Take Your Time Back: How to Win at AI Event Discovery and Attendee Experience

A recap of key insights from Bizzabo's "Take Your Time Back" webinar featuring Nick Lafferty of Profound

Most event professionals know AI is worth paying attention to. The tricky part is figuring out where to actually start when your calendar is already full, and your to-do list isn't getting any shorter.

In a recent Bizzabo webinar, we asked attendees to name their biggest challenge with AI. The top answer? "I'm not sure how to apply it to events specifically." So that's exactly what we set out to tackle.

We sat down with Nick Lafferty, Founding Marketing Engineer at Profound, an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platform that helps brands show up in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, alongside Enrique Secanechia-Santos, Enterprise Solutions Engineering Manager at Bizzabo. The result was one of the most practical conversations we've had about what AI for event planning actually looks like, day to day.

Key takeaways from this article:

• YouTube is the second most cited source in AI search, and small-view videos still get picked up
• Adding FAQs to event pages is the single highest-impact tactic for AI discoverability
• Keeping event pages live after an event ends preserves search authority you've already built
• LinkedIn is the number one most cited domain for professional queries in AI search
• An AI copilot embedded in your event app can handle the most common attendee questions automatically, freeing your team for higher-value work

First, let's address the pressure event professionals are feeling around AI

Here's something reassuring: nobody has this fully figured out. Not even the people who look like they do on LinkedIn.

As Nick put it during the webinar: "I feel behind when it comes to AI too, and I do this kind of thing for a living." The gap between you and the so-called AI experts is much smaller than it appears. What separates people making progress is simply that they picked one pain point, tried to automate it, and used that momentum to keep going.

When AI takes the repetitive, draining parts of your job off your plate, you get to spend more time on the deeply human stuff: connecting people, shaping experiences, and creating the moments that make events worth attending. As we've covered in our complete guide to using AI for events, the real unlock comes when AI becomes part of your everyday workflow rather than something you reach for occasionally.

How to make your events discoverable in AI search

Search behavior is shifting fast. More and more people are asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, "what's the best marketing conference this year?" rather than typing it into Google. If your event isn't showing up in those AI-generated answers, you're missing a growing chunk of your potential audience.

This is where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) comes in. AEO is the practice of structuring your content so that AI-powered search tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, can find, understand, and recommend it. Think of it as SEO, with the added requirement that your content needs to directly answer questions, not just rank for keywords.

Nick Lafferty and Profound shared five tactics every event team can act on today.

1. Upload your event content to YouTube

According to Profound's analysis of billions of AI search citations, YouTube is the second most cited source across all AI search platforms overall, and the most cited source for Google-family tools like AI Overviews, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.

Here's what that looks like practically for event teams:

• Record and upload all your hosted event sessions
• Bring a videographer to events you attend, grab booth interviews and B-roll, and cut a two to three minute sizzle reel
• Don't let low view counts put you off. 25% of cited YouTube videos have fewer than 1,000 views, and some have fewer than 100

Pro tip: Include the year in your video title. Videos with the current year in the title get cited roughly 55% more often, and 80% of all YouTube citations come from videos published since 2023.

One thing worth knowing: Vimeo does not get meaningfully cited in AI search. If discoverability is a priority, YouTube is the platform to focus on.

2. Add FAQs to every event page

When an AI assistant gets a question, it searches the web for a direct, quotable answer. FAQs are exactly what it's looking for.

Think about the questions your attendees always ask:

• Is this event free to attend?
• Will sessions be recorded?
• Where is the event located?
• What's included in the ticket price?

Publishing those answers on your event page means you're pre-loading the response for any large language model that comes looking. Profound does this across all of their Zero Click event pages, and it's a big reason their events surface when people ask AI assistants about AEO conferences.

3. Keep event pages live after the event ends

Taking down an event page once an event wraps erases a digital footprint that may have taken months to build, including rankings, backlinks, and AI citations.

Nick's recommendation: keep pages live with a year appended to the URL (e.g., /event-name-2025). Embed your YouTube recap video, link to past editions, and let that authority compound over time. This connects directly to the broader case for repurposing event content into multi-channel assets. Every piece of content you create during an event can keep working long after the doors close.

4. Create listicles that feature your own event

LLMs frequently cite list-format content like "best conferences for X" and "top events for Y professionals" when answering discovery queries. Building your own category roundup with your event featured prominently is a legitimate and effective way to shape what AI tools recommend.

Profound publishes a roundup of the best AEO conferences, and their own event appears first. The approach is transparent, and it works. The same logic applies to your category.

