SEO Week 2026

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Mike King

Founder & CEO, iPullRank

Quick welcome, key housekeeping, and a look at what's ahead.

The Invisible, Converged Web: Architecting Visibility for the AI Economy

Krishna Madhavan

Principal Product Manager, Microsoft AI

The web is shifting from pages and blue-link rankings to an invisible, converged information layer. Visibility is no longer about where content shows up — it's about whether text, images, video, code, and structured data can be understood, trusted, and reused inside modern AI pipelines.

• →Map the hidden layers: grounding, safety, attribution checks
• →Multimodal visibility playbook for AI systems
• →Designing how robots.txt + signals shape the entire AI journey

Beyond the Million-Token Window: TurboQuant and RLM-on-KG

Andrea Volpini

Co-founder & CEO, WordLift

Limits of infinite context, context rot, and why staged retrieval over knowledge graphs (RLM-on-KG) beats bigger windows alone.

F*CK it, I'll Do it Myself

Mike King

Founder & CEO, iPullRank

Burn the playbook: SEO tools are mostly keyword math with a ChatGPT wrapper. Build real relevance systems yourself with open source and automation.

• →Why 'AI-powered SEO tools' are mostly cosplay
• →What relevance engineering actually looks like
• →Build + automate the stuff vendors won't ship

Build the Tool Your Team Actually Needs: A Product Thinking Playbook for SEOs

Noah Learner

Director of Innovation, Sterling Sky

How Noah built SEOLoop with AI and no dev team. Not a demo — a playbook for spotting the process that should be software, scoping it for AI, and shipping.

From Vibes to Veteran: 7 Tips to Disaster-Proof Your Code

Annie Cushing

Founder, Annielytics

Speed without discipline creates fragility. Seven hard-earned lessons from building real apps with AI to move fast AND bulletproof your code.

Prioritize Investments by Financial Impact

Dale Bertrand

President, Fire&Spark

The new GEO playbook rewards revenue-first marketers. Replace traffic reporting with revenue-first GEO metrics; connect AI search performance to CFO-level ROI.

HEO: The Hybrid Engine Score

Jori Ford

Chief Marketing & Product Officer, FoodBoss

Hybrid Engine Optimization — a weekly, measurable scoring system that separates noise from signal across rankings, AI Overviews, and assistant retrieval.

Everything Is an Entropy Game: What Dies Between Retrieval and Citation

Metehan Yeşilyurt

Co-Founder & CGO, AEO Vision

A year reverse-engineering how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI pick citations. AI doesn't reward quality — it rewards certainty. Entropy reduction is the new SEO.

• →Entropy-based decoding in RAG is real
• →Rerankers are confidence machines
• →Information gain = next-gen reranking frontier

Is AI Seeing the Brand You Think You've Built?

Scott Stouffer

Co-Founder + CTO, Market Brew

AI doesn't retrieve brands by keywords — it retrieves by similarity. Measure your brand's mathematical identity and align your content to it.

From Showing Up to Winning: An IR & Systems-Level View of AI Search

Jeff Coyle

SVP Strategy, Siteimprove

Most AI visibility reporting measures appearance, not mechanism. Break AI search into the underlying pipeline — crawlability, rendering, semantic structure, retrieval, synthesis, citation reuse.

Welcome Reception

Drinks, light bites, and conversations. Sponsored by LastMile Retail.

SEO is a Performance Channel, GEO Isn't. How Do You Pivot?

Wil Reynolds

Founder & CEO, Seer Interactive

Why GEO and SEO play by different rules; how to find the prompts that reflect what customers actually ask; how to sell value (not quick wins) to budget holders.

SEOs Own Less Than We Think: The Influence Gap No One Trains You For

Bianca Anderson

Growth Strategist, Stellar Search Signals

AEO/GEO work increasingly lives outside SEO's direct control. A constraints-first framework for moving stalled cross-functional initiatives forward.

The Death of the Middleman: Why 'Good Enough' AI is Killing Traditional Marketing

John Doherty

Founder, JFD Coaching

AI commoditized 'good enough' execution. Smaller, faster, more profitable teams that lean into Empathy, Ethics, and Taste win. From Doer to Architect.

Run Persona Run: A Year in the Life of Me, Myself, and AI

Garrett Sussman

Director of Marketing, iPullRank

Year-long experiments on how persona cues, seeded context, and connected data change brand recommendations across AI Search.

Navigating the Fractured Funnel & the Rise of Delegated Choice

Azeem Ahmad

Strategy Director, Reflect Digital

Default Effect and Status Quo Bias redefined by platform evolution. Generational divide in discovery and how to adjust tactics.

Managing the FUD Out of Change

Brittan King

Fractional CRO, iPullRank

Decidedly human session on navigating fear/uncertainty/doubt in a perpetually shifting paradigm. Practical tips for centering work amid chaos.

Trifecta Content — Pages That Drive Rankings, Visibility & Engagement

Amanda Milligan

Content & Growth Manager, Semrush

What 'content quality' means in the AI era and how to create content that packs the biggest punch in 2026.

Quality Wins: How to Scale AI Content Without Losing What Makes It Work

Alex Halliday

Founder & CEO, AirOps

What data shows AI search actually rewards — brand context, humans in the loop, and performance checks. Three-part system the best content teams are building.

