One Agenda,
One Agenda
Thousands
of Invaluable Insights
shaping modern search.
JOIN US April 27-30, 2026 in New York
4
DAYS IN
NEW YORK CITY
39
AMAZING
SPEAKERS
32
HOURS
OF TALKS
4+
UNMISSABLE
EXCLUSIVE EVENTS
1
CONFERENCE
LIKE NO OTHER
Sunday, April 26
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Early Registration
Attending SEO Week? You can check in early on April 26. Stop by the venue to pick up your badge, get oriented, and avoid the morning rush before sessions begin. Early registration is available for all confirmed ticket holders.
11:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Authoritative Intelligence: Evolving IR, NLP, and Topical Evaluation in the Age of Infinite Content
Search is no longer about keywords—it’s about deep semantic understanding. Jeff Coyle will show how modern information retrieval, NLP, and AI-enhanced ranking methods redefine what it means to create authoritative content.
- How vector search, passage ranking, and hybrid retrieval models work
- Why search engines have evolved how they evaluate content quality
- How to build content that aligns with AI-driven ranking signals
Listen to the podcast ->
Monday, April 27
Day 01: The Science
From crawling and indexing to large language models and retrieval engines, this day dives into the technical foundations of search and AI—how they work, how they’re evolving, and how SEOs can stay ahead of the machines shaping discovery.
Featured activations
Stop by for a fresh headshot powered by
Fuel up at the Coffee Bar sponsored by
Content Capture Studio sponsored by
Times Square Lounge sponsored by
Central Park Lounge
8:00 AM – 8:45 AM
Registration and coffee
Start the day by checking in, grabbing a coffee, and connecting with fellow attendees. Consider it the first experiment of the day: meet new people, exchange ideas, and settle in before the sessions begin.
8:45 AM – 9:00 AM
Welcome & Opening Remarks with Mike King
Mike King kicks off SEO Week with a quick welcome, key housekeeping notes, and a look at what’s ahead. Get oriented, get grounded in the theme of the day, and get ready for the conversations, ideas, and insights that will shape the rest of the event.
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM
The Invisible, Converged Web: Architecting Visibility for the AI Economy
The web is shifting from pages and blue‑link rankings to an invisible, converged information layer that modern search, grounded systems, and emerging agentic workflows all draw from. In this new environment, visibility is not about where content shows up – it is about whether text, images, video, code, and structured data can be understood, trusted, and reused inside modern AI pipelines.
These systems operate through layers of eligibility checks, grounding confidence, safety filters, and policy alignment with publisher controls – and content without these signals simply cannot be selected or cited. This makes modern SEO/GEO feel less like ranking tactics and more like a distributed‑systems challenge: coordinating the signals that let AI pipelines trust, reuse, and act on your content.
This talk takes the audience behind those invisible layers and gives them a mental model for designing content that remains durable, visible, and executable across today’s AI‑driven ecosystem.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- A clearer map of the hidden layers: You will understand how content actually flows through grounding, safety, and attribution checks – and why “system readiness” determines whether your content is surfaced, cited, and used.
- A new multimodal visibility playbook: You will walk away knowing how multimodal content – text, images, video, code, structured data – needs to express the right grounding, safety, and attribution signals so AI systems can surface it in the first place.
- A durable strategy for designing how your content preferences shape visibility: Understand how AI preferences expressed via robots.txt and other mechanisms shape that entire journey.
9:45 AM – 10:15 AM
Beyond the Million-Token Window: TurboQuant and RLM-on-KG
TurboQuant is changing what long-context models can do, but bigger windows alone are not enough. AI systems still need staged retrieval to narrow huge information spaces down to the evidence that matters. This session explores the limits of infinite context, the risk of context rot, and why the next step is not more input, but better navigation.
Andrea will introduce Recursive Language Models and RLM-on-KG as a practical framework for AI search, where systems explore structured knowledge step by step instead of passively consuming larger prompts. For SEO teams, the implication is clear: winning in AI search means building content that is not only retrievable but also structured, connected, and easy to verify.
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
10:15 AM – 10:45 AM
Morning Break
Pause the experiments for a moment. Grab a coffee, compare notes with other attendees, explore the exhibitor halls, and process what you’ve learned so far before the next round of sessions begins.
