AEO is eating SEO | Steve Toth, CEO @ Notebook Agency

My guest in this episode is Steve Toth, CEO of Notebook Agency and the voice behind AI Notebook and SEO Notebook, two newsletters with 27,000+ subscribers where he cuts through the noise in one of the fastest-moving spaces in marketing right now.

In this episode we’ll dig into the current state of the industry, how big GEO is already for his agency and his clients and why he thinks ChatGPT is lazy and what he uses instead.

Check out Steve’s links:

• https://seonotebook.com/
• https://ainotebook.com/
• https://stevetoth.coach/

Check out the full episode

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Key learnings from this episode

State of the industry

• Clicks are down, impressions are up, but demand for agencies tackling this new landscape is higher than ever
• AEO has opened the door to working with broader marketing orgs (PR, brand, product, customer service), not just acquisition teams
• The LLM buyer is significantly more bottom-funnel and qualified — MQLs from AI channels can be 4-5x more valuable

AEO as a service

• Steve’s agency is roughly 60/40 AEO vs. SEO in terms of focus and client demand
• AEO isn’t just non-branded keyword acquisition — it’s about brand representation and optimizing for a company’s “deal breakers” (pricing, capabilities, ICP fit)
• This creates a new market: companies without huge search volume still need LLM representation
• Client education is the #1 thing agencies must get right — framing results around representation and deal-breaker correction, not just click graphs

Fan out queries & content strategy

• Don’t try to create pages for every possible fan out query — you can’t know them all
• Instead, understand the themes AI structures queries around: comparisons, pricing, use cases, ICP/company size
• Create content that covers these dimensions (e.g., pricing pages segmented by company type and size)

Tactical insights

• Bing Webmaster Tools shows 30-40% of queries Google hides — use both as complementary data sources
• Facebook groups are ranking on an exponential curve in Google and getting cited in LLMs — an underexploited opportunity
• ChatGPT still dominates referral traffic, but power users are migrating to Claude for reliability and instruction-following

AI content & Google’s stance

• Google doesn’t have an explicit AI-content detector — it’s about abuse and quality signals
• Google tracks how pages change over time; a “well-kept garden” wins long-term
• The SEO heist example: mass-publishing low-quality AI content works temporarily, then gets hammered

Claude-specific workflows

• Claude Projects over custom GPTs: no character limit on instructions, better instruction-following
• Claude Skills (mid-conversation prompt invocation) are underrated for complex outputs
• Claude Styles (creative, analytical) dramatically change output quality for different use cases

Newsletter & platform ownership

• Own your audience — email lists survive platform changes, account bans, algorithm shifts
• “There’s never a day where a professional doesn’t check their inbox”

Future outlook

• Within five years, LLMs will be deeply personalized (pulling from Gmail, Drive, chats) — optimizing for that is the next frontier

Auto-generated transcript

Niklas Buschner (00:03.19)
My guest today is Steve Toth, CEO of Notebook Agency and the voice behind AI Notebook and SEO Notebook, two newsletters with more than 27,000 subscribers where he cuts through the noise in one of the fastest moving spaces in marketing right now. In this episode, we’ll dig into the current state of the industry, how big GEO is already for his agencies and his clients and why he thinks chatGBT is lazy and what he uses instead.

Very much looking forward to this, Steve.

Steve Toth (00:35.63)
Well, thanks for having me on, Nicholas. Excited to join.

Niklas Buschner (00:38.542)
Cool, thanks. So let’s start with an easy one, probably for you. How do you feel about the current state of the search industry?

Steve Toth (00:45.88)
Well, I mean…

I think if you ask me at any point in the last 10 years, I would say it’s moving super fast and it just continues to move super fast. So, we’re seeing a big, you know, change in the last year, obviously with a decrease in clicks, increase in impressions. And I think, you know, we’re you, if you looked back a couple of years ago, people would think, you know, this is, a big blow to the agent, to the, to the, industry and all of our respective agencies, but actually what we’ve

noticed is that the demand for tackling this new landscape is even greater than it was a year ago when people were still kind of foreshadowing the reduction in clicks and divergence of budgets elsewhere. it’s as busy a time as ever for us. I think the industry needs to educate its clients on the fact that demand is still there, although we see people learning about us not from

our own websites but from within chats and I think as the more the industry is able to educate you know growth marketers and you know a lot of our clients on the other end the more we can kind of you know come to a new baseline in terms of understanding how we measure things and you know accept that that has changed rapidly.

Niklas Buschner (02:09.921)
But don’t you feel like the launch of ChetGBT has been like a new inception moment for like a complete shift in our industry? Because when I talk to people like in-house or also from the agency side, some tell me that especially the last two years, so I would say 2025 especially has been one of the like most changing or like disruptive years since probably…

Steve Toth (02:13.262)
.

Niklas Buschner (02:39.145)
lounge of Google and maybe the, the barred update or the penguin update, or, know, which dates dates pack quite some time. So how do you feel about that?

Steve Toth (02:48.056)
Yeah, mean, there’s this feeling that Google is sending less and less traffic to the web every year, and that’s absolutely true. And we know that, especially in B2B, when people are researching.

services and products to buy that there is almost a no-brainer that LLMs are part of that equation. If you think about it from the perspective of if you were to ask a coworker to do some research on a product or service that you were looking to integrate into your company and they weren’t using AI, you’d probably think that that person wasn’t doing a very good job. So we’ve seen this shift. We’ve seen companies also

their employees to be using AI at every turn and increase that behavior only continuing to increase. So it has been one of the biggest shifts that we’ve seen in decades.

