Ethan Smith, dubbed the AEO expert, is making one of his only UK appearances this year at BrightonSEO. Don’t miss your chance to see him live as he breaks down what’s real, what’s hype, and what you should actually do about it.
In this myth-busting session, Ethan challenges the biggest narratives shaping SEO and AEO using actual, real user, reliable data. More importantly, you’ll leave with a practical framework for interpreting data in the AI era:
- How to assess whether a statistic is trustworthy
- Which data sources deserve scrutiny, and which deserve confidence
- How to verify traffic claims and market share numbers
- How to run your own experiments and publish defensible research
The takeaway: Trust, but verify. Verify, then trust.
The AEO Hype Cycle: What’s Real, What’s Noise, What Should You Do
About this session
Syndicate 1&2 - Anything is Possible stage, Brighton Centre, Kings Road, Brighton and Hove, Brighton, BN1 2GR, United Kingdom
Thu 30 Apr, 2026 | 09:30 AM
The sustainability issue with AI and what we can change as marketers
This talk traces the true sustainability cost of today’s generative-AI boom—from the “Ghibli effect” and cartoon-box trends to daily ChatGPT query volumes—contrasting GenAI’s resource footprint with traditional ML and the industry’s “scale at all costs” response.
We’ll examine how AI is flooding marketing and search: AI Overviews on billions of queries, query fan-out, bot/“dead internet” dynamics, and the waste created by the new vibe-coding workflow where endless prompting erodes trust and bloats emissions. We’ll map the downstream effects on our roles, ethics, and the reliability of the web, then pivot to pragmatic ways to cut impact without losing capability.
You’ll leave with concrete alternatives:
* when to do the work yourself,
* how to plan prompts and model choices,
* when to favor small/custom models or fine-tunes, and
* how to apply efficient architectures, pruning/quantization, and pre-trained APIs to replace default LLM-everywhere habits—complete with workflows, roadmaps, and resources.
This talk is about building systems that are mindful not only about the results needed and expected by us, marketers, to stay competitive in the digital landscape; but also of the environment and it's needs.
About this session
Syndicate 1&2 - Anything is Possible stage, Brighton Centre, Kings Road, Brighton and Hove, Brighton, BN1 2GR, United Kingdom
Thu 30 Apr, 2026 | 09:30 AM
Content strategy vs AI slop: how we compete with the machines
Between Google's helpful content updates and hallucinating AI overviews, it can be difficult to know where we stand with SEO. In this talk, Alice will explore how zero click search and AI slop are changing the way we need to approach content marketing and why it's time to look at the bigger picture.
About this session
Syndicate 1&2 - Anything is Possible stage, Brighton Centre, Kings Road, Brighton and Hove, Brighton, BN1 2GR, United Kingdom
Thu 30 Apr, 2026 | 09:30 AM
What Site Structure Does AI Search Favor - A data analysis of 5000 websites
In this talk, Gijs will discuss what website structures AI models favor most when citing different sources in AI responses. Understanding how to correctly set your website up can be the difference of winning citations and mentions, or missing out on them completely.
About this session
Syndicate 1&2 - Anything is Possible stage, Brighton Centre, Kings Road, Brighton and Hove, Brighton, BN1 2GR, United Kingdom
Thu 30 Apr, 2026 | 09:30 AM