10:45 AM – 11:30 AM
F*CK it, I'll Do it Myself
- Why “AI-powered SEO tools” are mostly cosplay
- What relevance engineering actually looks like in practice
- How to build and automate the stuff vendors won’t ship
11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Build the Tool Your Team Actually Needs: A Product Thinking Playbook for SEOs
Every tool you buy is someone else’s guess at what you need. I built SEOLoop, a search revenue platform, with AI and no dev team. I’ll show you screens, the product thinking behind each one, and the expensive mistakes you can skip. This isn’t a demo. It’s a playbook: how to spot the process that should be software, scope it so AI can build it, and ship something your org actually uses. Bring your biggest workflow headache.
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Lunch
Step out, grab a bite, and connect with the people you’ve been learning alongside all morning. New York City offers endless options within a short walk of the venue. Use the time to recharge, continue the conversation, and meet someone new before the next session begins.
1:30 PM – 2:00 PM
From Vibes to Veteran: 7 Tips to Disaster-Proof Your Code
Top engineers at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly said AI now writes most — even 100% — of their code. That’s not a threat. It’s an invitation. There has never been a more exciting time to build. But speed without discipline creates fragility. In this session, I’ll share seven hard-earned lessons from building real apps with AI so you can move fast and bulletproof your code at the same time.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- AI can write code but it can’t own the architecture: Attendees will learn how to think like a systems designer so they’re not just generating snippets, but building resilient, scalable applications.
- Speed is a superpower only when paired with guardrails: They’ll learn how to move fast with AI while putting lightweight structure in place (e.g., tests, validation layers, logging, version control) to prevent silent failures.
- Small decisions compound into technical debt: I’ll show how seemingly harmless shortcuts (e.g., inline styles, quick patches, hard-coded logic, no error handling) create fragility—and some best practices I’ve learned in my engineering journey.
Watch Zach’s Podcast preview ->
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Prioritize investments by financial impact
The old SEO playbook optimized for traffic. The new GEO playbook rewards marketers who optimize for revenue—with proof for their CFO.
Your traffic is down. Your AI search conversion rates are up. And explaining this to your leadership feels impossible when they’re conditioned to celebrate traffic growth.
Join SEO expert Dale Bertrand for a strategic session that gives marketing leaders the financial frameworks, stakeholder narratives, and decision tools needed to defend AI search investments.
Using real world case studies from their work with global brands, you’ll see how revenue-focused GEO outperforms traditional traffic-based SEO strategies.
In this sessions you’ll learn:
- Replace traffic reporting with revenue-first GEO metrics
- Connect AI search performance to CFO-level ROI
- Prioritize investments using financial impact analysis
- Capture AI-influenced revenue GA4 misses
- Communicate value with executive credibility
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
HEO: The Hybrid Engine Score
Search visibility in 2026 runs on a hybrid engine: traditional rankings still matter, but AI Overviews (AIO) and assistant retrieval increasingly shape what gets seen, cited, and clicked. The problem is we’ve been stuck in a cyberchondriatic haze—reacting to every swing and every tool alert.
At SEO Week, I’m sharing HEO (Hybrid Engine Optimization) and the Hybrid Engine Score: a weekly, measurable scoring system that separates noise from signal, shows what’s actually changing, and turns findings into a prioritized list you can run Monday morning.
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Afternoon Break
Step out for a short pause. Grab a coffee, compare notes from the day’s sessions, visit the exhibitor halls, and reset before the final round of ideas and experiments.
3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Session Title Coming Soon
We’re finalizing the details for this session. Check back soon for the title and a full description of what the speaker will cover.
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
4:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Is AI Seeing the Brand You Think You’ve Built? Measuring and Aligning Your Brand’s Mathematical Identity
AI doesn’t retrieve brands by keywords — it retrieves by similarity. If your content isn’t mathematically aligned, you won’t be surfaced, cited, or trusted. In this session, you’ll learn how to measure the brand AI actually sees, expose structural misalignment, and make targeted changes that increase retrieval and authority.
In this sessions, you’ll learn:
- How to define and measure the brand AI actually sees
- How AI retrieval systems determine relevance using similarity — not keywords
- How Top Cluster Similarity exposes content gaps and drives measurable alignment
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
From Showing Up to Winning: An Information Retrieval and Systems-Level View of AI Search
Watch Jeff’s Podcast preview ->
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Welcome Reception
Kick off SEO Week with drinks, light bites, and great conversations with the people shaping the future of search.
