,000 a month or $50,000 a year or whatever their pricing is?

Mm-hmm.

And I'm like, have you looked at Profound? They're like, yeah, you know, it'll track our mentions on these LLMs, compare it to the competitors, look at the sentiment, and it also helps you get mentioned. And I was like, so how does it help you get mentioned there? And I've used the tool, so I know. And they typically say, oh, it can help you create articles and you can just publish them on your website. And it's like, cool. So if everyone can publish listicles on their website, because majority of the time they're thinking listicles, If everyone can publish listicles on the website, is that easy for you to do or hard for you to do? And they're like, it's pretty easy. I'm like, yeah, even AI helps you with that, right? They're like, yeah. So if everyone can do this, how well do you think this strategy really works? And they're like, oh, good point. I'm like, this is like SEO back in the days where you just put keywords on your page and then you magically rank.

Yeah.

And if you also look at the different versions of flavors of ChatGPT or Perplexity or any of these LLMs, They go through waves in which a percentage of their time, like I was with the Writesonic founder, Sam, and he had some data on one of the, a few of the different models of ChatGPT, but it went from ChatGPT barely looking at your website to the commands being roughly 20% that they're doing site: commands. So they're looking for content on your website to then it getting reduced. So it goes through waves, but the max, you know, that he's seen it from the data that he presented to me was roughly around 20%. Which means roughly 80% of the time they're looking for content on other people's websites to determine who should be mentioned for what keywords or prompts in what regions for when, right? And that means just, oh, I'm going to use Profound, and I'm not trying to talk trash on Profound, but it's the misconception that customers have, like, oh, I'm trying to use Profound and I'm just going to create some AI articles and boom, this is solved. I'm like, Good luck. It's just like saying SEO is about putting keywords on your page and doing technical SEO and you'll rank for everything. Just create 10,000 pages around this keyword.

That's why a lot of people are saying that when you— software alone is just one piece of it, but this is why services and software are converging where you still need a human in the loop. Even if you're running like one of our creator agents, Picasso, it can spin up a bunch of ads, but it doesn't matter if it's still crap. If you're spinning out a bunch of slop, it doesn't matter. Same thing with the written content, whether you're using something like a Writesonic or you're using something like a ClickFlow, right? You still need a human in the loop.

Yes.

But this is interesting to me. I actually pulled this up from Sierra Interactive. So they're showing that ChatGPT 5.5's fanout patterns reveal the importance of brand. So brand is playing way more into AEO.

Yes.

And thank God we've been creating content for a while now. And so Will Reynolds tweeted this, but he's basically saying because you have more query fanouts now, meaning that when you're searching in ChatGPT, it'll show you like, hey, these are the 15 queries that we use. Now it's maybe up to 30 or so. Same thing with Google. What it's showing now Is it's, it's, it'll show your YouTube, right? It'll show it's, by the way, YouTube showing up, I think in 25% of searches or something like that now. A lot more than before.

For ChatGPT? Not ChatGPT, Gemini.

Just Gemini. Yeah. Yeah. Or just search in general. But this, I mean, there's a lot in here, but the thing that you need to keep in mind now is that LinkedIn is getting cited. It'll look at your Twitter as well. It'll look at your YouTube as well. So it's no longer just an SEO thing. It's good. It's actually good that everything's kind of converging a little bit.

Yeah, and it's becoming where what is said about you on the whole web matters more than what's said about you on your own website, which makes it actually, in my opinion, harder to manipulate in the long run. The second thing is companies that focus their marketing on one or two channels will lose in the long run compared to companies that take an omnichannel approach. Even a multichannel approach is better than just taking one or two channels, but ideally you want an omnichannel approach.

Yeah, I'm just looking at this. This is interesting because Will Reynolds likes to say, well, if you want more query fanouts, you have to build more fans. And I'm like, okay, so people care about the fanout level, which means that doing podcasts like this, the reason why, you know, we spend the time to, you know, meet in person to do this podcast, one, it's— we're on YouTube, we get more clips as well. But speaking at conferences, okay, that helps too. Social media, all these things that were harder to measure before is now it's converging more now. And so it's, but here's what they're calling out, which we might disagree with. He's like, notice that we aren't seeing the usual suspects here with the listicle strategies. I still think they kind of work right now, but I do think they're getting abused still. So I think they're getting more and more, less, you're seeing less effectiveness, but they still work.

Yeah, we did an interesting analysis internally on our leads from GEO versus SEO for the people who are looking for different service items. What budgets do you think are higher, SEO or GEO?

GEO.

We are actually seeing the opposite of SEO.