But I think, you know, we’re bracing for it. We’ve been bracing for it for a couple of years. I think since the inception of CHAPGBT, there were a lot of, you know, SEO efficiencies. And now what we’re seeing is it’s, you know, there’s

different ways that we can apply AI to AEO instead. I think in the first couple years of ChatGBT, it was basically like, let’s accelerate our traditional ranking strategies, but now very much using it to accelerate our AI visibility strategies.

Niklas Buschner (04:27.895)
Got it. And what’s been most surprising for you in how the whole industry evolves currently?

Steve Toth (04:35.745)
Yeah, I think that.

It’s not so much surprising, but it’s delightful to see that we are now speaking to broader marketing organizations when discussing AEO services and not just the acquisition teams at these companies. Suddenly PR, brand, product, even customer service, these are all people who can contribute to the success of an AEO campaign.

So it’s been a shift in terms of who’s contacted us in terms of getting services at Notebook Agency. We’ve seen higher level folks suddenly take more of an interest in AEO because it really does have to do a lot with representing your brand and not just strictly being a non-branded keyword version of Google Ads that we’re targeting.

You know now it’s suddenly about not only those non branded keywords, but also the company’s broader representation and how you know your your key differentiators your core product truths are reflected in In LLMs, you know because people are not only reading websites so I think the the biggest surprise and really delight to see is You know us being able to integrate more with our clients beyond just the acquisition

folks.

Niklas Buschner (06:10.017)
And have you ever been, let’s say, frightened or concerned during the last, let’s say, one and a half, two years? Because I mean, when I talk to fellow people that have also been in the SEO industry for quite some time, I would say that not everybody was like solely positive about all that’s changed that was going on. So take us a little bit with you through your feelings during like these.

Dynamic times.

Steve Toth (06:38.699)
That.

That existential crisis that I had actually occurred right after chat GPT. So going back three years ago, I remember very like vividly in the early 2023 thinking, man, if this is it, like, what does this mean for the health of my agency, the health of my business? And what if people just divert all of their searches to this? we have, like at that time it wasn’t even

Niklas Buschner (06:46.156)
Okay.

Steve Toth (07:10.307)
even really querying the web for things, right? It was almost like, you know, what’s going to happen? And, you know, I remember kind of like it hitting me and thinking that this is, you know, a big…

Sea change coming and it still is a sea change coming but I think you know over the last few years and two years really like three years since you know chat gbt has been out. We’ve had times to kind of reframe what you know SEO aeo services mean for clients and you know, I think when I taught my course on aeo for cxl that was a great opportunity for me to kind of really consolidate, know all of my thinking around

around this space and that’s really where I kind of landed on this idea about optimizing for a company’s deal breakers being a really important aspect of…

AEO services and it not just being about you know branded acquisition for best project management software But you know what you know? Asking specific questions about the product’s capabilities or asking, you know

Complex queries with a multitude of facets like best project management software with time tracking client view Gantt charts and $20 per user and customer support and AEST right like This suddenly becomes now a game of not just optimizing pages But optimizing an entire brand presence and I think that that actually opens up more doors in terms of the number of clients

Steve Toth (08:56.143)
that we can work with because not every client is a fit for non-branded acquisition. Some companies don’t have a huge search volume, but still those companies are very, and rightfully concerned with their representation on LLMs. And this creates a market for us that didn’t exist before.

Niklas Buschner (09:19.383)
So, but what happened between you seeing this as an exit existential threat, and then you basically fast forward three years, being very, like positive, very, very strong outlook, also being like probably one of the dominant agencies in that space. So you just decided, okay, like I won’t give up my life’s work just because of this little AI chatbot or.

you saw the opportunity maybe that still a lot of people don’t see yet.

Steve Toth (09:53.506)
Yeah, I think learning how it works, that’s the biggest empowerment, right? I remember quite vividly when Google AI overviews started to really surface going back a couple of years now after they kind of retired SGE and started to integrate that into everyday SERPs.

people were panicking because the page one results were not citing any pages that were even in the top 100. And if you think about it, like it was obviously because of query fan out and that was just not popular and a popular idea at the time. And nobody really knew that that was the underlying mechanism causing a lot of pages to get cited that weren’t in the top 100 for that

one keyword. just for your audience who is maybe not as advanced, query fan out is the process of taking one keyword and spawning dozens of synthetic subqueries in order to improve the final result. And again, it was like, you know, there were people saying, you know, in 72 % of AI overviews, the citations did not even occur in the top 100 results for that.

keyword and we now know that Google is creating these fan out queries, personalizing, comparing, all these different ways in which they’re trying to enrich the result. And we know that that is how it’s assembling its corpus. So just the empowerment of better understanding of how AI search results are generated, having the time to test,

having the time to have an extended campaign with a client. All those things breed familiarity with the systems and allow us to gain confidence in terms of how we optimize for them.

Niklas Buschner (11:56.302)
Before we go into the operational details of fan out queries, how to optimize for that. And I know that you have a lot of thoughts on that and also like proven strategies. Give us a quick idea how big GEO or AEO. So basic for everybody that is not familiar, maybe yet with the acronym. So Generative Engine Optimization or Answer Engine Optimization. How big is this new field, so to say?

already for you as an agency, as a service and for your clients as a conversion channel.