SPONSORED BY
Tuesday, April 28
Day 02: The Psychology
Search isn’t just changing for users, it’s changing for marketers too. This day explores how AI, evolving consumer expectations, and new search experiences are reshaping both how people find information and how brands need to think, create, and adapt their content strategies.
Featured activations
Stop by for a fresh headshot powered by
Fuel up at the Coffee Bar sponsored by
Content Capture Studio sponsored by
Times Square Lounge sponsored by
Central Park Lounge
8:00 AM – 9:00 AM
Registration and coffee
Pick up your badge, grab a coffee, and warm up the brain before the first talk. Use the time to connect with other attendees and start the conversations that will carry through the day.
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM
SEO is a performance channel, GEO isn't. How do you pivot?
Everyone’s getting the “why aren’t we showing up in AI answers?” question, and most of us are still reaching for the wrong toolkit. This session breaks down why GEO and SEO play by completely different rules, how to find and refine the prompts that actually reflect what your customers are asking, and how to stop selling quick wins and start selling value to the execs who hold the budget.
In this sessions you’ll learn:
- Why measuring GEO like SEO is setting yourself up to fail — and what metrics actually matter
- How to identify the right prompts and evolve them around real customer behavior over time
- How to pivot the exec conversation from volume to value in a world where visibility looks completely different
9:45 AM – 10:15 AM
SEOs Own Less Than We Think: The Influence Gap No One Trains You For
Our industry is having an identity crisis. SEOs are uniquely positioned to lead conversations around AEO/GEO — or whatever we are calling it this year—yet much of the work required to deliver results still lives outside our direct control. Want a Reddit strategy for LLM citations? That often sits with social. Want to improve brand sentiment? You will probably need PR. This talk explores how AI has intensified the tension between responsibility and authority inside modern orgs and introduces a practical framework for moving work forward by embracing restrictions rather than fighting them.
In this sessions you’ll learn:
- How to use a constraints-first strategy to build projects that work within real org boundaries
- How to give visibility and credit in ways that increase long-term buy-in
- How to move stalled initiatives forward by reducing risk and rebuilding alignment
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
10:15 AM – 10:45 AM
Morning Break
Take a moment to reset your brain. Grab a coffee, continue the conversation, check out the exhibitor halls, and trade perspectives with the people around you before diving back into the next session.
10:45 AM – 11:15 AM
The Death of the Middleman: Why "Good Enough" AI is Killing Traditional Marketing
For decades, the marketing industry has been a game of headcount. Whether you were an in-house leader justifying a budget or an agency billing by the hour, more “output” required more “heads.” But the “Middleman Era,” where humans served as the primary engines for drafting, resizing, and routing work, is officially over.
AI has commoditized “good enough” execution, turning weeks of production into seconds of compute. If the robot can do the task, the task is no longer your value proposition. So, where does that leave us?
In this provocative session, John Doherty explores the “Before and After” of the marketing machine. We’ll look at why the teams of tomorrow will be smaller, faster, and infinitely more profitable, provided they know how to lean into the one thing a LLM cannot replicate: human taste.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- The Workflow Post-Mortem: Why traditional “production-heavy” workflows are now a liability for agencies and a drain on in-house budgets.
- The Human Edge: Identifying the three pillars of human value—Empathy, Ethics, and Taste—and how to hire for these un-promptable skills.
- The Profitability Pivot: How agencies can move from “selling hours” to “selling outcomes,” and how in-house teams can reallocate production spend toward high-impact differentiation.
- From Doer to Architect: How to transition your staff from specialists who “do the work” to orchestrators who “direct the machine.”
Watch John’s Podcast preview ->
11:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Run Persona Run: A year in the life of me, myself, and AI
Search is becoming hyper-personal. Is that a good thing?
Garrett Sussman shares insights from a year-long experiment analyzing how different personas influence bottom-of-the-funnel research in AI search platforms. The results raise a larger question: what happens when search systems combine persona context with signals from a user’s broader digital footprint? This talk examines the potential for individualized filter bubbles in AI Search and what marketing teams should rethink in their omnichannel strategy as search results become increasingly shaped by the individual.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How different personas can produce different brand recommendations during high-intent research
- Early signals that AI Search may adapt results based on a user’s broader digital context
- Practical ways marketers can adjust content and channel strategy as search becomes more personalized
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM
Lunch Break
Take a break, grab lunch, and keep the conversations going. Share insights, debate perspectives, and recharge before diving back into the psychology of search.
