FA
Quick Answer:The strongest AI search events in the second half of 2026 are Spotlight by Semrush (London, 13 October) for CMO-level strategy, the GEO Conference (New York 4 December, San Francisco 9 December) for 150-seat practitioner depth, GEO Know How (Berlin, 1 October) for German-language GEO, Zero Click London (22 October) and Google Search Central Live Deep Dive (Barcelona, 30 September to 2 October) as the two no-ticket-cost options, and brightonSEO (San Diego 15 to 16 September, Brighton 8 to 9 October) as the largest general search room. Pick by the problem you have, not by the brand you recognize.
The Circuit Split in Two
For about fifteen years, the search conference market was one market. There were big ones and small ones, technical ones and strategic ones, but a program director booking an SEO event in 2018 and one booking in 2022 were filling the same shaped hole: how to rank. The differences were of degree.
That stopped being true somewhere in 2025, and 2026 is the first full season where the split is visible from the outside. Look at how the events describe themselves now. SMX Advanced Europe sells “SEO, GEO & PPC Strategies, Tactics, AI & Scripts for Search Pros,” which is a legacy search conference that has widened its remit. The GEO Conference sells itself as “the in-the-room-only event for how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and AI search,” caps each edition at 150 seats, and runs no recordings and no livestream. Those are not two versions of the same product. The first is a conference for people whose job still contains SEO. The second is a working session for people whose job has quietly become something else.
A quick definition pass, because the acronyms in this post are used loosely everywhere else. GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is the practice of getting your material cited inside AI-generated answers; the term comes from Aggarwal et al. in November 2023, not from any vendor. AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is the older and broader term for optimizing to be the answer rather than a link. In practice the 2026 conference market uses them interchangeably, and you should read both as “this event is about citations, not rankings.” I keep them apart in the frameworks comparison, but for choosing a ticket the distinction rarely matters.
The reason the split matters commercially is that the two kinds of event answer different questions, and most teams only have budget for one. Semrush’s 2026 AI Visibility Index, built on 126 million US prompts across 22 verticals and four platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, is the kind of dataset that tells you whether you have a problem. It does not tell you which room to sit in to fix it. That is the choice this post is about.
One more thing worth saying plainly, since I am on the speaker side of this market and you should read me accordingly. I am not neutral about these events. I have worked several of the stages below, and one of them, Spotlight, is hosted by Semrush, where I work. I have marked every case where that applies, and every fact here is sourced to the organizer’s own page rather than to my memory of the room.
How to Pick, in Four Questions
Before the list, the filter. Four questions, in order, and the first one that gives you a clear answer decides your ticket.
1. Are you trying to convince someone, or trying to build something? If the real goal is getting a board or an exec team to accept that AI search has changed the acquisition model, you need a room whose speakers are used to talking to budget owners. Spotlight, DMWF Europe and the AI Summit Barcelona are those rooms. If the goal is that your team walks back with an implementation plan, the practitioner events are where that lives, and you will feel the difference by the first coffee break.
2. Do you need the general room or the specialist room? brightonSEO is the largest general search event and the organizers put attendance at around 11,000 across their annual events. Breadth is the product: you will find a session on almost anything. The specialist events invert that. The GEO Conference runs 150 seats per city and Zero Click is invitation-by-request. You give up optionality and get depth and access.
3. What language does your team actually work in? This is underrated. GEO Know How in Berlin runs in German and bills itself as Germany’s first GEO conference. SERP Conf. runs a European circuit through Rome and Vienna. If you are building AI-search capability inside a non-English-first team, an event in the working language is worth more than a marginally better English lineup, because the vocabulary your team adopts is the vocabulary it will use internally for the next two years. I have written about why that asymmetry matters in Cross-Lingual Citation Authority.
4. What is the real budget? Not the ticket, the trip. Two of the strongest AI-search events of the second half of 2026 cost nothing to attend: Google’s Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona and Zero Click in London. If your constraint is budget rather than time, start there and spend the saved ticket money on sending a second person.
Still Ahead: The Second Half of 2026
Sixteen events, in date order. Every date, venue and price below was checked against the organizer’s own site on 2 August 2026, and each card carries a screenshot of that page as it looked on that date. Prices move and agendas change, so treat the screenshot as a timestamp rather than a guarantee.