Steve Toth (12:29.847)
Yeah, well, you’ll never hear me say that SEO is dead. just because I talk a lot about AEO doesn’t mean that we’re not applying SEO best practices at every turn. But in terms of the interest that we get at our agency and the services that we end up offering, I’d say it’s about 60-40 AEO versus SEO at this point. And yes, there’s tremendous overlap with…

SEO best practices, but then if you kind of open up that whole idea about brand representation, that requires a whole different host of activities than just trying to improve presence for a non-branded keyword, right? Suddenly we’re looking at help documentation. Suddenly we’re looking at more robust comparison or alternative or listicle strategies.

a new.

sort of service that is emerging. And, you know, it’s us providing that at our agency, would say, you know, 60 % of the focus being there because of that demand, right? So we still try to educate our clients that, you know, Google still sends a lot of traffic and all that kind of stuff. the reason why they’re focusing on LLMs is because they’ve experienced and they know that the LLM buyer is a lot more bottom funnel.

They’re the ones who’ve qualified themselves much better. They’re the ones who’ve been able to ask their deal breaker questions and essentially…

Steve Toth (14:10.253)
Compact their entire journey into a much more efficient process of research, right? So they’re coming to these, you know B2B demo calls a lot more educated Asking fewer questions You know that they’ve basically already clarified and instead are just seeking validation for and And you know, they’ve also compared you Against you know, your competition and kind of shortlisted you so

when the clients understand that the value and you know your MQLs become MQLs times four times five more qualified, the incentive is there to invest in it and especially in where we operate which is B2B. know as I primarily as I mentioned you know if you task a person at your company to do research on a product or service and they’re not using AI, they’re not doing their job and they’re probably not going to keep their job for very much

longer right so we know how fundamental it is in the journey and that’s you know a big reason that it predominates the focus.

Niklas Buschner (15:20.205)
Okay. And, I know that some people are still very skeptical about, how big AO really is as an, a channel in terms of conversion impact. but still there are case studies out there, for example, from web flow and other companies. I recently had the CMO of surfer. Maybe, you know, the SEO tool, I recently had the CMO at, at the podcast and he shared that they get, think roughly 20%.

of their paying customers already from LLMs. So I have to ask this question. Do you think that AO can be a substantial channel in terms of the conversion it brings to a client?

Steve Toth (16:05.771)
Yeah, mean, the classic SEO answer is it depends. And if you’re talking about my mom searching for someone to go repair her furnace, probably not. But if it’s something that I’m integrating into my tech stack at a 500-person SaaS company, then absolutely. Absolutely, it’s much bigger. So I think it also depends on the savviness of your ICP.

search also in clients where we see desktop being you know 70 % of the traffic to the website then I think you’re also going to see more AEO playing a larger influence and yeah like you know B to C more sorry B to B

predominantly than B to C at this point. But I think, you know, things are rapidly changing, right? Apple and Google are entering into a partnership with Gemini to be the AI LLM behind iPhones, right? We’re seeing more integration into mobile search, you know, we’re seeing perplexity even.

you know, start to be integrated more into Android phones. So it’s just a matter of, you know, like for example, I bought a set of headphones and it gave me the option to use perplexity as my assistant. You know, I think that we’re only gonna see that continue. But, know, in today, in early 2026, if your buyer is savvy, if your buyer is being judged on the quality of their research,

and there’s actually multiple stakeholders involved in that research, then you’re gonna see AI become a very dominant channel. But if it’s just one person trying to solve one problem and they don’t have to share their HVAC research with the whole family, then less of an issue at this point.

Niklas Buschner (18:13.817)
And can you share what are like the biggest AI conversion sources on necessarily traffic sources from your clients? is it a chat chat, GBT still, or is it perplexity or, mean, in the end, Google is like this two-sided story because you have AI overviews, have AI mode, but you, we don’t really know because we don’t have the data. So what would you say are the biggest?

and most impactful AI channels that you see with your clients.

Steve Toth (18:45.292)
Yeah.

Yeah, with the Google caveat removed and that we don’t know exactly which queries or visits come from either an AI overview, AI mode, know, fingers crossed Google, get your app together and give us some useful data. you know, we’re still seeing chat GPT dominate as much as I think that is slowly changing. You know, I think one of our things that we discussed was, you know, why is chat GPT getting lazy or why do I think chat GPT

is getting lazy. I’m seeing a lot of folks in the business world start to migrate over to Claude as a everyday LLM tool. And I think there are good reasons for that. think that ChatGPT got out of the gates as the early leader, but are kind of suffering the consequences of that rapid growth and also the big free tier that they now have as something they have to support.

still again your question was who where are we seeing the most referral traffic it’s still from chat GPT but that doesn’t mean that you know other LLMs aren’t still very important.

Niklas Buschner (19:59.166)
And you said, I think it was a LinkedIn post that so ChatchatGPT is obviously most used chatbot, but you, your personal opinion is that it’s lazy or it gets lazy. Can you, can you explain what you mean by that and what you are using instead?

Steve Toth (20:09.186)
Yeah.

Steve Toth (20:14.925)
For sure, so like, you know, I’ve created a lot of chat GPT bots over the last couple years, we’re upwards of 40 or 50 different bots for SEO notebook and AI notebook.

