# The AEO Panic Is Here β€” And It's The Best Thing To Happen To SEO Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-school-digital-marketing-and-online-marketing-tips-3891700/the-aeo-panic-is-here-and-it-s-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-seo Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-school-digital-marketing-and-online-marketing-tips-3891700/the-aeo-panic-is-here-and-it-s-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-seo.md Podcast: [Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips](https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-school-digital-marketing-and-online-marketing-tips-3891700) Published: 2026-07-06T16:20:13+00:00 Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ESHO5631532863.mp3 Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ESHO5631532863.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/marketing-school-digital-marketing-and-online-marketing-tips-3891700/episodes/the-aeo-panic-is-here-and-it-s-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-seo Duration seconds: 1024 ## Resource Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric opens with Eli Schwartz's viral take that the AEO panic is the best thing to happen to SEO budgets in years, and he and Neil unpack why every CMO is suddenly fighting over who owns answer engine optimization. They dig into why brands keep asking to just buy a tool like Profound, why publishing AI listicles is the new keyword stuffing, and how ChatGPT actually only crawls your own site a fraction of the time. Neil shares real agency data on the gap between SEO and GEO budgets that surprises even Eric, then they test which agencies the LLMs actually cite, from Seer and Wil Reynolds to iPullRank. They land on why brand, an omni-channel presence, and a human in the loop still decide who wins. The panic is real, but the money is not moving where you think. Key takeaways β—ΎAEO and SEO are far more tightly linked than the panic suggests β—ΎLLMs weigh what the whole web says about you, not just your own site β—ΎBuying a tracking tool is not a strategy when everyone can buy it too Chapters 00:00 The AEO panic explained 01:04 When SEO lived inside product 01:55 Why SEO budgets aren't shifting yet 02:50 What the panic really is 03:37 Losing pitches without technical SEO 04:15 "Can't we just buy a tool?" 04:49 Why publishing listicles fails 06:26 Software and services converge 07:22 Query fanouts and getting cited everywhere 09:22 SEO vs GEO budgets: 11x apart 11:12 Testing the agency queries 12:42 Profound pivots to done-for-you 13:44 Is the data really cleaner? 𝗔𝗕𝗒𝗨𝗧 π—§π—›π—˜ π—–π—›π—”π—‘π—‘π—˜π—Ÿ Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 milli… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/marketing-school-digital-marketing-and-online-marketing-tips-3891700/episodes/the-aeo-panic-is-here-and-it-s-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-seo/transcription-requests` β€” Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/marketing-school-digital-marketing-and-online-marketing-tips-3891700/the-aeo-panic-is-here-and-it-s-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-seo.md` β€” Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.