1:15 PM – 1:45 PM
How YOU can Navigate the Fractured Funnel and the Rise of Delegated Choice Using Behavioural Science
Search has fractured along generational lines as younger cohorts adopt social-first ecosystems while older demographics remain anchored to traditional tools like Google. In this session, Azeem examines how the Default Effect and Status Quo Bias are being redefined by platform evolution and AI. This discussion explores the psychological drivers of this divide and its impact on digital discovery.
In this sessions you’ll learn:
- The Generational Divide in Discovery: Participants will gain an understanding of how to speak to the younger generation that are abandoning traditional search engines in favour of social-first ecosystems that prioritise visual discovery and peer-vetted information.
- Psychological Anchors in Digital Habit: The session provides an analysis of how behavioural science principles like the Default Effect and Status Quo Bias continue to dictate the online habits of older users even as sophisticated tools offer more efficient alternatives for information retrieval, and how to adjust tactics towards those.
- The Evolution of Information Access: Attendees will explore the implications of a fractured landscape where platform capabilities and new technologies redefine the fundamental relationship between the user and the wider internet, and how to adapt their marketing strategies towards this.
1:45 PM – 2:15 PM
Managing the FUD Out of Change
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. With the state of well…everything, how do we Keep Calm & Carry On as marketers, as technologists, as HUMANS when we are all so full of justifiable FUD? When everything is chaotic, and everything is rapidly changing- how do we manage our business, our partners, and ourselves in the messy middle? Join Brittan King for a decidedly human session on navigating the FUD out of SEO. This interactive session will leave you feeling energized, optimistic and grounded with practical tips for centering our work while the paradigm is perpetually and radically shifting.
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
2:15 PM – 2:45 PM
Learning from "Trifecta" Content - Pages That Drive Rankings, Visibility, and Engagement
Search is no longer just about retrieving documents, it’s evolving into a dynamic system of reasoning. The Reasoning Web introduces a contextual memory layer for introvert and extrovert agents, showing how internal AI agents and public-facing agents interact to maintain truth, prevent context drift, and deliver actionable insights.
Using the metaphor of Encyclopedia Galactica, Andrea will reveal how SEO 3.0 is transforming from a visibility-focused practice into a discipline that shapes how AI agents think, act, and make decisions. The talk will be grounded in actionable examples and real-world showcases from Fortune 500 companies in Fintech, SaaS, and retail, illustrating how this next-generation approach is already driving results at scale.
In this sessions you’ll learn:
- SEO 3.0 is a discipline that constrains AI reasoning, guiding how agents think and act, not just improving visibility
- Understanding agentic reasoning is critical to staying relevant in the next era of search
- Preserving context and truth is the foundation for trustworthy AI interactions
2:45 PM – 3:15 PM
Afternoon Break
Take a moment to recharge. Grab a coffee, reflect on the insights so far, visit the exhibitor halls, and keep the conversations going before the final sessions begin.
3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
Session Details Coming Soon
A new session has been confirmed for this time slot. The title and description will be announced soon.
Watch John’s Podcast preview ->
3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
Teach The Shit Out Of Everything
Ian will show you why teaching boosts marketing performance and improves visibility across every search surface, how to do it, and maybe a secret tool or two.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Why teaching is a marketing superpower
- How AI and search algorithms reward it
- One teaching recipe that always works (except when it doesn’t)
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
4:15 PM – 4:45 PM
I Have a Degree for This: Reclaiming Your Expertise, Identity, and Edge in an AI-Mandated World
You spent years building expertise. Now there’s a tool that does it in seconds. Cool.
For the AI skeptic who’s quietly wondering: Is this making me dumber?, Angela explores the psychological tension between professional identity and AI mandates. She unpacks what it actually means to be “the human in the loop” when the loop keeps getting tighter. Drawing on real insights from search professionals navigating AI in their daily roles, this session is part reality check, part framework, and part permission slip to stop spiraling.
In this session, you’ll learn:
How the same forces reshaping consumer search are impacting your professional identity, and how to fight back
A practical framework for strengthening your human skills while leveraging AI tools
How to affirm your expertise, showcase your value, and stay indispensable when the robots are getting a little too good
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Post Content Meetups
After the day’s sessions, head out to one of our sponsor-hosted meetups around the city. Pick the one that interests you most and keep the conversations going with fellow attendees.
