The DemandSphere team had a fantastic time at brightonSEO San Diego last week.
The conference’s third U.S. edition brought together more than three thousand search marketing pros at the Manchester Grand Hyatt on September 23–24, and the energy around AI search was incredible.
Presentation
On Wednesday morning, I joined Crystal Carter (Wix), Amanda Jordan (Owner.com), and Josh Blyskal (Profound) for the “AI & the SERPs” talk track.
What are most people getting wrong about the traditional versus AI search divide?
I explained it in my presentation, “It’s ALL AI Search: Building a Unified View for Growth,” where I shared data from our 10,000-prompt study that completely flips the conventional wisdom about which search indexes these AI engines actually use behind the scenes.
We started seeing data in February and March that ChatGPT was relying heavily on Google and presented this in April at the brightonSEO UK event. Since then, things have only accelerated and the launch of Google’s AI Mode in May unleashed an explosion in the usage of query fan-outs across answer engine platforms.
You can find my slides here.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth, attended the presentation, and for all the engaging conversations.
Shoe-In Winner at the Booth
We also had some fun with a sneaker raffle at our booth: SEO manager Debbie Chew won our limited-edition Nikes. Congrats, Debbie!
Looking Forward
That’s a wrap on brightonSEO San Diego. Always energizing to be around people who are tackling the same challenges we face every day.
I’m presenting again at brightonSEO UK in October (more on that later). In the meantime, I want to share an update on a new development at DemandSphere.
Analytics AX: Our New Enterprise Log Analytics Solution
We’re happy to introduce our new enterprise-scale log analytics solution, Analytics AX.
This wasn’t something we had a huge need for a couple of years ago, but with the proliferation of so many new bots and content indexing patterns that have emerged with the advent of LLMs, it has become a very common request for us.
When it comes to SEO and AI, people want to know:
- Which LLM bots are crawling which URLs?
- Is content getting blocked from bots when they index?
- How effectively is Google crawling the site?
We built this product on open standards for two key reasons…
First, we needed to offer the ability to ingest terabytes of streaming log data from a variety of sources, including Cloudflare, Akamai, as well as the ability to pick up data from S3 buckets.
Second, we wanted to give power users the ability to get their hands directly on the underlying data streams and yet easily build new views and dashboards on top of it.
From this foundation, we can build pretty much any view on top of it that we need and we have some great new enhancements planned already.
Stay tuned for more on this.
Upcoming Events
Next up, we’ll be in Brighton, UK October 23–24 for brightonSEO UK.
FOUND Conference Tokyo October 2025
October 28–28, we’re hosting the FOUND Conference in Tokyo, Japan at the stunning Otemachi Mitsui Hall.
Speakers include Rand Fishkin, Lily Ray, Mike King, Elias Dabbas, Noah Learner and more.
Back with more updates soon. Hope to see you there!