UK SEO Summit 2026
- 26 August 2026
- Shepperton, United Kingdom
- Organizer: Skyrocket Marketers
- I am speaking
- ukseosummit.com
A one-day, eight-speaker summit just outside London covering on-page, technical, off-page authority, local and ecommerce SEO. It is a working practitioner event rather than a conference-industrial-complex production, and the lineup reflects that: Craig Campbell, Ivana Flynn, Anna Moragli, Kalin Karakehayov and Michael Melen among others.
Best for: UK-based in-house SEOs and agency operators who want a full-spectrum refresher in a single day without a two-night hotel bill. I am on this program with the AI-search research, which is the one part of the agenda that is not classic SEO.
brightonSEO San Diego 2026
- 15 to 16 September 2026
- San Diego Convention Center, California
- From $865, free single-day expo pass on request
- brightonseo.com
The US edition of what the organizers call the world’s biggest search conference. brightonSEO puts around 11,000 attendees through its annual events and the San Diego edition draws several thousand practitioners on its own. The format is many parallel tracks, which is exactly why it works: with that much surface area, the AI search and GEO sessions sit alongside technical SEO, content and analytics rather than replacing them.
Best for: teams sending more than one person. The multi-track format lets a three-person team split up and cover ground no single specialist event can, then compare notes on the way home. If what you want instead is one continuous argument to think with, pair it with a single-track event like MozCon later in the season, the two formats complement each other well.
DigiMarCon Europe 2026
- 17 to 18 September 2026
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Digital marketing, media and advertising
- digimarconeurope.com
DigiMarCon is a global series rather than a single event, and the Europe edition is the broad digital-marketing gathering of the three September options: media, advertising, content and analytics alongside search. It is deliberately generalist, and its value is proportional to how mixed your remit is.
Best for: marketing generalists and small-team leads who own more than search. If your job title contains only SEO, the specialist events later in this list will be denser per hour. I have worked DigiMarCon stages in previous years, though not this edition.
AI Summit Barcelona 2026
- 22 to 23 September 2026
- WTC Barcelona, Spain
- 10,000+ attendees, 200+ speakers, 50+ side events
- I am speaking
- aisummitbarcelona.com
The outlier on this list, and deliberately so. This is not a search conference: it is an AI industry event, held during Barcelona’s AI Week, with Anthropic, Google Cloud, ElevenLabs, HP and McKinsey among the participating organizations. Search and marketing are one thread inside a much larger conversation about what these systems are and where they are going.
Best for: the CMO who is tired of hearing about AI search from search people. Sitting in a room of 10,000 builders reframes the problem usefully: you stop asking how to optimize for ChatGPT and start asking what an interface that answers rather than lists does to your entire acquisition model. I am presenting the AI-search citation research here.
SMX Advanced Europe 2026
- 29 September to 1 October 2026
- Berlin, Germany
- Experts-only format
- smxadvanced.eu
SMX Advanced is the clearest example of a legacy search conference adapting rather than being replaced. The 2026 Europe program covers AI search visibility and LLM retrieval, technical SEO in an AI world, advanced bidding and Google Ads scripts, measurement and automation. The organizers are explicit that the content assumes fluency and skips introductory material.
Best for: senior practitioners who own both organic and paid and do not want two separate trips. The paid-search depth here is genuinely rare at AI-search-branded events, most of which quietly ignore PPC entirely.
Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026
- 30 September to 2 October 2026
- Barcelona, Spain
- No ticket cost
- Run by Google Search Relations
- developers.google.com/search/events
The Deep Dive format is the long version of Search Central Live: multiple days instead of a few hours, with what Google describes as a semantically chained curriculum built around how Search actually works. Google announced the Barcelona edition in July 2026. Google’s own event page states that “tickets are available at no charge.”
Best for: technical SEOs and anyone who wants the mechanics from the source rather than from a vendor’s interpretation of the source. Note the overlap: this runs directly into SMX Advanced Berlin and GEO Know How, so European teams have a genuine scheduling conflict in that week.
GEO Know How 2026
- 1 October 2026
- Festsaal Kreuzberg, Berlin
- German language
- geoknowhow.com
Billed on its own landing page as “Deutschlands erste Konferenz für Generative Engine Optimization,” Germany’s first conference for GEO. The framing is practical and forward-looking rather than definitional: how brands become visible in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and how classic SEO extends into AI-assisted search systems.
Best for: German-speaking teams, and for anyone who wants evidence of how fast this category is institutionalizing. A national-first GEO conference existing at all, in a market as SEO-mature as Germany, is the signal. Note the date clash with EcomExpo and the second day of the Barcelona Deep Dive.