5. Prioritize LinkedIn as part of your event promotion strategy

LinkedIn is the number one most cited domain for professional queries in AI search, according to Profound's data. When speakers, attendees, and team members post about your event and tag your brand, it creates a web of signals that AI tools pick up and cite.

Put live event LinkedIn activity together with YouTube content and a well-maintained event website, and you have what Nick calls "the trifecta of modern event discovery."

How to automate event content repurposing with AI

For teams running a high volume of events, manually turning session recordings into blog posts, optimizing video metadata, and refreshing event page copy adds up fast. This is exactly the kind of repetitive work AI handles well.

Profound walked through their agent-based workflow live during the webinar: upload a YouTube URL, and the platform automatically pulls the transcript, generates a blog post draft, and produces an optimized title and description for AI search. The whole thing takes minutes.

The compounding effect is real. One event session becomes a blog post. That blog post gets cited in AI search. The citation drives discovery. The discovery drives registration. Our guide to post-event content repurposing covers the formats and channels that consistently deliver the most value.

How AI improves the attendee experience at events

Getting your events found is one piece of the puzzle. Delivering a great experience once people show up is where the real magic happens, and AI is opening up some genuinely exciting possibilities there, too.

Bizzabo's Enrique Secanechia-Santos walked through a live demo of BizzyAI, an AI copilot built directly into the Bizzabo mobile event app. Attendees already know how to use ChatGPT-style interfaces, so the learning curve is basically zero. Give them that same familiar experience, trained on your event's specific data and available on their phone throughout the event, and you've got something really powerful. This is AI-driven event personalization in practice, delivering experiences that feel relevant and intentional rather than one-size-fits-all.

What an event AI copilot can do for attendees

Answer common logistics questions instantly. "What's the Wi-Fi password?" "How do I register for a session?" "What food options are near the venue?" Train the AI on your FAQ document, and it handles these automatically, with no queue and no staff time required.

Help attendees navigate a complex agenda. "Show me sessions about product innovation." "What's on at 2 PM on Day 2?" For large conferences with multiple tracks, AI-powered session search saves attendees a lot of time and helps them engage with the full program, not just whatever they stumble across first.

Surface relevant speakers and attendees for networking. "Show me speakers from marketing roles." "Find other attendees who work in fintech." The AI parses job titles, industries, and interest tags to surface relevant connections, making networking feel more intentional.

Manage personal schedules and meeting reminders. "What sessions have I favorited?" "Who am I meeting with tomorrow at 10 AM?" The copilot takes the mental load out of managing a packed conference day.

Improve attendee profile discoverability. The AI can nudge attendees to add a bio, update their interests, or clarify their job title so the right people can find them more easily.

What you need to train your event AI copilot

The copilot automatically ingests your core event data: agenda, speaker profiles, and registered attendees. The additional training you layer on top is what makes it genuinely useful. Consider building an FAQ document that covers:

• Venue logistics (Wi-Fi credentials, parking, accessibility)
• Local recommendations (restaurants, attractions near the venue)
• Event policies (session registration, cancellation, dress code)
• Common app how-to questions ("how do I send a message to another attendee")

Generative AI tools can help you draft this content, especially for venues or cities you're less familiar with. And when the copilot is handling the routine stuff, your team gets time back for the higher-order decisions that actually shape the experience, which connects nicely to AI for event strategy more broadly.

Where to start if you only have an hour a week

Both speakers landed on the same advice: pick one thing and start there.

• Choose one AI tool and commit to learning it well, rather than sampling five (Nick and his team use Claude)
• Identify the most time-consuming, repetitive part of your current event workflow
• Spend one hour setting up an AI-assisted version of that one task
• Use the time you save to experiment with the next thing

Think of it like onboarding a new team member. There's an upfront investment, but once the process is running, it stays off your plate. And if you're looking for a structured place to start, Bizzabo's complete AI guide for event planners covers the full range of use cases, from content creation through to attendee management.

What event professionals who embrace AI have in common

AI isn't going to replace the reason events exist. People will keep wanting to gather, connect, eat together, and hear ideas delivered by a human standing in front of them.

What AI can do is clear the path between your best ideas and their execution, taking care of the briefs, recaps, FAQ pages, and content repurposing so you have more room to focus on the experience itself.

The event professionals who will stand out in the years ahead are the ones giving it a go now, not the ones waiting until they feel fully ready.

See AI for events in action

BizzyAI, Bizzabo’s attendee copilot, is available for early access in beta. If you want to see how it works for your events, we'd love to show you.

Frequently asked questions about AI for events

This post was adapted from Bizzabo's "Take Your Time Back: Practical AI for Events and How to Win an LLM Search" webinar.