And you know, if I want to create a bot that actually has a good output, I find that I spend probably double the amount of time versus if I have that in a Claude project and just, you know, very tangible example of that would be, for example, I need it to generate 10 URL strings from hrefs that have pre-populated fields in them. And I’ll ask ChatchBT to do that and it will generate the first

to and then tell me that all the rest follow the same conventions right because it’s trying to save tokens and it’s trying to basically take a shortcut and not have to process all of that information and you know half the time I end up swearing at it and it listens to me finally but if I do that with Claude it you know it just does it so I think that you know Sam Altman and the and the team over at OpenAI are probably struggling with this balance of you know how do they

not just you know they’re not profitable but how do they be extremely unprofitable versus you know trying to inch towards that baseline of at least like you know not being such a

you know, unprofitable company that they’re having to save on compute with, you know, terms like that. And I think that the average user is not going to really notice that as much. they’re also falling back to, you know, less intensive models for certain queries and letting the, the, you know, chat GPT effectively decide what kind of model it’s using, which is saving them some costs. But I think when it comes to the power user and, really

Steve Toth (22:13.262)
wanting, knowing what they want out of an output, it can be extremely frustrating and I’m seeing it take a lot of shortcuts and my everyday LLM choice is definitely Claude.

Niklas Buschner (22:27.453)
Very much like that because I also opted for Claude I think a year ago at least Because I think I somehow saw the or I I don’t know how to describe it But I felt like the answers have been more on point. It has already with like sonnet 3.5 been more Like following my instructions. Well, so everything you just said I want to make a plus one on that I also saw that you’re building a lot of Claude projects

So basically the cloud version of custom GPTs, which I think have become very popular and a lot of people know the concept of a custom GPT. What I’m curious about is how do you decide that something’s worth building a project versus just prompting on the fly?

Steve Toth (23:14.764)
think the great thing about projects is they can be shared within your entire company and just used right away. you know, I, for example, have a project that evaluates link building campaign based on an Ahrefs backlink export. you know, without even adding the word, all I really have to do is just upload that CSV of the five years of Ahrefs data and it just creates that report.

report for me. So I think anything that has complex instructions, anything that requires extra context that would aid the quality of an output, generally that’s where I tend to create a project and something really that I want to share with my team and I want them to use, it’s much, much better to create that project. And the thing I also like about Claude projects is that there is no

limit on the length of the instructions whereas chat GPT bots custom GPTs have an 8,000 character limit but in Claude you can make them as long as you want basically you know within reason but you don’t run into that cap as often and and they’re also the only downside of a Claude project is that I believe it cannot be shared publicly that a person would have to set up

own instance of that. So that’s a bit of a downside but if you think about the amount of money that that saves Anthropic because you you don’t have like people just using custom GPTs all the time and they’re only using them internally it’s probably a smart move on their point.

Niklas Buschner (25:02.103)
Got it. think Claude introduced the option to like create these art artifacts. So basically like this, vibe coded environment don’t have a better wording for that. And they also, allow people to have like Claude LLM functionality being used in there. I’m not a hundred percent sure if people have to be active Claude users, but I think this is somehow a workaround where you can basically create.

an artifact as a cloud project representation that you can then share publicly. But yeah, not 100 % sure about that just came to mind.

Steve Toth (25:40.833)
Yeah, I know in the business plans, the artifacts are only being able to be shared within a company. But I believe the artifacts, if you’re on just a regular plan, can be shared by anyone. But yeah, I haven’t tried, know, vibe coding my own little environment for custom.

Projects, but then again, there’s just a lot of things built into the custom project for example like the preview pane the ability to Generate a Word document or an Excel from it that you know, you’d probably just want to use natively So, you know basically what what I’ve done now on SEO notebook since becoming more of a cloud user is just giving away those prompts and you saving some of them for Just our clients or just my coaching students

in my AEO program, but giving a good amount of value away in terms of just direct prompts that people can set up in their own instances.

Niklas Buschner (26:43.687)
And what are your favorite like AI enabled workflows for SEO and AO, no matter if it’s in a cloud project or something completely different.

Steve Toth (26:53.94)
Yeah, I mean we stand up a lot of our own stuff using data for SEO, API, Digital Ocean, a lot of our own.

and sorry, our own internal tools and stuff like that. But one of the things I think for Claude specifically, and maybe just to focus on that again, is the adoption of skills. So skills being essentially a prompt that can be called upon mid conversation to give the AI explicit instructions on how to do something exactly the way you want to. So you mentioned, for example, you find

that Claude is a bit easier to follow your comprehensive instructions but if halfway you know in the middle of a long

to invoke a skill, you can be assured that that skill is going to be followed more closely because Claude is going to reference that skill at the exact point in time that it needs to, and it doesn’t need to front load those instructions, you know, going into the prompt and remembering it halfway through a complex output. So Claude skills, I think are, if you’re not using them, very underrated. And then another thing that

is also really useful in Claude are styles. So styles are essentially how your output is written. And one of the interesting styles that we use is the creative style. I think it’s maybe even one that was custom for us. I don’t remember.

Steve Toth (28:36.377)
if it’s default or custom, but the creative style basically expands on ideas and explores uncharted territory and it’s very good for ideation.

is if you just want something super concise, you can use like an analytical skill to make your output no-nonsense kind of thing. So if you invoke styles in terms of your output, it’ll drastically change the type of output that you’re getting. And if you’re doing more of a brainstorming type of exercise, having that creative style that really expands and explores ideas can lead to

a lot of great stuff.

Niklas Buschner (29:21.277)
Nice. And what’s your take on AI generated content? Because I mean, a lot of people definitely use cloud and other LLMs to create content with that. So do you have an opinion on that?