Really?

What do you think the difference is if you had to guess? It's large.

In terms of numbers.

It's large.

100, 150%?

It's around 11x of a difference.

Wow.

So SEO budgets are still around 11x difference higher than GEO. And I'll tell you why. When you look at most local searches, do you believe they do local searches mainly on a traditional Google search or they're doing it more on ChatGPT?

Traditional Google.

Yes. We're seeing the same data as well. I'm not saying that can't change over time, but still people are using Google for traditional local searches. And the majority of the people who are optimizing for LLMs and going really aggressive, we're seeing them to tend to be enterprises. Enterprises have massive SEO budgets because it's been consistent.

It produces— It's also understood.

It's understood.

Yeah.

They've been doing it for a long time. They have big SEO teams. GEO, whether it's mid-market, SMB, or enterprise, I don't, it's, and I don't believe this is going to continue in the long run, but the biggest pushback we get isn't that they should do it. They understand everyone uses these LLMs. Like that's obvious. You don't even have to convince them on that. It's again, goes back to the ROI question. So people are just really hesitant. I'm not saying you can't get $50 grand or $100 grand or even $200,000, $300,000. It is very hard to get LLM budgets to be $1 million plus at this point for GEO right now. I do think that'll change in a few years.

So here's what I'll call out too. So this, and then we can move on. So they're basically, he's testing out agency queries. Okay. So like what's the best PPC agency or whatever. So who shows up alongside here? Is this Eli? No, this is now Will Reynolds.

Okay, Will Reynolds.

Yeah. So you got SEER plus iPoll rank that shows up the most and then Amsiv, Profound, Mike King, NP Digital is number 5 on this thing.

For what type of queries?

It's like, what's the best type of PPC agency?

Is it specific PPC or?

I think it's, he was trying like a handful of these and Okay, so he said here, implied, okay, these are 2 brands treats Sears' peer set in this prompt. Talk about agencies. Okay, yeah. So the agencies, the only agencies I see here, Neil, in this top 10 is you have Brain Labs, Tenuity, MP Digital, and No Good. So there's like 4 agencies here and maybe 5, 6, Emsiv, iPollRank.

iPollRank is agency.

iPollRank is Mike King, who creates a lot of content, and Lily Rae is Emsiv. So, yeah, so that, I think their posting helps the agencies.

Got it. Well, iPollRank is an agency.

Yeah, correct.

And then SEER, was SEER in the list or not?

I mean, this is SEER plus like who shows up alongside SEER like most of the time.

Oh, got it.

So 26 of 26 times it's going to be iPollRank and SEER, and then 23 of 26 times it's SEER plus Ansip. So you have Mike King and then Lily Rae, and then you have Profound, which is number 3, which is interesting.

Yes. Profound is going for the done for you, we, Even though they're not an agency, they will help you with all the LLM stuff.

I think eventually they're all going to just become services. Like, I think AirOps does some services too. I think Profound is going to have to do it because whenever, same thing, same conversations that you're having when people are like, oh yeah, you know, we're about to sign up with Profound as if it's going to like, they're going to solve all their problems, right? And again, I'm not saying Profound is a bad tool. I think it's a great tool, but it's like, yeah, we're about to sign with Profound. Like, I think we're covered there, right? I'm like, are you?

So. And we're also seeing a huge shift with customers of all sizes not wanting to pay the same amount that they used to have to pay for LLM tracking. They're like, this is expensive. A lot of people now have these features.

I think it was just given away for free.

Who's the one who gave it for free? Was it Amplitude who released a free version?

Yeah, but it wasn't that good. Yeah.

We have a free version of it, but it's limited because the costs are just so high.

Yeah. But I mean, Profound has a good dataset, so that's why people go to it as the kind of the main one?

No, it's not the dataset. I think they have the brand recognition. The dataset is you're just going and crawling anytime people put in prompts.

I'm saying that from hearing from other SEOs that have used a bunch of different ones. They're just like, the data's cleaner and it's better. So when I've used it, I was like, I couldn't tell the difference if I'm being honest myself. But what I hear from a lot of SEOs is like, it's, it's, it's, it's higher quality.

So we've tested out all the tools. We've paid for majority of these LLM tools, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, negotiated on it. When people say Profound's dataset is cleaner, what people don't realize is if you sign up for Profound, their team will set up everything for you. And then within 24 to 48 hours, you start seeing reports. The big difference from what we see isn't the datasets, it is how thorough they are in tracking. So if you have a good agency, And they set it up for you. No matter what tool you use, the data is pretty much the same.

Anyway, that's it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.