Meetups SPONSORED BY
Wednesday, April 29
Day 03: The Ecosystem
SEO isn’t one-size-fits-all. This day focuses on the nuances of enterprise search, including vertical-specific strategies such as video, local, and ecommerce, and how businesses can build scalable, future-proof search strategies.
Featured activations
Stop by for a fresh headshot powered by
Content Capture Studio sponsored by
Times Square Lounge sponsored by
Central Park Lounge
8:00 AM – 9:00 AM
Registration and coffee
Check in, grab a coffee, and plug into the ecosystem. Speakers, marketers, technologists, and founders all in one place. Use this time to meet the people shaping the future of search before sessions begin.
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM
Inception: How to Plant Your Brand Into the Memory Layer of Every LLM
Every conversation your customer has with ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini is shaping what that AI believes, recommends, and remembers. The brands that win won’t just optimize for the algorithm…
They’ll execute strategies that get customers to install ideas into the memory layer of every AI they use. In this session we will discuss how to create “inception moments” that make your audience the key to your success in the LLM era.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How to audit what LLMs currently know about your brand
- A playbook for creating shareable frameworks, tools, and language
- Low-lift experiments you can run this week to test whether and how to measure what’s working
9:45 AM – 10:15 AM
Session Details Coming Soon
We’re finalizing the details for this session. Check back soon for the title and a full description of what the speaker will cover.
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
10:15 AM – 10:45 AM
Morning Break
Step out and reconnect with the ecosystem. Grab a coffee, meet someone new, see what tools are available to you in the exhibitor halls, and keep the conversations moving before the next speakers take the stage.
10:45 AM – 11:15 AM
Inside the LLM Black Box: How to Gain AI Visibility
At WLDM’s AI Research Lab, my data science team and I invested over 1,000 hours into Research & Development. We analyzed 2+ million AI citations across models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to understand and reverse-engineer what actually determines visibility inside these Large Language Models (LLMs).
Most companies are still optimizing for Google while AI models quietly decide which websites get cited, trusted and recommended.
Companies might own position #1 in Google while being completely invisible to LLMs.
Why? – LLMs don’t “rank” content the way search engines do. They rebuild context, infer relationships and surface sources using entirely different mechanisms. Through our large-scale citation analysis, we identified which signals are real, which are noise and why many authoritative websites never appear in AI answers at all.
Watch Zach’s Podcast preview ->
11:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Watch the Party Die: Engineering “Answerability” for Prospective Students
Old SEO is dead. Students now get answers from AI. I’ll show Archer’s playbook for winning in both AI Web Search (still fueled by classic SEO signals) and LLM Fetch (can the model read and parse your URLs?). We build a student-first knowledge graph with custom schema, entity gap analysis, semantic scoring, topic silos, and multimodal amplification.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- A simple way to tell if you have a Search problem or a Fetch/parse problem
- How to build an AI-ready higher-ed knowledge graph (entities, gaps, silos, personas)
- How custom schema + multimodal content + academic thought leadership drive retrieval and citations
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM
Lunch Break
Head out for lunch and connect with the broader ecosystem. Speakers, practitioners, founders, and marketers all in one place. Use the time to build new relationships before the afternoon sessions.
1:15 PM – 1:45 PM
What TikTok Shop Can Teach SEOs About Content That’s Seen and Converts
We’re finalizing the details for this session. Check back soon for the title and a full description of what the speaker will cover.
Watch Mike’s Podcast preview ->
1:45 PM – 2:15 PM
Your Competitors Are Still Prompting. You Could Be Building
Sam will show you how to use ML as research infrastructure, not just a shortcut. She’ll cover real workflows using embeddings, clustering, and LLM pipelines, and leave you with a practical framework for matching the right model to the right problem, plus hands-on notebooks you can run on your own data immediately.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- A model-selection framework for SEO tasks: when to use embeddings, clustering, or LLMs, and why combining them is where the real leverage is
- How to build a modular ML pipeline that automates competitor research, content gap analysis, and keyword cannibalization at scale
- Ready-to-run notebooks you can immediately apply to your own GSC, crawl, and SERP data
Watch Christian’s Podcast preview ->
2:15 PM – 2:45 PM
Deception, Distinction, and Directives
This session provides a pragmatic playbook for navigating three critical fronts in the 2026 marketing landscape.