Steve Toth (29:34.379)
Yeah, in terms of safety, don’t think Google has an explicit work checking to see if this content was written by AI and going to reward you if it’s not and demote you if it is. I don’t think that’s scalable for Google. And if you think like a Google engineer, that’s probably not how you would approach that problem. But, you know, it comes down to abuse, right? Like how…

Are you just publishing thousands of low quality articles? We know that those tend to work for a while. is like something that kind of flies under the radar. And then Google applies some user behavior metrics to that. then we see them plummet. They kind of get re-ranked. That’s where I would caution people against. And at the end of the day, when you optimize, Google will just tell you,

bluntly like if you asked John Mueller at a side conversation at Brighton SEO, he would say that you know Google wants to reward users that care about their website and Caring about your website is not publishing, know hundreds or thousands of articles with very little human oversight Caring about your website is using you know AI assisted content with a human layer and an editing process and you know brand consistency

and good citations, good supporting statistics, refreshed on a consistent basis where there’s actual value added. And Google can pretty efficiently keep track of how pages change over time because they have their own kind of.

simplified system and understanding what page changes are and actually dug into that on this week’s SEO notebook, that it can see your upkeep of your site. can see how much love you’re actually putting into your content. And I think that long term, the more it sees a well-kept garden, the more it’s going to cultivate that.

Niklas Buschner (31:46.519)
Do you remember the SEO heist?

Steve Toth (31:49.985)
Yeah, I do. I can’t believe Jake Ward is still bragging about that. To be honest, I just saw something today about how he was hosting a webinar and saying he was from the SEO heist.

I think that’s a, likes to make an example to kind of scare the industry and they definitely made an example out of that website. I think that, AI, again, just going back to your question, AI generated content is fine, but you don’t want just one prompt, write me an SEO article about how to rank on Google and then hit publish.

you know that’s not going to do you much good but if you you know weave in some

for commentary, some examples, some case studies, you basically enrich your result with AI can help you with that, but essentially it’s undergoing a stamp of approval, then you’re in a lot better stead. But the problem that I had with what Jake Ward did in the SEO heist was that he basically put in the site map of a site called Exceljet.net into his

tool by word and just URL for URL copied their entire site map. And I spoke to the owner of ExcelJet and what he told me was the site that they published that on, which was causal.app, which got manually.

Steve Toth (33:24.938)
demoted completely is that those Excel formulas didn’t even work, you know, so it was literally just publishing a lot of garbage that went under the radar and I don’t think that’s a very ethical way to act and it’s not, you know, just not being a good web citizen and I think we do have a responsibility as SEOs not to pump out garbage because our reputation is already soured enough due to, you know, a lot of bad actors in our space, but

You know, basically trying to clone a site and then publishing content that is absolutely unhelpful because those Excel formulas didn’t even work. You know, I think there’s a reason why Google wanted to make an example of that. And, you know, I don’t think that’s anything to brag about personally.

Niklas Buschner (34:16.353)
Yeah, I also don’t think that ethics is probably something at least like SEO business ethics that Jake Ward really cared about. He probably just wanted to prove his point that you can like pump out a lot of stuff very quickly and get a lot of traffic. But yeah, you, you already answered my, my, my follow up questions I would have if you think that Google wanted to set an example. but bridging may be the idea of AA generated content and,

a concept you introduced earlier, fan out queries. I can imagine people thinking about, hey, back in the days, we basically had a keyword, lot of people were searching for that keyword or key phrase, and then we created a piece of content and we knew that we were target this key phrase. Now, if I enter something into Google, I have like these fan out queries. So I have to create more content, right? Because I have to like somehow target all of these different queries.

So what’s your take on that? How to handle this operationally if people are thinking about how should I update my content strategy to account for this new reality?

Steve Toth (35:23.776)
Yeah, great question. And I think you you.

could be tempted to say, me just use an AI fan out query simulator and try to create a page for every fan out query for your money keyword. And I think that’s an approach that’s not going to work because A, you don’t know what the actual fan out queries are. We do have ways of telling them in ChatGPT, but in terms of Google, you really don’t have any clarity in terms of that. They hide all of that stuff. Believe me, I checked the code.

And what instead I would encourage people to do is to understand the themes that AI wants to guide users down towards. So one of the methods that I used in SEO, or sorry, in AI notebook.

was using the chat GPT deep research clarifying questions to understand what kind of feedback it wants to get from the user to get to the heart of their query. So in SAS, I can tell you very plainly that some of the main ways that AI wants to structure those fan out queries are around your.

Comparisons. So how do you compare to other products what your pricing is? What your use case is it wants to know what the ICP? Does like what type of company do they work for what is the size of their company? Those are all very common paths that the AI is going to you know generate these queries because it wants to retrieve a result That’s relevant to them, you know, if you’re looking for projects

Steve Toth (37:08.34)
management or you’re looking if you just even put in something very like I need help managing my workflow right or something like that and you know it asks you are you a solo freelancer are you working at a large company you know if you’re a solo freelancer it’s gonna give you more of like a to-do-ist type of app suggestion whereas if you’re working at a larger you know 200 person SaaS company it’s gonna say you know try something like monday.com right so it

It wants to know who the ICP is, what type of company they work for, what’s the size of that company, what are their pricing constraints, comparing you against different…

businesses and if we understand that those are some of the common themes that AI wants to structure those fan out queries, we know that if we have good coverage around that stuff, that’s going to help us. So even if you think about pricing, companies just have one page about their pricing, but actually having pricing for that targets different size companies, different types of companies and all that

of stuff and you know it may be the same for a healthcare company or a finance company but you may still want to call out that you know pricing for 200 person finance fintech startups is X for HubSpot or whatever it is you know this is where you can kind of win because there’s an intersection between playing to that specific ICP and that important criteria of pricing.

