What brightonSEO. 2026 Told Us About the Next Six Months of Search

Last week, my business partner Paul and I spent two days at brightonSEO. and Hero Conf in Brighton, on 30 April and 1 May. As co-founders of Priority Pixels, we’d been meaning to attend for years and this was the year we made the time. It was our first time at either event and, across two stages and 40-plus sessions, we filled a notebook each cover to cover, coming back with a clearer picture of where search and paid media are heading over the next six months.

brightonSEO. has been a fixture in the search industry calendar for over 15 years and going in person was the right call. The spring programme made it clear how much has changed in the past 12 months and how quickly the wider strategy conversation has moved on. For a B2B marketing agency like ours, where SEO, AI SEO, paid media and content all sit alongside web development, that pace of change is something we already have to absorb every quarter and translate into client work.

We’ve already booked the October edition. In the days since, we’ve taken what we learned back to the team at Priority Pixels and are using it to strengthen our services. Here’s what stood out from the spring sessions and how we are applying each theme to client work.

1. AI search has stopped being theoretical

AI Overviews dominate the SERP: conference slide showing share of above-the-fold real estate on informational SERPs, with AI Overviews at 21.1%, paid at 19.9% and organic at 17.9%.

A year ago, AI search was a panel topic. This year it ran through almost every session we attended, on both stages and across both days.

Aleyda Solis opened the conference with a session on redefining success metrics for the AI search era and Judith Lewis followed with practical KPI alternatives for LLM visibility. Felipe Bazon’s session on entity SEO and topical authority focused specifically on AI contexts, while Rick Tousseyn presented data on YouTube’s growing role in AI citation patterns and Victory Umurhurhu-Michael covered Reddit’s growing influence on what AI tools surface.

The framing has changed. The question is no longer “what happens when AI search arrives” but “AI search is here, so what does our strategy look like in response?” For our clients, that means looking past traditional Google results and producing content that AI tools can pick up, parse and cite cleanly. Visibility tracking has to widen too, taking in AI citations alongside the rankings and impressions we used to monitor in isolation, so the same plan now covers Google and the LLM-driven tools that increasingly sit alongside it.

This is a direction we have already been investing in. Our AI SEO work, including the GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) services we offer alongside traditional technical and on-page SEO, has been built around exactly this kind of evolution in search behaviour. brightonSEO. confirmed that this is now the conversation across the industry rather than the exception. The practical question for most B2B and public sector businesses is no longer whether to start tracking AI visibility but how quickly they can put a measurement framework in place before the gap between the leaders and the rest of the market widens.

2. Measurement is broken and the industry is rebuilding it

Revenue Influence Factor explained: conference slide showing how £80k return users plus £100k tracked attribution gives a £180k total impact and an RIF of 1.8x, a more honest measure of search performance.

James Yorke gave one of the more candid sessions of the week, walking through the measurement crisis in SEO performance tracking and the gap between what most agencies report on and what the data shows in practice. Stephen Akadiri and Christian Goodrich followed with practical GA4 sessions. Goodrich’s case study showed a 50% reduction in ad waste after a properly configured technical implementation, a number that quietly made the case for spending more time on foundations than most projects do.

Server-side tracking, consent mode, attribution drift and GA4 quirks came up across multiple sessions. The consensus across speakers was that none of it is straightforward and that getting it right at foundation level is what separates campaigns that scale from campaigns that stall. Bad data in the early stages doesn’t just produce bad reports later. It produces bad decisions that, repeated over a 12-month retainer, get expensive quickly.

We’ve been investing in this area at Priority Pixels for the past year, with a Conversion Tracking Setup and Audit process that runs at the start of every campaign. The sessions reinforced the value of that approach. We were also reassured to see foundational work treated as headline material rather than a footnote, because too much of the commentary online still treats GA4 setup as a tick-box exercise rather than a strategic asset that everything else sits on top of. We picked up a handful of refinements to fold into the existing process, particularly around server-side configuration and consent-mode edge cases that hadn’t been on our radar at the same depth.

3. Entity SEO and EEAT are now structural, not optional

Our own client base leans heavily toward professional services, healthcare, the public sector and B2B technology. For those sectors, EEAT signals matter more than almost anywhere else, which made Ashley Liddell’s session on entity signal frameworks one of the highlights of the week. Several other speakers across both stages kept returning to the same idea.