EcomExpo 2026
- 1 October 2026
- Samsung Conference Center, Tech Zity, Vilnius
- 600 to 800 attendees, 30+ speakers
- EUR 170 to 31 August, EUR 240 after, excl. VAT
- I am speaking
- ecomexpo.eu
The Baltic region’s largest ecommerce conference, now in its 14th edition, running under the theme “SCALE or FAIL.” The 2026 agenda is built around agentic commerce: what happens to product discovery, purchasing and logistics when AI agents rather than people do the browsing. The venue is new, a Samsung Conference Center opening in September 2026 with three stages.
Best for: ecommerce operators who have understood that AI search is not only a content problem. Agentic search optimization is the part of this shift most retail teams have not started on, which is the subject I am bringing to this stage and which I set out in the ASO framework.
brightonSEO Brighton 2026
- 8 to 9 October 2026
- Brighton, United Kingdom
- From GBP 300, early-bird available
- brightonseo.com
The original, by the sea, and still the cheapest way to put a search team in front of a large number of practitioners. Same multi-track format as the San Diego edition at roughly a third of the ticket price, which for European teams makes it the default rather than a choice.
Best for: European teams on a per-head budget. The economics are hard to argue with: three people at Brighton costs less than one all-access pass at a US flagship conference.
Ahrefs Evolve 2026
- 12 to 13 October 2026
- InterContinental San Diego, California
- 600+ marketers from 35+ countries
- Reported from $899, all-access $2,099
- ahrefsevolve.com
Ahrefs’ own conference, positioned squarely across SEO, AEO and AI marketing, with a stated preference for “real workflows from high-performing teams” over frameworks. The attendee list skews enterprise: IBM, Microsoft, Adidas, HubSpot, Alibaba, Stripe and AT&T are named among participants.
Best for: in-house teams who want to see how comparable companies are actually running the work, rather than how a consultant thinks they should. It is a vendor-run conference and the lens is Ahrefs’, which is useful to know going in and easy to account for. The workflow-level detail on offer is genuinely hard to find anywhere else.
Spotlight 2026 by Semrush
- 13 October 2026
- London, United Kingdom
- 1,200+ marketers, 80+ speakers, 100+ sessions
- 40% off with code FERNANDO40
- Hosted by Semrush
- spotlightconf.com
The largest CMO-tier event on this list, and the one I have the most obvious conflict of interest about. Full treatment in the next section, including what I think it is and is not good for.
SERP Conf. Rome 2026
- 16 October 2026
- Nazionale Spazio Eventi, Rome
- In collaboration with WordLift
- serpconf.com/rome
A one-day advanced conference on SEO, ecommerce and AI, with Judith Lewis, Aleyda Solis and Gianluca Fiorelli among the confirmed speakers. The WordLift collaboration matters for the agenda: that is a semantic-web and knowledge-graph company, so the entity and structured-data content here tends to run deeper than at general search events.
Best for: practitioners who have accepted that entity resolution sits upstream of keywords and want the implementation layer. Also the strongest single-day option in Southern Europe.
Zero Click London 2026
- Thursday 22 October 2026
- London, United Kingdom
- Attendance by request
- Programming 14:30, networking from 18:30
- tryprofound.com/zeroclick/london
Profound’s invitation-style gathering, described on its own page as “an exclusive gathering for the world’s top AI Marketing Experts.” The London edition follows San Francisco in April and New York in June. The format is deliberately short: an afternoon of programming built around Profound’s proprietary research on AI answer behavior, then two hours of networking.
Best for: senior people who value the room over the agenda. Half a day and no ticket cost makes the calculation easy if you are already in or near London. The research on stage is Profound’s own, which makes it a rare look at proprietary data on AI answer behavior that you will not see published elsewhere.
SERP Conf. Vienna 2026
- 3 November 2026
- The Stage at Tech Gate Vienna, Austria
- Group discounts up to 30%
- serpconf.com/vienna
The DACH-region stop on the SERP Conf. circuit, covering SEO, ecommerce, AI and digital marketing through lectures, panels with live Q&A and structured speaker access. The format leans harder on direct conversation with speakers than the large conferences can.
Best for: Austrian, German and Swiss teams who want a compact event with real speaker access, and for anyone who found GEO Know How in October sold out or too Berlin-specific.