Niklas Buschner (38:49.281)
Do you think that Google for better transparency around AI overviews, AI mode and fan out queries, et cetera. So everything that is basically hidden in the dark and then chat GPT for what people actually prompting, et cetera, that they will over time introduce more transparency, maybe like a chat GPT search console kind of solution or.

Do you think that we will basically stay with this black box now like forever?

Steve Toth (39:24.96)
Yeah, it’s a great question. When a company’s as unprofitable with chat, GBT, they’re not exactly prioritizing helping SEO people understand how users are using it. Right. So I don’t have a lot of faith that that’s coming anytime soon for chat, GBT. But what they would prioritize is more transparency for their advertisers, though they are going with the CPM model, which I think is going to ultimately not provide as much

value for advertisers that know SEOs may be able to leverage some of that data should they have clients that are doing you know active a EO GEO plus paid ads that there might be something there but you know my my real hope and the thing that you know I would love to see is better reporting from Google and we just saw a few weeks ago in early 2026 here being webmaster tools rollout

AI clicks and impressions for AI citations and being partners like Copilot and stuff like that. I think that there’s a lot of things that I still wish I would see in that Bing Webmaster Tools reporting. Like, for example, the ability to compare periods, like that doesn’t even exist there, but it’s a start. And I think that if Bing puts a little bit of pressure on Google and Google decides that, hey,

actually giving SEO, AEO folks some understanding about how things are changing and how they can better serve their ICPs that maybe they’ll roll out some more useful reporting. But we don’t really have any control of that. can only really hope.

Niklas Buschner (41:17.975)
Hmm. I just looked it up today, because I wanted to basically go back in time to the beginnings of Google and Google introduced AdWords, which was the name back then in 2000. And honestly, I didn’t know I would have expected something really different. They only introduced webmaster tools like Google webmaster tools back then. Now Google search console in 2006.

So only six years after the advertising product. So the sequencing between having the ads product first and then maybe introducing some sort of transparency mechanism after that, I think makes total sense. Probably also due to the demand from, as you said, advertisers. But I also wanted to ask you about the Bing Webmaster Tools thing, because I obviously also set it up for like a multitude of clients because it was pretty easy. So for everybody listening.

If you have Google search console set up, it’s basically like a two or three click import is very simple. but how useful did you find the data? So.

Steve Toth (42:23.392)
Well, there’s a couple of things I like about Bing Webmaster Tools. Well, know, the period that there is any visibility on AI reporting is a great start. Things I didn’t like was not being able to compare date ranges or look at year over year progress or whatever. So I didn’t like that. But one other thing that I would say about

being webmaster tools that’s a little bit underrated is that they tend to filter out fewer keywords for what Google thinks are privacy reasons. So if you look in Google Search Console and you export all the that are generating clicks to your page and you add all of those clicks up and then you look at the big blue and purple and.

green and orange numbers at the top with clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, those clicks and impressions are not going to add up to what you see in the table. And that’s because Google’s filtering out quite a bit of data from that for, again, like what it deems privacy reasons. And in some niches, that’s more…

visible than others, but you know there is this idea that they filter a lot of those queries and I think even Ahrefs did a study that showed that almost 50 % were being filtered in some cases. But what I’ve done in the past is compared.

the keywords that we’re seeing in Bing to the keywords that we’re seeing in Google and we’re seeing, you know, upwards of like 30 or even 40 percent of the queries that Google hides still being shown in Bing and in Bing Webmaster Tools. So what you can kind of do is, you know, use both sources of data as sources of truth. And then what you’re doing is you’re basically saying, look, if Bing is five percent of search traffic, we can

Steve Toth (44:21.166)
extrapolate that and say that this keyword that didn’t appear anywhere in the Google search results is probably still being searched on Google and is probably orders of magnitude higher in terms of clicks and impressions that it’s driving. But you won’t get that keyword data from the GSE. You have to look in Bing.

Niklas Buschner (44:39.949)
Hmm, got it. I think you can’t do a podcast where you talk about AEO if you do not mention Reddit, at least in the current state. But what I found really interesting is a post from you where you didn’t focus on Reddit, but you actually focused on Facebook groups and that Facebook groups are huge in AEO. And I don’t know, like,

how it’s in the US and in certain demographics, but I can just say that at least for Germany and for Europe, that Facebook is not really a thing anymore besides Facebook groups. And now I just feel like what’s your take on Facebook groups being like so huge for citations and the whole AEO space?

