2026 Past Conference Agenda

Google Updates & AI Search: What's Working, What's Getting Hit

Barry Schwartz and Glenn Gabe return to break down the recent spam update, the broad core updates, and where Google's ranking systems are heading. They'll also cover what some companies are doing to game AI search that's getting them penalized in Google, plus how AI-generated content actually ranks and survives updates.

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Barry Schwartz is the founder and Executive Editor of the Search Engine Roundtable and News Editor at Search Engine Land, where he's covered search for over 15 years and interviewed many of Google's top search executives. He's CEO of the New York web firm RustyBrick, a longtime speaker and organizer at conferences like SMX and PubCon, and has advised Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In 2018 he was named US Search Personality of the Year, and in 2019 he received Search Engine Land's Outstanding Community Service Award.

Glenn Gabe is the founder of G-Squared Interactive (GSQi) and an SEO and AI Search consultant with over 27 years of experience in digital marketing. He specializes in helping large, complex sites recover visibility across organic search and AI Search, with a heavy focus on Google algorithm update recovery, technical SEO audits, and site migrations. Glenn is a longtime blogger at The Internet Marketing Driver, a contributor to Search Engine Roundtable and former Search Engine Land columnist, and hosts the video podcast "SEO From The Front Lines." He's also a regular speaker at industry conferences.

Who Does AI Trust? Rethinking Authority in the Age of AI Search

Authority in AI search is about more than links. In this session, Lisa Paasche will explore how authority is evolving in AI search, why visibility alone doesn't equal credibility, and why trying to manipulate the signals is unlikely to be a sustainable strategy.



She'll look at what brands should be doing now to build the kind of real-world authority that both search engines and AI systems can recognise, retrieve and trust.

Lisa Paasche

Lisa Paasche is one of the UK's early SEO pioneers and the founder of EKTE Vision, where she works as a business adviser, coach, and mentor to agency owners. She built and scaled Verve Search, one of Europe's leading SEO and digital PR agencies, from scratch into a team of 50+ before selling it to Omnicom Media Group in 2017 and staying on as CEO. Over that time the agency won 50+ industry awards, including Best SEO Agency three years running, and Lisa was recognized as Search Personality of the Year and named to the BIMA100 CEO category. She's also an angel investor and a longtime conference speaker 

You're being fooled by AI SEO industry.

Michał will break down why API-based monitoring returns a fake answer, cutting content in half and pulling different sources than the real user interface. He'll also cover why 78% of rephrased prompts return the same brands — meaning most large-scale prompt monitoring burns budget for little insight —  and how fragile real AI visibility actually is.

Michał Suski

Michał Suski is co-founder and Head of Innovation at Surfer, where he's spent years running large-scale content experiments and building the frameworks behind one of the most widely used SEO tools in the industry. His current focus is on what comes as search expands — how LLMs generate answers, what makes a source citable, and what SEOs need to change before the shift becomes impossible to ignore.

He shares what the data actually shows, not what sounds right or safe to say.

Google forgives almost everything in technical SEO. ChatGPT, Claude… don't.

Google forgives almost everything in technical SEO. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity don't. This session breaks down the core difference: Google renders your JavaScript, waits hours for slow servers, picks a canonical URL for you, and ranks 20-year-old pages, while AI engines run zero JavaScript, hang up on slow servers with no retry, can't read your schema on a live fetch, and skip old content. Martin walks through live tests where ChatGPT quotes wrong prices and misses in-stock products entirely, shows why roughly 72% of brands get zero mentions in AI search, then gives a practical hygiene checklist, server-render your content, cut JS debt, keep TTFB under 800ms, structure answer-first, and build entity strength, for winning visibility on both Google and the AI engines.