Digital Marketing Europe 2026, Vilnius
- 10 to 12 November 2026
- Workshops at SIMBIOCITY Nova, conference at Apollo Cinema Vilnius Outlet
- 8th edition, 40+ international speakers
- I spoke at the Lisbon edition
- digitalmarketingcon.eu
The autumn edition of the series whose spring event I spoke at in Lisbon. Day one is workshops, days two and three are the multi-track conference, covering AI, martech, customer experience, data and brand strategy. Fili Wiese, Felix Beilharz and Tamara Novitović are among the confirmed speakers.
Best for: Central and Eastern European teams, and for anyone who prefers a mid-sized international conference to either a 10,000-person expo or a 150-seat working session. The workshop day is the part with the most upside, and it is the reason to arrive a day early.
MozCon London 2026
- 13 November 2026
- Convene 22 Bishopsgate, London
- One day, single track, in-person only
- Reported from GBP 499
- moz.com/mozcon
MozCon has moved to a roadshow format, and London closes the 2026 run after the July New York date. Single day, single track, no livestream in 2026. The speaker programme was opened to pitches from practitioners working specifically on AI search visibility, AI workflows and new SEO research, which is a reasonable predictor of what makes the stage.
Best for: people who want one curated argument rather than a menu. Single-track is a real feature: everyone in the room saw the same talks, which makes the hallway conversations sharper than at multi-track events.
DMWF Europe 2026
- 24 to 25 November 2026
- RAI Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 2,500+ senior marketers
- digitalmarketing-conference.com/europe
The Digital Marketing World Forum is a two-day exhibition and conference spanning AI, data, CRM, automation, content, analytics, SEO, social, ecommerce, omni-channel and customer experience. It draws 2,500+ senior marketing professionals, and the seniority is the point: this is a room of people who sign off on budgets.
Best for: CMOs and marketing directors who need AI search positioned inside the wider marketing stack rather than as a standalone discipline. I have spoken at DMWF previously; it is one of the few large events where a search argument reaches non-search decision makers.
The GEO Conference, New York and San Francisco
- 4 December 2026, Quorum, New York
- 9 December 2026, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco
- 150 seats per city, in-person only
- $900, rising to $1,000 after 1 September 2026
- I spoke at the DC edition
- geo-conference.com
The most concentrated GEO event running, and the clearest example of the citation-native category. Editions 04 and 05 close a year in which the first three sold out. The constraints are the product: 150 seats, no recordings, no livestream, no vendor booths, both editions running 09:30 to 15:00. Group pricing drops to $800 each for two or more and $750 each for three or more.
Best for: teams already executing GEO who need the next layer rather than the case for starting. I spoke at Edition 03 in Washington DC in June, which sold out, and the room quality was the highest of any event I worked in the first half of 2026. The no-recording rule is what makes the room that candid, and it means the value is entirely in being there, so treat the date as the decision.
The CMO-Tier Room: Spotlight by Semrush
I need to declare the conflict before the analysis: Spotlight is run by Semrush, where I have worked since 2011. I am not on this program as of writing, and everything below comes from the event’s public materials rather than from anything internal. Read it with the bias in mind, and check the primary sources, which I have linked.
Spotlight 2026 runs on 13 October 2026 in London. Semrush announced it on 4 March 2026 as its flagship marketing conference, with the stated aim of gathering more than 1,000 senior leaders, CMOs, heads of brand, SEO executives and growth teams, to build what the announcement calls new blueprints for brand visibility. That was the March target. The current event materials put it higher: one full-day event, 100+ practical sessions, 80+ top speakers and 1,200+ marketers, drawing from 700+ global brands. Named speakers include Leila Woodington, Head of B2B Marketing EMEA at OpenAI, and Alex David, GM of AI Solutions at G2. The line on the landing page is “Win brand visibility in the age of AI.”
There is also an AI Visibility Bootcamp running alongside the main event, a hands-on track on maximizing brand presence across traditional and AI-driven discovery platforms.
40% off Spotlight with code FERNANDO40
The Spotlight team gave me a reader discount to share: FERNANDO40 takes 40% off a ticket. Applies at checkout on the official site, and I get nothing if you use it.