Steve Toth (45:27.398)
Yeah, well, I was just peering into Ahrefs one day and decided to put in the path of, you know…

facebook.com slash groups and I noticed that their traffic is like on an exponential curve and basically Facebook groups have begun to rank very well in Google. So this was just you know kind of an insight there and and and seeing an opportunity in you know.

threads that otherwise you wouldn’t think that have any impact on business. But you know, there’s real people out there looking for, you know, the best personal injury lawyer in Nashville or whatever. And you see this, you know, Facebook group, you know, ranking in the top three where, you know, people are ultimately making decisions. Or I think the biggest keyword that the Facebook group was ranking for when I last checked was Chinese food near me. And it didn’t even make sense because if somebody’s

that on one end of the country versus the other near me doesn’t really you know do them any good but again there’s this Facebook group that’s ranking for Chinese food near me which is just a gigantic keyword right so whether it’s useful or not that’s kind of Google’s mess up there but they are rewarding Facebook groups and

You know, there’s also it’s really interesting in terms of what’s making those posts rank. It’s not, you know,

Steve Toth (47:03.432)
Optimization in some cases some cases it does pull the the beginning of the post into a title tag So I think the title tag has the group name and then the beginning of the post But I’ve seen instances where the beginning of the post is not even really relevant and It’s just sourcing the context of the the actual comments to rank it. So it’s it’s Highly intelligent and it’s not like it’s not looking at that post

like it’s a well structured page is looking at you know what what value are real users you know recommending and wanting to bring that to light and give visibility for that so in that follow-up to that post

what I did was that’s where I generated that GPT that I mentioned earlier where it was being a bit lazy whereby you can take one keyword, create a multitude of keywords, and then this bot, or whether it’s a cloud project or GPT, will generate the pre-populated query parameters in Ahrefs to show you where these social networks are ranking for keywords that are important to you.

it would search Reddit, would search Facebook, would search LinkedIn, see where these social sites are ranking. And actually just this morning, one of my teammates had created our own internal tool that uses the data for SEO API, searches a bunch of our client keywords, and then only looks at where social networks are ranking. So we basically took that GBT and instead of looking at Ahrefs, we’re just now looking

at our own dashboard to see where those social links are ranking.

Niklas Buschner (48:55.624)
Now obvious question, how can SEOs exploit that?

Steve Toth (48:59.722)
Yeah, I think SEOs will end up ruining it. Not just exploit, but look, if you’ve got a client that is that personal injury lawyer in Nashville, it’s not a matter of saying just like best injury lawyer in Nashville, here’s my link. But maybe that injury lawyer actually posts something that’s helpful in there and drives some interest back to their site. So I think that

site SEO is something that has exploded in the last few years as Google has made it harder for actual websites and especially websites without a brand presence to rank. effectively those types of sites that don’t have brands are now latching on to larger pair of sites that are ranking in these spaces. So I think those types of sites are the ones that will jump on these posts. And you can also not just latch on to an existing post

but you can analyze what type of posts or YouTube videos or Facebook threads are ranking and you know, create your own posts that you control as well. So, multitude of ways you can take advantage of that.

Niklas Buschner (50:15.5)
Very nicely put. Now, besides running an obviously very successful agency and newsletters with like almost 30k subscribers, you also started running an AEO agency accelerator. Can you share a little bit about what made you started? What’s like basically the idea behind it and a couple of things that you can maybe tease that you teach in the accelerator?

Steve Toth (50:43.318)
Sure, came together very naturally. Usually once a year I open up hour long consulting calls after I usually come back from the Chiang Mai SEO conference. So this year I spoke at the conference, I booked a bunch of one hour calls after that and you know there were

few agency owners who had booked calls with me and it just became very evident that they were looking for guidance, right? And I wasn’t setting out to say in 2026, I’m going to start a coaching program and it’s going to do this. I don’t even have a website for it. It’s just happening very naturally. And there were two agency owners that stuck out to me as would be great people. just liked, I wanted to work with them in some capacity and one,

Was I won’t say the names just because well, they’ve talked about it themselves, but I’ll just be you kind of more general one owns a SEO agency that does SEO for rehab clinics and the other one did SEO for law firms So I saw those two as being you know, too high ticket SEO niches and to non-competing businesses that would effectively do the you know be in a group coaching format where I’m

meeting with both teams once a week for eight weeks. And what we’re basically doing is shaping their AEO service for them. So the outcome of that eight week program is kind of a.

Education obviously, but really the outcome is what is a service that we can now offer? To our clients, you know specifically for a yo upsells or net new business so we basically shape that during the eight weeks and Yeah, it’s I’ve already started my second cohort with that again. Very natural I’m booking 25 minute kind of discovery calls that are paid but if somebody’s interested in that they can go to Steve

Steve Toth (52:44.756)
toth.coach and just read a Notion page on that. I don’t really have a website for that but yeah there’s already a wait list and I don’t want to do more than two at a time so I kind of have to push them out now into the summer and fall.

Niklas Buschner (53:01.748)
Interesting. And what would you say what are like the most important things that agencies have to get right if they want to start introducing a EO as a service into their portfolio?

Steve Toth (53:15.436)
Well, client education is probably the biggest one because your clients are, you know, if you’re getting them to plunk down 10K a month on AEO and

they don’t understand that there’s not going to be necessarily this huge up into the right graph of click increases, then they’re ultimately not going to be a happy client for you. But if you frame it in terms of, hey, look, this is how you’re being represented right now on the web. And, you know, there are some important deal breakers that we effectively need to correct and, you know, make more known across all LLMs. You know, you’re going to close more deals and, and

what the outcome of this is, is better representation for you in addition to improved non-branded discovery. But it’s essentially that client education piece that I think is most important. And then actually what the deliverables are and how you, with each deliverable that you give to a client, you’re explaining the why behind why you’re doing it and maybe even teasing a little bit of the

Niklas Buschner (54:28.608)
Nice.

final question around your newsletters because you obviously have built them up with some substantial time invest over the years. What is like what makes this newsletter different to to other SEO newsletters that are out there? And do you would you still recommend to people to start a newsletter now because I feel like newsletters have become

very popular again, so they have been popular, then a little bit less, then again with Substack and everything. like, is, what is, why should people subscribe to either the AI notebook or SEO notebook? And what’s like your whole perspective on where newsletters go over the next years?