Martin Stepanek

Martin Stepanek is an enterprise technical SEO and web performance consultant, and the founder of TechSEO Vitals. He spent over a decade as a web developer specializing in website architecture and performance before fully transitioning into technical SEO in 2021, a background that lets him go deeper than most consultants and turn audits into prioritized, actionable fixes rather than long PDFs. Today he helps companies stay findable not just on Google but inside ChatGPT and other AI engines, writes a regular newsletter an

The New Playbook For SEO/GEO Content in 2026

The move from ten blue links to AI-generated answers means the biggest opportunity isn't just ranking, it's becoming the source AI systems trust and cite. In this session Zach shows content teams and marketing leaders how to make their pages "answer-ready" for Generative Engine Optimization, covering how AI evaluates content at the passage level, why chunking and structure matter more than ever, and how semantic relationships and "triples" help AI connect your brand to the topics that matter. He'll also dig into synthetic fan-out queries, the follow-up questions AI generates behind the scenes, so you can build content ecosystems that anticipate what AI asks next. You'll leave with a marketer-friendly framework for writing content that isn't just searchable but usable in AI-driven discovery, no engineering background required. 

Zach Chahalis

Zach Chahalis is the Senior Director of SEO and Data Analytics at iPullRank and was formerly VP of SEO for Apartments.com/CoStar Group. With 15 years of experience, he's developed and executed SEO strategies for enterprise brands including Under Armour, GameStop, Michaels, Sodexo, Warner Music Group, and Genuine Parts Company/NAPA. His passion is deep technical SEO, especially website replatformings and migrations (he's done over 75), structured data, log file analysis, and JavaScript SEO. Zach was named to the inaugural Search Power List of the 100 most influential SEOs in the US, delivered a keynote for Disney in 2025, joined Google's AI search video series, hosts the podcast "Azeem Digital Asks," and has judged the Global, US, and European Search Awards. 

Humans Need Trust. Machines Need Structure. SEO Needs Both.

(Because apparently Google alone wasn’t enough.)

Technical SEO used to be complicated enough when we only had Google to impress.

Now we also have AI systems, crawlers, users, clients and probably someone asking why traffic dropped before we’ve even opened Search Console. Perfect. Exactly what we needed.

In this session, I’ll talk about how technical SEO, structured data, entities, site architecture and trust signals work together to make websites easier for machines to understand, while still making sense to actual humans.

Because a website can have perfect schema, perfect canonicals and a beautiful sitemap…

…and still make absolutely no sense.

And that’s basically SEO’s version of being technically correct and completely useless.

The idea is simple:

Make humans trust you.
Make machines understand you.
And ideally, make SEO contribute to the business too.

Ana Precup

Ana Precup is a UK-based SEO consultant specializing in AI Search, ecommerce SEO, brand visibility, and digital strategy. She has been doing SEO since 2012 and writing on her blog Deby.ro since 2010, and is the founder of Deby (Deby Digital Agency), where she helps brands and online projects become more visible, clearer, and more relevant across Google and AI Search. 

Publisher personalization strategies for the AI age

In this session, news SEO veteran Louisa Frahm will explore how publishers can utilize personalized search features (EX: "Preferred Sources" in Google's Top Stories carousel) to encourage long-term reader loyalty amid the rise of zero-click search. Related angles of interest include dynamic content recommendations, content paywall strategies, tailored entry points, and enhanced E-E-A-T signals. 

Louisa Frahm

Louisa Frahm is a San Diego native who built her career in the news SEO world, running search efforts at E! Online, Yahoo!, TMZ, People, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Google, and ESPN over the past decade. In June 2026 she launched her own search consultancy, Frahm Focus. She holds an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2012) and a master's in communication management from USC (2021), and starting August 2026 she'll join USC Annenberg as an adjunct professor in audience development. Leadership development and mentoring are two of her biggest professional passions. Outside of work, Louisa loves all things pop culture, her Funko Pop collection is over 100 figurines strong, and she's always happy to talk Prince, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie. 

Pet Detective - Tracking the Trends and Leaders

Steve will highlight search trends, leading brands and websites that can be used as blueprints for success. Data by SISTRIX.