The Deception of Data. Measurement is broken… on purpose. Between privacy-centric walled gardens, and the “blur” of probabilistic attribution, measuring marketing performance is as clear as mud. For SEO, AEO, and GEO, the lines are even worse. This session will address how to rebuild a baseline for where you stand in these programs and extract clear signal to tie your efforts to business value.
The Distinction of “Being the Answer”. In a world of generative models, SEO is no longer about being relevant enough to be mentioned, it’s about winning endorsement. While some marketers settle for a footnote citation, the real winners will move from having an answer to being the answer. This session will show how to treat LLMs as influential advisors and how this shift fundamentally redefines content production and success metrics.
The Directives for Bumbling Agents. AI agents are currently fumbling through human-centric websites using reductive image processing. This leaves many tasks either undone or incorrectly done. This session will show a practical solution with an agent-first alternative view providing real-world examples of how to optimize your site with directives that facilitate better agent-led interactions.
Watch Zach’s Podcast preview ->
2:45 PM – 3:15 PM
Afternoon Break
Pause and reconnect with the ecosystem. Grab a coffee, meet someone new, explore the exhibit halls, and continue the conversations shaping the industry.
3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
The Truth About Google Discover: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Changing
Google Discover can drive massive traffic, but it does not work like traditional SEO. John Shehata breaks down what actually influences Discover visibility, what publishers often get wrong, and how to build a smarter strategy for sustained performance.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- The core signals behind Google Discover visibility
- The biggest reasons Discover traffic drops, and what is changing now
- The 2 most important strategies to grow and sustain Discover performance
Watch Zach’s Podcast preview ->
3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
We Had One Job (& It Wasn’t Rankings)
Marketers were given broken scorecards and now AI is revealing the gaps. Learn how to connect your work to revenue using data you already have, and build a strategy that survives whatever search does next.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- The industry trained SEOs to optimize for the wrong metrics — and how to reframe that conversation with clients
- Practical use cases for identifying what makes a user convert and what’s stopping them
- What it looks like to be an SECRO (search engine conversion rate optimizer)
Watch Zach’s Podcast preview ->
4:15 PM – 4:45 AM
The Relevance Engineering Metrics That Matter for AI Search
This session will look at how specific content signals behave differently across different types of search queries and how those differences inform our experimentation at iPullRank. We will deep dive into designing the AI Search metrics that reflect how systems interpret your content, interpret metric behavior by query type and intent, translate the insights into controlled experiments, and apply our findings to content templates and editorial strategy.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- See how iPullRank approaches experimenting with the metrics that matter for AI Search
- Learn how to analyze metric outputs to identify actionable patterns
- See how to take those patterns and apply them to optimizing your content strategy
7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Algorhythms Afterparty
Keep the energy going at SEO Week’s official After Party. Connect with fellow attendees, speakers, and industry leaders over drinks, music, and celebration. You won’t want to miss this—special guest artist to be announced soon!
SPONSORED BY
Thursday, April 30
Day 04: The Future
Search is being rewritten in real time. This day examines the direction of conversational search platforms and the evolution of Google, as well as the rise of alternative engines.
Featured activations
Content Capture Studio sponsored by
Times Square Lounge sponsored by
Central Park Lounge
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Registration and coffee
Pick up your badge, grab a coffee, and step into what’s next. Connect with fellow attendees, compare ideas, and get ready for a day focused on where search and technology are headed.
10:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Beyond the Click: How to shape what AI says about your brand
SEO and AEO can coexist. But, when entire buyer journeys happen in a single AI conversation, AEO concepts like sentiment, positioning, and accuracy matter. Good SEO can help you appear in AI Search, but AEO ensures you show up favorably. This talk explains how to shape the way AI sees your brand.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How to use SEO and AEO as a foundation
- Why sentiment and accuracy matter more than ever
- Seeing the ROI of better sentiment and accuracy
Watch James’s Podcast preview ->
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM
Two Studies, 38 Million Data Points, and the Blind Spot in Every AI Search Study
Most AI visibility analysis starts from the brand and works down. Consumers search from a location, with context, in a particular model with ever-improving memory. This mismatch is creating immense confusion.