Steve Toth (55:21.004)
Look, the thing that made mine different, and I got in at a good time, there’s no doubt about it, I started SEONotebook.com in 2019 while I was still working full time at FreshBooks and at that time, you know, I believe there were not even maybe one or two SEO roundup newsletters. You had like the Moz Top 10 and things like that going out, but you didn’t have like…

legit SEO strategy or tactical advice Going out so my whole take was you know, I I really started it again very organically and out of a need of personal necessity You know, I was testing a lot of things at FreshBooks. I was learning a lot of things I was working with a bunch of great consultants and really like pushing the limits of of what I knew back then and that’s really where I felt like I

I was really becoming the SEO that I am today. And I was having all of this reading and I don’t watch YouTube videos that much, but more reading to learn and testing. And I needed a place to put everything instead of just like in an email to myself or in my physical notebook. So I got Evernote and I started putting all of my strategies and stuff into Evernote and then

The next day I thought, look, I’ve already got like 15 different things in here. Wouldn’t it be cool if, you know, once a week I emailed, you know, one strategy to an email list and called it SEO notebook. I ran it by my boss at FreshBooks that day and went and bought the domain for $750. And it is just, you know, it would quickly get that it got quickly within the first couple of months, got a thousand subscribers and, you know, really changed my life.

and allowed me to become an independent consultant initially and now agency owner, coach, etc. And you know I thought it just a it was a huge huge thing for my career. But do I think it’s worth doing now? I mean it all depends on what you have to say right? If you have unique value to put out into the world.

Steve Toth (57:43.213)
encourage people to do that. If you’re just posting your stuff on LinkedIn or X or Facebook or whatever, you’re not in control of those platforms. You could lose your account. could effectively lose a lot of the hard work that you put in. But when you have an email list, you own that email list. And it’s just a matter of keeping your sending reputation high and doing double opt-in and all that kind

of stuff and not spamming your list, right? So I would say that for long-term security, you know, no matter what, if something happened, you know, to my LinkedIn account or another account.

that would be bad, but I would still have that assurance of these two lists that I own, right? So I would encourage people to, if they’re posting value on these social networks, to also do that on email because a lot of the times, usage of these social networks also comes and goes. Sometimes people will use it for a while and then not.

it but there is never a day where a professional doesn’t check their email inbox right so that’s also something that’s never really well at least right now for this generation or maybe not for my 10 year old’s generation you know inboxes are still a very important touch point in people’s lives

Niklas Buschner (59:07.754)
That’s a good, very good, fundamental advice that there won’t be a single day where a professional won’t check his, his inbox. Steve, that has been a very, very insightful conversation. Thank you so much for sharing a lot also of your thinking, behind the scenes, how you basically approach stuff. If people want to follow you around so they can obviously, so there are, there are so many options.

So people can subscribe to seonotebook.com. They can subscribe to AI Notebook. They can, if they’re an agency owner, they could take a look at stevetoth.coach for the accelerator. where else can people follow?

Steve Toth (59:50.123)
Yeah, so I’m looking to consolidate into one platform, but we’re just actively building that and stealth right now. But the best place in terms of working with us notebook.agency and then the two newsletters are aiNotebook.com and seonotebook.com. And then, you know, if you’re on those newsletters, you’ll hear about all the different stuff that I’m doing as well. But anybody specifically interested in coaching at stevetoth.coach, which just redirects to a Notion page at this

at this point. yeah, add me on LinkedIn. That’s the social network that I’m most active on every day.

Niklas Buschner (01:00:27.85)
Awesome. Then I got a final question, which is what didn’t we talk about that we should have talked about?

Steve Toth (01:00:34.732)
No, great question. I would say that, know, LLM, like I take this from a.

Niklas Buschner (01:00:36.746)
I stole it from Lenny’s podcast. It’s it’s a blunt copy here, but I give credits at least.

Steve Toth (01:00:50.454)
Brenda, mine who works at Google and a conversation that I had with him this past summer in that, you know, pretty soon within the next five years, standing up and LLM is going to be something that is very quick and highly personalized, right? So LLMs are being now, like Google has already announced, you know, that certain features will draw upon your Gmail conversations or your chat conversations.

or your drive files. So I would say like this personalization and then even moving into the future of having our own primary assistant that is just completely hooked into everything that we’re doing. How do we optimize for that? But that’s probably a conversation for another podcast.

Niklas Buschner (01:01:43.083)
Awesome. think that’s definitely a conversation with another podcast. So we should probably do, do an update episode at the end of the year or next year if things are moving into that direction. But I suppose that also if people follow you, they will probably learn first if you learn more about that stuff. So.

Steve Toth (01:02:02.592)
Yeah, I do my best to publish all of my latest kind of thinking on SEO notebook and AI notebook and posting on LinkedIn. But we’d be happy to do this again another time.

Niklas Buschner (01:02:16.396)
Awesome. Thanks so much, Steve, for taking the time. I know you’re a busy man and yeah, hopefully speak soon.

Steve Toth (01:02:23.018)
Yeah, all the best. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye.

Niklas Buschner (01:02:25.162)
Same for you, bye bye.