Everything Old Is New Again: Why Information Retrieval Still Powers AI Search

As generative AI reshapes how users discover information, many assume traditional search principles are obsolete. This talk argues the opposite. From ranking and relevance to retrieval pipelines and evaluation, modern AI Search systems are built on decades of information retrieval research. Attendees will learn how foundational IR concepts quietly underpin LLM-powered search experiences—and why understanding them is essential for building, optimising, and auditing AI-driven discovery systems.

Optimizing Social Media For High-Converting SEO.

The search landscape is evolving. The gradual introduction of social media insights in Search Console strongly suggests Google no longer relies on websites alone to deliver real-world information. Recent SERPs are noticeably showing results that come from diverse sources, heavily leaning towards user narratives in discussion groups and perspectives expressed in social media content. Even YMYL niches are not entirely excluded from this evolution as shown in the screenshot below for the query "how can I file my taxes for 2025 in 2026.

Visual Semantics and Algorithmic Authorship: Dance of Bytes and Letters

It is gonna explain how to increase relevance based on the document understanding capacities of Google, by correlating the textual and visual data they can absorb.

Why Most B2B SEO Programs Plateau at ‘Traffic That Doesn’t Convert

B2B SEO has two structural problems:

1. Traffic that doesn’t convert
2. Declining CTR due to AI surfaces

When AI answers the question directly in the SERP, only the strongest brands and most differentiated content earn the click. This session explores how traditional traffic-led roadmaps are breaking — and what it takes to build defensible, conversion-focused SEO programs in an AI-shaped search landscape.

How to Optimise for Google Discover in the Age of AI

AI Summaries are now also appearing in Google Discover, alongside more social media content from YouTube and X. How can websites maximise the visibility in Discover and attain consistent traffic from his highly unpredictable content recommendation feed? In this talk Barry Adams will show how Discover works, what tactics yield the best results, and what websites can do to maintain Discover traffic in this new era.

E-E-A-T 2.0: How Real-World Trust Signals Now Drive Rankings

As Google shifts toward a safety-first search ecosystem, websites, especially those in the YMYL space (finance, medical, legal, insurance, wellbeing) face a new reality: E-E-A-T is no longer just about on-page optimisation, it’s about real-world credibility. In 2025, Google’s trust systems increasingly rely on external validation such as expert authority, institutional citations, regulatory trust markers, and off-site reputation signals.

This talk explores the evolution of E-E-A-T into a multi-layered trust framework, showing how Google blends content quality, author identity, brand reputation, and third-party verification to identify safe, authoritative sources especially in high-risk YMYL categories.

Attendees will discover how to build E-E-A-T into a measurable, scalable strategy that aligns SEO with PR, compliance, expert governance, and brand reputation. The session will provide practical steps for strengthening author entities, elevating organisational authority, improving content credibility, and creating the kind of trust signals that both users and AI models recognise as reliable.

Learn how to speak Google's Love Language with SXO

In today’s search landscape, success means more than just technical SEO, it’s about creating experiences that delight users while keeping Google happy. We’ll explore the symbiotic relationship between search marketers and UX designers, showing how collaboration drives better results. You’ll get practical takeaways for balancing SEO, UX, and the evolving world of AI-driven search, ensuring your content connects with humans first… and ranks higher too.

Building Local Trust and AI Visibility Through Community PR

Search has changed. Local businesses are no longer just competing in traditional rankings. They are competing for inclusion in AI-generated answers, map packs, and increasingly crowded SERPs. In this environment, generic link building and high-DA placements are losing ground to something more powerful: real-world relevance.

In this session, you will learn how community sponsorships and local partnerships can become a scalable, data-driven visibility channel. Drawing on original research and millions of dollars in sponsorship placements, we break down how local trust signals influence both search engines and AI systems, and why they outperform traditional link strategies.

You will see what effective community links actually look like, how they impact visibility, and how to operationalize sponsorships in a way that drives both business outcomes and meaningful community impact.