Data and results from two original Yext Research studies provide clarity on where to focus. We will explore an Elo chess ranking analysis of 21.6 million local search results and a citation analysis of 17.2 million AI citations across four major models.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How a chess rating system from 1960 measures sustained search performance, and why synchronized data gains +6.20 Google rank positions in the most competitive markets
- What 17.2 million citations reveal about which data sources you control, which you don’t, and how that mix shifts by model, industry, and location
- Why analyzing AI visibility from the brand down instead of the location up means misreading the entire customer journey
11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Morning Break
11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Working Through a Google Drop
When traffic drops, panic is usually the loudest voice in the room. But leadership during a downturn isn’t about speed; it’s about resisting the urge to react and instead establishing testable hypotheses. We avoid the ‘fix’ until we know what we can measure. We find the signal, define the target, and then act with velocity.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Discipline — how to respond when performance drops
- Diagnosis — what signals and metrics to matter
- Direction — where to go next
Watch Ryan’s Podcast preview ->
12:00 PM – 12:30 PM
SEO vs GEO: Semantic Success Secrets
We’ll dive into the changing landscape and the evolution of search toward semantic relevance. We’ll explore real tactics based on patents, information retrieval theory, and science that actually drive results. We’ll look at the impact and potential of AI overviews/mentions on sales and real case studies. Attendees will walk away with new methods, new tools, and a new understanding of semantic search and how to evolve/succeed for the new landscape.
Watch Ryan’s Podcast preview ->
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Lunch Break
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
When Agents Fuel the Funnel: Optimizations for the New Validation Layer
What happens when AI agents will run the “messy middle” of your customer’s funnel? How do you show agents and human users that your brand is the best fit during the consideration stage and shine in the new validation layer.
Learn how brands can “seal the deal” in this new era, get into the consideration mix, and stay “top of mind” for agentic users.
Join this session to find out:
- How brands can convert at the validation stage
- What criteria agents look at before they engage with a website or brand in the first place.
- How brand affinity drives allegiance for agentic users
2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
One Day, Your Mom Will Be an Agent: How Work and Life Are Changing with AI
AI systems are reshaping how people work. As agents move from pilots into everyday operations; handoffs, ownership, and pace are being renegotiated.
Drawing from hands-on experience building agentic systems in his day job, and offloading personal workflows with OpenClaw and n8n, this session examines emerging patterns across planning, research, drafting, monitoring, and operational follow-through. The examples span SEO, product management, and adjacent operational work.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How to inexpensively and securely setup Claude Code, n8n, and OpenClaw (formerly ClawdBot).
- When and how to use agents, as well as give some real world examples of workflows you should setup.
- How Paul believes much of the tooling and public writing around AI Optimization (GEO/AEO) is barely scratching the surface.
Watch Zach’s Podcast preview ->
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Earned Architecture for AI Visibility
Most SEOs are still focused on what they own—their websites, their content, and their code. But in 2026, owned content is just the entry fee for AI Visibility. The true engine of AI Visibility is a trifecta of Earned: Earned PR, Earned Social, and Earned Content.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Unpacking the earned pillars of AI visibility: PR, social, and third-party content
- The difference in owned and earned influence on branded and unbranded AI queries
- Strategic methods to better “own” the un-owned channels that drive AI visibility
Watch Jordan’s Podcast preview ->
3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Afternoon Break
4:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Building a Modern Digital Marketing Engine (and Career)
Our industry is changing at an unheard-of pace, and with that comes the rapid evolution of what a career in digital marketing looks like. In this session, we’ll discuss how enterprise organizations are thinking about building teams for the future of search in an increasingly AI- and agentic-driven space. Learn about the skills you can be honing now to get hired for your next role; how job descriptions are changing to match the current state of marketing; how in-house teams are collaborating across channels in brand-new ways; and how to turn experts from across your organization into your on-the-ground resources to drive organizational change.
Watch Jordan’s Podcast preview ->
4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Making the Impossible Possible
As AI accelerates how we work, the real differentiator is no longer who has the smartest strategy, but who can collaborate, motivate, and psychologically support people through constant change, uncertainty, and pressure. We don’t have a motivation problem, we have a nervous system regulation problem.
In this talk, Lisa Paasche draws on her experience scaling and exiting an award-winning agency, alongside neuroscience-informed leadership coaching, to explore how we can make the seemingly impossible possible, even in high-stress, high-performance environments.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Why pressure and fear reduce performance, creativity and good decision-making
- How psychological safety and nervous system regulation improve collaboration and adaptability
- Simple shifts leaders can make to help people perform better, without pushing harder.
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Cache You Later Closing Reception
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