Here is my actual read, and it is a structural point rather than an endorsement. The gap in this market is not practitioner education. Between brightonSEO, SMX, Ahrefs Evolve, MozCon and the GEO Conference, a working SEO in 2026 has more good options than time. The gap is at the layer above: the person who controls the budget, does not attend search conferences, and has been told by their team that organic is shifting under them, without yet being handed a frame for what to do next. Very few events are built for that person. Spotlight, DMWF Europe and the AI Summit Barcelona are the three on this list that are, and they get at that audience from three different directions: the search-platform view, the wider marketing-stack view, and the AI-industry view.
Where Spotlight sits: it is built for strategy and brand visibility rather than hands-on implementation. If what you want is crawl budget and structured data at the code level, pair it with the Barcelona Deep Dive three weeks earlier, where Google’s Search Relations team goes to that depth at no ticket cost. Together they cover the whole span.
A note on data attribution, since I get asked. When I present Semrush research, including the 2026 AI Visibility Index and its 126 million prompts across 22 verticals, the data is © Semrush and I attribute it as such. The opinions in this post are mine and do not represent Semrush or Adobe.
Where I Was in 2026
Full disclosure of my own position in this market, because a list of events written by someone who works the circuit should say which stages he was on. Six in 2026, four already delivered and two ahead.
| Event | Date | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Marketing Europe | 14 to 16 April 2026 | Olissippo Oriente, Lisbon | Delivered |
| Croatia SEO Summit | 11 to 13 June 2026 | Amadria Park, Šibenik | Delivered |
| GEO Conference, Edition 03 | 18 June 2026 | Washington DC | Delivered, sold out |
| UK SEO Summit | 26 August 2026 | Shepperton, UK | Upcoming |
| AI Summit Barcelona | 22 to 23 September 2026 | WTC Barcelona | Upcoming |
| EcomExpo | 1 October 2026 | Samsung Conference Center, Vilnius | Upcoming |
The pattern in that table is the argument of this post in miniature. Two of the six are classic search conferences. One is an ecommerce event that reframed itself around agentic commerce. One is an AI industry summit where search is a subplot. One is a GEO-native event that did not exist three years ago. The circuit I worked in 2019 no longer describes the circuit I work now, and any list that treats “SEO conferences” as a single category is describing a market that has already split.
The full roster, including the academic and past appearances, is on the speaking page. If you are programming an event and want the AI-search citation research on your stage, the invite form is the fastest route.
Already Run: The First Half of 2026
Included because an evergreen directory earns its keep by showing the whole shape of a season, which is what makes next year plannable. This is what the first half of the season looked like, and most of these will return in 2027 at roughly the same point in the calendar.
| Event | Date | Location | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zero Click San Francisco | 8 April 2026 | San Francisco | Free, by request |
| Digital Marketing Europe | 14 to 16 April 2026 | Lisbon | 7th edition, 500+ attendees from 30+ countries |
| SEO Week | 27 to 30 April 2026 | New York City | Four days on AI search mechanics |
| brightonSEO | 30 April to 1 May 2026 | Brighton, UK | Spring edition |
| SMX Advanced | 3 to 5 June 2026 | Westin Boston Seaport District | $1,445 to $1,795 all-access |
| Croatia SEO Summit | 11 to 13 June 2026 | Amadria Park, Šibenik | Europe’s seaside SEO conference |
| Zero Click New York | 11 June 2026 | New York City | Free, by request |
| GEO Conference, Edition 03 | 18 June 2026 | Washington DC | Sold out, 150 seats |
| MozCon New York | 14 July 2026 | The Glasshouse, New York | From $649, single track |
Two observations from that half-season. First, the free events were not the weak events: Zero Click ran twice before July, in San Francisco and New York, both on a request-a-seat basis rather than open sale. Second, the event that sold out was the smallest one on the list. A 150-seat conference at $900 selling out, in the same season that offered several thousand-seat alternatives, is the clearest available signal that the demand in this category is for depth rather than for scale.
Working a Conference for Citations
One practical note that applies whichever ticket you buy, and that rewards a little planning.
A conference appearance is not only a learning event. It is a publishing event on domains you do not control. Speak at any of the conferences above and the organizer generates a speaker page with your name and title, an agenda entry describing your session, usually a recap post, and sometimes a transcript or a video. Those are third-party pages that describe who you are and what you know, on sites with their own authority, in a structure that looks exactly like the corroboration generative engines lean on when they decide whether a name is a real entity worth citing.
That is not a theoretical benefit. It is the same mechanism I set out in the stage-to-citation pipeline: the talk is the source event, and the citation trail is what you build with it in the following week. The single highest-return habit here is to publish something of your own within seven days of speaking, because event sites naturally refresh their speaker pages when the next edition goes live, and your own post is what keeps the record durable.
