One of the confirmed sessions at MozCon’s New York date is titled “Preparing for the Death of the Open Web.” The speaker is Mike King, founder of digital marketing agency iPullRank.
It is not the most alarming talk title on the 2026 conference calendar. It might be the most honest.
The backdrop is not easy to ignore. At Google I/O 2026, the company announced the most significant overhaul of its search product in more than two decades.
It replaced the traditional search box with AI-powered information agents, rebuilding the experience around generative responses rather than ranked links.
According to a recent TNW analysis, zero-click searches now account for 60 per cent of all Google queries, and organic traffic from search to publishers has fallen 33 per cent globally.
Some publishers have reported losing 70 to 80 per cent of their search-driven visits entirely.
For marketing and SEO professionals, that is not a trend to monitor at a comfortable distance. It is a structural shift to work inside, in real time, with no settled playbook.
The conference circuit has become one of the fastest feedback loops the industry has: a way to compress the distance between the people who figured something out last month and the rooms that need it now.
In 2026, every major event on the calendar has reorganised itself around the same central question.
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The conference calendar, from June to November
The season opens in Boston. SMX Advanced, produced by Search Engine Land and running June 3 to 5 at the Westin Boston Seaport District, is one of the longest-running expert-level search conferences in the industry.
This year it has added dedicated programming for generative engine optimisation (GEO) and AI-driven search alongside its traditional SEO and paid search tracks.
The opening keynote comes from Purna Virji of LinkedIn, whose talk is titled “Your AI ROI story is broken”.
It is a reference to the gap between what organisations are investing in AI and their ability to show measurable business results.
All-access passes run from $1,445 to $1,795. A free expo pass covering the keynotes and exhibition floor is also available.
MozCon arrives in New York on July 14 at The Glasshouse, 660 12th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
Now in its second year as a roadshow after a run in both cities in 2025, it is a single-day, single-track event: no competing sessions, no decisions about which room to be in.
The confirmed speaker list for New York is eight strong, and reads like a cross-section of where the industry’s attention is right now.
Tom Capper of Moz opens with “Billboard SEO: How to Win Google’s Visual Real Estate,” a talk built around the observation that ranking first organically no longer means what it once did.
Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, closes the formal programme with “How to get your website ready for AI Agents.”
Between them, Eric Siu covers AI workflows that generate measurable revenue, and Debbie Chew addresses digital PR’s role in large language model (LLM) citations.
A panel discussion tackles “Top Strategies to Dominate Answer Engines,” naming AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity by name.
Mike King’s session on the open web lands in the afternoon. Early-bird tickets for New York start from $649; full details and registration are at the MozCon NYC page.
September brings BrightonSEO to the United States. The UK-origin conference draws more than 4,000 practitioners to its Brighton editions twice a year.
It has moved its San Diego date to the full San Diego Convention Center for September 15 and 16.
BrightonSEO has historically been one of the most accessible events in the industry. Single-day passes in San Diego are available without charge through a request process.
Two-day passes start from $865 before prices rise in July. A Hero Conf PPC track runs alongside the SEO content across both days.
The UK autumn edition follows on October 8 and 9 at the Brighton Centre, with two-day passes from £300 plus VAT.
Ahrefs Evolve returns to the InterContinental San Diego on October 12 and 13, drawing more than 600 marketers from dozens of countries.
Ahrefs has built the event explicitly around AEO, its preferred framing for answer engine optimisation: optimising content for visibility in AI-generated responses rather than traditional ranked results.
Confirmed speakers include Rand Fishkin of SparkToro, Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, international SEO consultant Aleyda Solis, and Austin Lau from Anthropic’s growth marketing team.
Patrick Stox, Ahrefs’ technical SEO brand ambassador, is also on the bill, with his session still to be announced at the time of writing.
Tickets start from $899 for the standard two-day pass. All-access passes, which add session recordings, reserved seating, and a pre-event speaker reception, start from $2,099.
The same day, October 13, Semrush runs its Spotlight conference in London.
Where most events on this list are aimed at practitioners, Spotlight is pitched at the senior leadership tier: CMOs, heads of brand, and VPs of growth.
Semrush says it expects more than 1,000 of them, drawn from enterprise companies and high-growth scaleups.
The organising idea is brand visibility in the AI search era, with “Total Digital Brand Visibility” billed as one of the event’s central themes.
