Thirteen episodes later, we’re officially wrapping up the second season of our podcast, Get Discovered. This season, we explored why AI is changing where online discovery happens, what gets surfaced, and why most teams have a lot less visibility and control than they thought.
To close out season two, host Joe Walsh handed the mic to the person who’s usually behind the scenes: producer Carli Van Stolk. She’s sat in on every conversation this season but hasn’t been on the recording herself this season, so this episode is a little different. It’s a casual, unscripted debrief on the themes, the favorite moments, the technical hiccups behind-the-scenes, and what’s coming in season three.
Watch or listen to the full episode below, or read on for the highlights.
The Season’s Real Theme Wasn’t AEO vs. SEO. It Was Confusion
Ask Joe to name one theme that ran through the season, and he’ll actually give you two. The first is general: a lot of smart, experienced guests, and still a lot of honest hypothesizing about the lack of clarity on what’s actually happening.
“Everyone is honest about that,” Joe says, “which I think is another theme that’s important to note.” The industry is in a liminal space. The game has clearly changed, but nobody has fully mapped the new one yet.
He traces part of that back to something raised in the episode with Klaus-M. Schremser from Otterly AI: SEO should probably have always been called “Google optimization,” he says. It was built around one company and one algorithm. When something changed, there was a whole ecosystem of insiders ready to explain what to do differently. That clarity is exactly what’s missing now.
Carli’s read from behind the scenes backs this up. Guest after guest described the same problems: attribution gaps, traffic loss, and a lack of clarity on what’s actually working. “Maybe the podcast needs to turn into a support group,” she jokes.
But alongside the hand-wringing, she and Joe both noticed something else: genuine optimism about where things are headed.
“Most guests are excited about the state of things, and what’s to come,” Carli says. “The industry is in an exciting place.”
Is AEO Really Different From SEO? Yes, No, and It’s Complicated
The season’s most recurring debate gets its own segment in the wrap-up, and neither host lands on a clean answer. Carli points to the episode with Sylvain Charbit, Lead AI Search Strategist at HubSpot and a Prerender.io client. He argued that the gap between AEO and SEO is only going to widen, even as many SEOs still treat them as basically the same thing.
Joe’s take is more first-principles: SEO was always about organic growth, and AEO is a flavor of that same goal rather than a separate discipline. He credits the framing from Max Woelfle, Organic Growth Lead at On: both terms need to fold into something bigger and connected to actual business metrics, as the direction the industry should be heading.
“SEO or AEO in and of themselves don’t connect to the business metric tree,” Joe says. “They’re a stepping stone.” He also flags a moment from another episode that stuck with him: Alain Schlesser from Yoast asking a client what their real goal was, only to point out that “more traffic” isn’t a goal. It’s a proxy for something the business actually wants.
Where they land: the terms matter less than what teams are optimizing toward, and the work has gotten more cross-functional than ever, pulling in product, partnerships, and sales teams that pure SEO rarely touched.
The Biggest Misconception: Wanting AI Search to Behave Like Google
Every guest this season got asked the same question: what’s the biggest misconception about AI visibility?
Joe’s takeaway, looking back across all episodes, is that most people want AI search to be a smaller, slightly weirder version of Google. Something with clear levers you can pull and clean metrics you can track.
But it isn’t. The goalposts move constantly, and the tidy attribution chain SEOs grew up with doesn’t translate.
Carli adds a favorite from Tobias Schlottke’s episode: the gap between discoverability and actionability, and how this is something all SEOs should be thinking about now.
What Tobi means by actionability, in this case, is whether AI agents will actually be trusted to act on someone’s behalf—not just surface information. This is something that Max Woelfle from On echoes, too.
An important caveat: even though agentic AI is certainly on the way (nearly every guest spoke about it), it’s still a long way off from mainstream adoption, says Joe. He’s skeptical it’s coming as fast as the loudest early adopters suggest. His evidence: even Tobias, one of the most technically fluent people he knows, ended up buying his daughter’s toy himself instead of letting an agent handle it.
What Changed Behind the Curtain This Season
The conversation also turns inward, covering what actually improved production-side across season two. Carli points to two things she’s carrying into season three. First, better tooling (the team moved from ChatGPT to a Claude project this season). Second, a much stronger prep process, including intro calls with guests before recording so she understands what they actually want to talk about.
“The prep is huge,” she says. “Notes for anyone running a podcast: don’t just rely on AI exclusively for that. Have an actual conversation with the guest, and use your brain.” She’s candid that she leaned on AI a bit too heavily earlier in the season for her own thinking, and it showed. Going forward, she’s keeping the note-taking and clip selection human.
As for guests with standout energy on the mic? Carli calls out Noah Greenberg from Stacker as a natural, and someone who “should be on podcasts all the time.” The two also discussed favorite moments, but those were harder to pin down. Joe name-checks the conversation with Ray Grieselhuber from Demandsphere, where a throwaway phrase about “service as software” put language to something he’s tried to explain for a decade of SaaS work. He also mentions the episode with Ryan Law from Ahrefs, whose depth of experience made for one of the season’s most grounded conversations.
Season Three: From Discoverability to Actionability
Season two was about diagnosing the discovery crisis: noticing where visibility broke down, why attribution stopped working, what teams are getting wrong. Season three is shifting toward something more prescriptive, such as specific solutions, rather than shared confusion.
Joe and Carli are planning to bring in more partners and more voices from across the industry to dig into the actionability question they raised this season. They also expect to keep tracking what the community ends up calling all of this, since “organic growth,” “AEO,” and “SEO” are all still competing for the job.
There’s also a structural change worth flagging: Carli is heading out on maternity leave, so season three will feature new voices from the Prerender.io team stepping in as co-hosts and producers. “It’s gonna be an adjustment,” Joe admits, “but it’ll be nice to surface new perspectives.” On the research side, Prerender.io is also bringing on its first applied research scientist, who’ll help bring more rigor to the data and findings that make it into future episodes.
Tune Into the Full Conversation
Listen to the full season two wrap-up of Get Discovered on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to review and subscribe so you don’t miss season three. Got a specific problem you’d like the show to tackle next season? Let the team know at prerender.io/podcast or on LinkedIn.
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