Teach The Sh*t Out Of Everything

Ian Lurie

The Digital Marketing Nerd, Ian Lurie LLC

Why teaching is a marketing superpower across every search surface. One teaching recipe that always works (except when it doesn't).

I Have a Degree for This: Reclaiming Expertise in an AI-Mandated World

Angela Clark

Senior Content Strategist, iPullRank

Psychological tension between professional identity and AI mandates. Framework for strengthening human skills while leveraging AI tools.

Post-Content Meetups

Sponsor-hosted meetups across NYC. Sponsored by Yext, DemandSphere, AirOps.

Inception: Plant Your Brand Into the Memory Layer of Every LLM

Ross Simmonds

Founder & CEO, Foundation

Every conversation with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini shapes what AI believes and recommends. Audit what LLMs know about your brand; create 'inception moments'.

7 Small Creative Changes That Lead to BIG Discovery Wins

Carrie Rose

CEO & Founder, Rise at Seven

Combining creative work with technical SEO — examples from JDsports, Red Bull, Ninja, Airalo, and Kroger.

Inside the LLM Black Box: How to Gain AI Visibility

Brie Moreau

Founder, White Light Digital Marketing

1,000+ hours of R&D analyzing 2M+ AI citations across ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. Which signals are real, which are noise, why authoritative sites get ignored.

Watch the Party Die: Engineering 'Answerability' for Prospective Students

Ray Martinez

VP of SEO, Archer Education

Archer's playbook for AI Web Search + LLM Fetch. Student-first knowledge graph with custom schema, entity gap analysis, semantic scoring.

What TikTok Shop Can Teach SEOs About Content That's Seen and Converts

Angela Skane

Content & SEO Strategy Manager, Network Solutions

Psychological levers behind TikTok Shop content formulas — translated to SEO and written content for Google, GPT, and other LLMs.

Your Competitors Are Still Prompting. You Could Be Building.

Sam Torres

Sr Mgr Tech SEO, Pipedrive

ML as research infrastructure. Embeddings, clustering, LLM pipelines — model-selection framework + ready-to-run notebooks.

Deception, Distinction, and Directives

Brian Cosgrove

Principal, BrainDo

Three fronts: rebuilding measurement baselines, moving from being mentioned to being the answer, and agent-first directives for bumbling AI agents.

The Truth About Google Discover: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Changing

John Shehata

CEO & Founder, NewzDash

Core signals behind Google Discover visibility, why traffic drops, and 2 most important strategies to grow and sustain Discover performance.

We Had One Job (& It Wasn't Rankings)

Brie Anderson

Founder, BEAST Analytics

Connect SEO work to revenue using data you already have. Becoming an SECRO — search engine conversion rate optimizer.

Why You Need a Relevance Engineer Driving the Car

Zach Chahalis

Sr Director SEO & Data Analytics, iPullRank

Designing AI Search metrics that reflect how systems interpret content. Translate insights into controlled experiments and editorial strategy.

Algorhythms Afterparty

Drinks, music, and a special guest artist. Sponsored — see SEO Week site.

Beyond the Click: How to Shape What AI Says About Your Brand

James Cadwallader

Co-Founder & CEO, Profound

SEO and AEO can coexist. AEO ensures favorable appearance in AI; sentiment, positioning, and accuracy as ROI levers.

Two Studies, 38 Million Data Points & the Blind Spot in Every AI Search Study

Christian Ward

Chief Data Officer, Yext

Elo chess ranking on 21.6M local results + 17.2M AI citations across 4 models. Why analyzing AI visibility brand-down misreads the journey.

Working Through a Google Drop

Ilana Gershteyn

Director of SEO, Edmunds.com

Discipline, diagnosis, direction — how to respond when performance drops without panic-driven 'fixes'.

SEO vs GEO: Semantic Success Secrets

Ryan Jones

SVP SEO, Razorfish · Founder, SERPrecon

Real tactics based on patents, IR theory, and science. Impact of AI Overviews on sales with case studies.

When Agents Fuel the Funnel: Optimizations for the New Validation Layer

Crystal Carter

Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix

What happens when AI agents run the messy middle of your funnel. Convert at validation; stay top-of-mind for agentic users.

One Day, Your Mom Will Be an Agent: How Work and Life Are Changing with AI

Paul Shapiro

Lead Product Manager Web Intelligence, Uber

Hands-on experience with agentic systems — Claude Code, n8n, OpenClaw — and emerging patterns across planning, research, drafting, monitoring.

Earned Architecture for AI Visibility

Jordan Leschinsky

VP Strategy, Vayner Media

Owned content is just the entry fee. Earned PR + Earned Social + Earned Content drives true AI Visibility.

Building a Modern Digital Marketing Engine (and Career)

Ruth Burr Reedy

Director of SEO Solutions, Microsoft

How enterprise orgs build teams for AI/agentic search. Skills to hone, evolving job descriptions, cross-channel collaboration.

Making the Impossible Possible

Lisa Paasche

Founder, EKTE

Neuroscience-informed leadership coaching for high-stress, high-performance environments. Nervous system regulation as a performance lever.

Cache You Later — Closing Reception

Drinks and final connections. Prize draw from Peec AI.