Confirmed speakers include Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy and Research at Amsive, alongside speakers from McKinsey, the Financial Times, Visa, and Spotify.
Multiple early-bird ticket tiers have already sold out; current pricing and availability are on the Spotlight website.
MozCon closes out the major event calendar on November 13 in London, at Convene 22 Bishopsgate in the City of London financial district.
The London edition returns for its second year, with the speaker programme open for pitches from practitioners working on AI search visibility, AI workflows, and new SEO research.
Early-bird tickets start from around £499; registration and details are at the MozCon London page.
Neither the New York nor the London event will offer a livestream in 2026. Both are in-person only.
A wider field
The events above are not the full picture. The 2026 calendar is unusually dense, and some of the more interesting gatherings are operating at smaller scale or in less obvious locations.
WTSFest, organised by Women in Tech SEO, runs in Philadelphia on October 1, with passes from $399.
It is a full-day conference for women in marketing and SEO, with a reputation for high-quality programming and a deliberate focus on representation.
The SERP Conf series, an international circuit with editions across Europe and in New York, adds further autumn dates, with European passes that have started around €499.
The Belgrade SEO Conference is among the most affordable in-person options on the European calendar, with tickets that have historically started under €100.
Search ‘n Stuff runs a London edition on June 26 at the Emirates Stadium, with Lily Ray and Tom Capper among the confirmed speakers, ahead of a later edition in Antalya.
At the other end of the spectrum sits the SEOktoberfest G50 Summit, which takes over the Stanglwirt, a five-star resort in the Austrian Tyrol, from September 20 to 25.
It has billed itself as an SEO think tank since 2008. The format is invitation-only and all-inclusive, built around peer conversation among senior practitioners rather than stage talks.
The guest list is tiny, roughly 25 experts and 30 attendees, and tickets run from €5,500 for invited experts to €8,000 for attendees. The 2026 edition has already sold out.
Lily Ray and Mike King are among the names on its roster.
What the sessions are actually saying
The terminology across these events does not agree, and the disagreement runs deeper than branding.
Ahrefs has built its programme around AEO. SMX leans on GEO alongside wider AI search programming. Semrush frames the whole conversation as brand visibility in the AI search era.
It would be easy to read these as competing labels for a single idea, and they are often used that way. But they are not strictly interchangeable.
AEO predates generative AI. It grew out of featured snippets, knowledge panels, and voice assistants, and it covers any engine that returns a direct answer.
GEO is newer and narrower, aimed at the responses that tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews generate.
LLMO, large language model optimisation, is usually treated as a technical subset of GEO, concerned with how models choose and cite their sources.
AIO is the slipperiest of the set, standing for AI optimisation in general or Google’s AI Overviews in particular, depending on who is talking.
The vocabulary has not stabilised, and the reason is not simply that the industry cannot agree on a name.
It is that practitioners do not yet agree on where one discipline ends and the next begins, which tells its own story about how new all of this still is.
The session titles are more revealing than the acronyms. “Preparing for the Death of the Open Web.” “Billboard SEO: How to Win Google’s Visual Real Estate.” “How to get your website ready for AI Agents.”
“2 Truths and a Lie About Digital PR” is Debbie Chew’s MozCon session, which argues that off-site signals are now where LLMs draw from when processing commercial-intent prompts.
These are not incremental updates to an established playbook. They are attempts to reframe what the job is.
The same names recur across the calendar. Tom Capper is billed at both MozCon New York and Search ‘n Stuff London in June.
Lily Ray appears at Search ‘n Stuff in June, Semrush Spotlight in October, and SEOktoberfest in September. Mike King turns up at MozCon New York and on the SEOktoberfest roster.
The circuit is, in part, a distributed conversation among practitioners working on the same problems from different angles and different datasets, comparing notes publicly across a six-month span.
For practitioners deciding which events to attend, the themes across all of them are converging. The real choice is about what kind of room you want to be in.
Whether the format that serves you best is a single intense day or two days across multiple tracks. Whether your priority is peer-level exchange or access to senior strategic discussion.
Whether your budget reaches Boston, New York, San Diego, Brighton, London, or somewhere further afield.
What the calendar offers in 2026 is genuine variety across format, price point, geography, and audience level. What it does not yet offer is settled answers to the questions every one of these events keeps asking.
