One of the confirmed sessions at MozCon New York is titled “Preparing for the Death of the Open Web.” The speaker is Mike King, founder of digital marketing agency iPullRank.
It’s not the scariest topic of discussion on the 2026 conference calendar. It can be the most honest.
The background is not easy to ignore. At Google I/O 2026, the company announced the most significant overhaul of the search product in more than two decades.
It replaced the traditional search box with AI-powered information agents, reinventing the experience around generative answers rather than ranked links.
according to recent TNW analysiszero-click searches now account for 60 percent of all Google queries, and organic traffic from search to publishers is down 33 percent globally.
Some publishers have reported losing 70 to 80 percent of their search-based traffic altogether.
For marketing and SEO professionals, this is not a trend to watch from a comfortable distance. It’s a structural change to work in-house, in real-time, with no resolution playbook.
The conference circuit has become one of the industry’s fastest feedback loops: a way to bridge the gap between the people who thought of something last month and the rooms that need it now.
In 2026, every important event on the calendar was restructured around the same central question.
Disclosure: The MozCon links in this article are affiliate links. TNW may earn a commission if you buy tickets through them.
Conference calendar, June through November
The season opens in Boston. Produced by Search Engine Land and running June 3-5 at the Westin Boston Seaport District, SMX Advanced is one of the longest-running expert-level search conferences in the industry.
This year, it added generative engine optimization (GEO) and artificial intelligence-based search-specific programming alongside traditional SEO and paid search tracks.
The opening keynote comes from LinkedIn’s Purna Virji, whose talk is “Your AI ROI Story Is Disrupting.”
This is a reference to the gap between which organizations invest in AI and their ability to show measurable business results.
All-access tickets range from $1,445 to $1,795. A free expo pass is also available, which covers the main entries and the exhibition floor.
MozCon arrives in New York on July 14 at The Glasshouse, 660 12th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
Now in its second year as a road show after a run in both cities in 2025, it’s a one-day, single-track event: competitive sessions, no room decisions.
The confirmed speaker list for New York is eight strong and reads like a cross-section of where the industry’s focus is right now.
Moz’s Tom Capper opens with a talk titled “Billboard SEO: How to Win Google’s Visual Real Estate,” a conversation built around the observation that ranking first organically no longer means what it used to do.
Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, closes the official program with “How to Prepare Your Website for AI Agents.”
Among them, Eric Siu covers AI workflows that generate measurable revenue, and Debbie Chew addresses the role of digital PR in large language model (LLM) citations.
The panel discussion covers AI Mode, ChatGPT and “Best Strategies to Dominate the Answer Engines” naming Confusion.
Mike King’s open web session begins this afternoon. An early bird ticket to New York starts at $649; full details and registration here MozCon NYC page.
September brings BrightonSEO to the US. The UK-originated conference attracts more than 4,000 practitioners to its twice-yearly Brighton editions.
He moved the San Diego date to the full San Diego Convention Center on September 15th and 16th.
BrightonSEO has historically been one of the most accessible events in the industry. One-day passes in San Diego are available for free through the inquiry process.
Two-day passes start at $865 before prices go up in July. The Hero Conf PPC track runs alongside SEO content for both days.
The UK autumn edition continues on October 8 and 9 at the Brighton Centre, with two-day tickets starting at £300 plus VAT.
Ahrefs Evolve returns to the InterContinental San Diego on October 12th and 13th, attracting more than 600 marketers from dozens of countries.
Ahrefs explicitly built the event around AEO, its preferred framework for response engine optimization: optimizing 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 of Anthropic’s growth marketing team.
Ahrefs technical SEO brand ambassador Patrick Stox is also on the bill, with his session yet to be announced at the time of writing.
Tickets for a standard two-day pass start at $899. All-access tickets, which add session notes, reserved seating and a pre-event speaker reception, start at $2,099.
On the same day, October 13, Semrush is holding the Spotlight conference in London.
While most of the events on this list are focused on practitioners, Spotlight is placed at the senior leadership level: CMOs, brand heads, and VPs of growth.