If you are attending rather than speaking, the equivalent move is narrower but still real: publish your notes. A specific, dated write-up of what was said at a named event is a genuinely scarce piece of content, particularly for the no-recording events like the GEO Conference and Zero Click, where nothing else from that room will ever be indexed. I go further into the speaker-side version of this in GEO for speakers.
The last thing worth saying is about frequency. I attend or speak at around 50 events a year, which is a function of the job rather than a recommendation. For an in-house team, two a year is a rhythm that consistently works: one large strategy event that gives the leadership layer a frame, and one small specialist event that gives the practitioner layer a method. The teams that get the most out of that pair are the ones who book implementation time in the fortnight after, so the curiosity the room generated turns into something shipped. Staying curious is genuinely the whole strategy right now, this field is rewriting itself faster than any of us can read, and the people who keep showing up in rooms like these are the ones who stay relevant through it.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on what you need from the room. For pure Generative Engine Optimization depth, the GEO Conference is the most concentrated option: 150 seats per city, in-person only, no recordings, with editions in New York on 4 December 2026 and San Francisco on 9 December 2026 at $900 per ticket. For a German-language equivalent, GEO Know How runs on 1 October 2026 at Festsaal Kreuzberg in Berlin and bills itself as Germany’s first GEO conference. For CMO-level strategy rather than practitioner tactics, Spotlight by Semrush in London on 13 October 2026 is the larger room, with 1,200+ marketers and 80+ speakers expected.
Yes, two worth planning around. Google runs Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona from 30 September to 2 October 2026, and Google states that every Search Central Live event is available at no charge. Profound runs Zero Click London on Thursday 22 October 2026, which is attendance by request rather than paid ticket. brightonSEO also offers a free single-day expo pass for its San Diego edition on request, though the two-day conference pass is paid.
Send the SEO manager to brightonSEO, SMX Advanced or Ahrefs Evolve, where the content assumes fluency and the value is tactical. Attend Spotlight by Semrush, DMWF Europe or the AI Summit Barcelona yourself, because those rooms are built for budget owners: Spotlight expects 1,200+ marketers including CMOs, heads of brand and growth leads, DMWF Europe draws 2,500+ senior marketers to RAI Amsterdam on 24 and 25 November 2026, and AI Summit Barcelona is an AI industry event rather than a search event, which is where the board-level framing comes from.
The 2026 range in the US and Europe runs from free to roughly $1,800. Reference points: Zero Click London and Google’s Search Central Live are free, EcomExpo in Vilnius is EUR 170 until 31 August and EUR 240 from 1 September excluding VAT, MozCon London starts around GBP 499, brightonSEO Brighton starts at GBP 300, brightonSEO San Diego and Ahrefs Evolve start at $865 and $899 respectively, the GEO Conference is $900 rising to $1,000 after 1 September 2026, and SMX Advanced in Boston ran $1,445 to $1,795 for all-access. Budget the flight and two nights on top, which usually exceeds the ticket.
It is worth attending the right kind. The useful split in 2026 is between legacy search conferences that added an AI track and citation-native events built around AI answers from the start. If the question you are bringing is why organic traffic is shifting and how to explain it to a board, the large strategy events are the better use of a day. If you already have that answer and want the mechanics of getting cited in ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, the small in-the-room-only events like the GEO Conference and Zero Click are denser per hour. Doing one of each in a year, rather than two of the same kind, is what gives a team both the frame and the method.
Treat the talk as the source event and the week after as the publishing job. A stage appearance produces a speaker-page entry, an agenda listing, a recap post, and sometimes a transcript, and those are third-party pages that reference you by name on a domain you do not own. That is exactly the corroboration generative engines look for. The highest-return habit is publishing something of your own within a week of speaking, so the citation trail lives on a domain you control as well as on the organizer’s.
Last verified: 2 August 2026. Every date, venue, price and attendance figure on this page was checked against the organizer’s own site on that date, and each screenshot shows the landing page as it appeared then. This directory is reviewed quarterly and rewritten each December for the following season. Spotted a change or a missing event? Tell me on LinkedIn and I will update it.
Want this research on your stage?
I keynote on AI search, GEO and citation behavior across the US and Europe, backed by Semrush’s 2026 AI Visibility Index and its 126 million prompts. In English, Spanish or Russian.