Semrush said he expects more than 1,000 of them from enterprise companies and because of their high growth rates.
The idea of the organization is the visibility of the brand in the search era with artificial intelligence, “Total Digital Brand Visibility” presented as one of the central themes of the event.
Confirmed speakers include Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy and Research at Amsive and speakers from McKinsey. Financial TimesVisa and Spotify.
Many early ticket levels are already sold out; current prices and availability are on the Spotlight website.
MozCon closes its main event calendar on November 13 at Convene 22 Bishopsgate in the City of London financial district in London.
The London edition is back for a second year, with a speaker program open to AI search visibility, AI workflows and talks from practitioners working on new SEO research.
Early bird tickets start from around £499; Registration and details here MozCon London page.
Neither the New York nor the London event will offer live streaming in 2026. Both are in person only.
Larger area
The above events are not the full picture. The 2026 calendar is unusually busy, with some of the more interesting gatherings operating on a smaller scale or in less obvious locations.
Organized by Women in Tech SEO, WTSFest takes place in Philadelphia on October 1st with tickets starting at $399.
It’s a full-day conference for women in marketing and SEO, with an intentional focus on high-quality programming reputation and representation.
The SERP Conf series adds additional autumn dates to the international circuit, with editions in Europe and New York, with European passes starting at around €499.
The Belgrade SEO Conference is one of the most affordable private options on the European calendar, with tickets historically starting at under €100.
Search ‘n Stuff is playing a London edition on June 26 at the Emirates Stadium.
At the other end of the spectrum is the SEOktoberfest G50 Summit, which takes over the five-star Stanglwirt resort in the Austrian Tyrol from September 20 to 25.
It has been promoting itself as an SEO think tank since 2008. This format is invitation-only and all-inclusive, built around peer-to-peer conversation between senior practitioners rather than stage talks.
The guest list is small, around 25 experts and 30 participants, and tickets range from €5,500 for invited experts to €8,000 for participants. The 2026 edition is already sold out.
Lily Ray and Mike King are among the names on his list.
What the sessions actually say
The terminology of these phenomena does not match, and the disagreement goes deeper than branding.
Ahrefs built its program around AEO. SMX is based on GEO along with broader AI search programming. Semrush frames the entire 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 as such. However, they are not strictly interchangeable.
AEO predates generative AI. It’s built from custom snippets, knowledge panels, and voice assistants, and includes any engine that returns a direct response.
GEO is newer and narrower, focusing on answers generated by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Insights.
LLMO, large language model optimization, is usually considered a technical subset of GEO in terms of how models select and reference their sources.
AIO is the most slippery one, meaning AI optimization in general or Google’s AI Insights in particular, depending on who’s talking.
The vocabulary hasn’t settled, and it’s not just because the industry can’t agree on a name.
That practitioners still don’t agree on where one discipline ends and another begins tells its own story about how new it all is.
Session titles are more revealing than acronyms. “Preparing for the Death of the Open Internet.” “Billboard SEO: How to Win Google’s Visual Real Estate.” “How to prepare your website for AI agents.”
“2 Truths and Lies About Digital PR” is Debbie Chew’s MozCon session, which claims that there are off-site signals currently being used by LLMs when processing commercial leads.
These are not incremental updates to the established playbook. They are attempts to rethink what work is.
The same names are repeated throughout 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 appears at MozCon New York and on the SEOktoberfest list.
The scheme is in part a distributed conversation between practitioners working on the same problems from different perspectives and different databases, openly comparing notes over six months.
For practitioners deciding which events to attend, they all have themes in common. The real choice comes down to which room you want to be in.
Whether the format serves you best is one intensive day or two days between multiple tracks. Whether your priority is peer-to-peer exchange or access to high-level strategic discussions.
Whether your budget stretches to Boston, New York, San Diego, Brighton, London or further afield.
What Calendar 2026 offers is true diversity in format, price point, geography and audience level. What it doesn’t yet offer are settled answers to the questions each of these events continues to ask.