EEAT used to feel like a Google rule of thumb, the kind of guidance you nodded at in a webinar without acting on directly. With AI search in the mix, it’s becoming the way content is judged in the first place, with AI tools weighing who wrote a piece, what credentials they have and whether the signals around the author and the organisation hold up under scrutiny. The practical implication is that vague content from anonymous authors is increasingly filtered out, while content with named authors, real credentials and supporting entity signals is more likely to surface in both traditional and AI-driven results. For clients in regulated sectors (healthcare, finance, professional services) this becomes a structural question rather than a content one, with author pages, schema, organisation profiles and third-party citations all carrying more weight than they did 12 months ago.

The new emphasis on entity signals is already shaping how we plan content for those sectors. Author bios and credentials that used to feel like a nice-to-have in editorial planning are now briefed in from the outset, alongside structured author schema and explicit links between content and properly maintained organisation profiles. The work is more involved than it used to be but it is the kind of structural investment that protects visibility as the AI search layer matures.

4. Zero-click search is now most search

Above the fold reality: conference slide showing that only 65% of organic results that rank first sit above a typical laptop fold, illustrated with a Toyota Corolla search example.

Ainhoa Lizarralde’s session on content strategy in a zero-click environment was one we’d recommend to any in-house team grappling with declining click-through rates. The data on how few search results now generate clicks would have felt controversial five years ago but in 2026 it’s the baseline, with a growing share of search demand resolved on the results page itself, through featured snippets, knowledge panels and AI overviews, before a user gets close to a website.

The strategic response isn’t to give up on SEO but to measure it differently. Click-through rate carries less weight than it did, while featured snippets and AI overviews are better counted as wins than losses. The rest of the funnel needs to be built to capture the intent that organic search now surfaces but doesn’t always convert directly. Brand search, retargeting and email become more important precisely because the front end of the funnel has thinned out and the conversion has to happen further down the journey.

This is consistent with how we’ve been advising clients through our SXO (Search Experience Optimisation) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) work for a while, where the conversation is already centred on the experience around the click rather than the click itself. Lizarralde’s session put a useful structure on something we had been seeing in client data for the past year. It also gave us a clearer way to talk to clients about updating their KPI frameworks for an environment where the zero-click share of search keeps growing.

5. PPC is being rebuilt around AI automations

On the Hero Conf side, Farah Radford’s session on creative signals in AI-driven campaigns was the one that stuck with us most. The argument was that Performance Max, Advantage+ Shopping and Smart Bidding strategies are now driven by signal quality more than manual control and that most of the traditional manual levers have either gone or been abstracted behind the platform’s own automation, leaving the quality of inputs as the main variable agencies can still influence.

Chris Ridley on PPC strategy evolution and Sukhjeet Singh on Meta Ads optimisation reinforced the same point from different angles. The job has moved from pulling levers to training the algorithm and the skill set has had to evolve with it. Audience signals, creative quality, feed integrity and conversion data are now the primary inputs and adapting to that reality well is increasingly central to paid performance, regardless of platform.

As a certified Google Partner running paid campaigns across Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Meta, this is a development we have been adjusting to for some time and it has changed how we brief creative, structure feeds and integrate conversion data on every account. We are also testing AI Ads inside platforms such as Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, where the levers and the measurement frameworks are even less mature than on the established platforms and where signal quality matters from day one.

Paid is becoming as much a creative and data discipline as a bid-management one and that reality is shaping how we approach media planning, briefing and reporting for clients on retainer.

What this means for our clients

Two changes are taking effect immediately for our clients.

First, we are folding the brightonSEO. 2026 takeaways into our client onboarding and account audit processes, so that new clients from May onwards will see this approach shape their plan from the start. For existing clients, the same thinking will land in their next quarterly review, where we will work through which of the five themes apply most directly to their sector and search profile and adjust the plan accordingly.

Second, we are offering AI visibility audits for clients where it matters most. If you are in a sector where ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews are starting to take search traffic away from traditional results, we would like to map how visible your business is in those tools, where the gaps sit and what content or entity signals would help to close them.

See you in October!

Priority Pixels at brightonSEO. 2026: Paul and Nathan, co-founders of Priority Pixels, outside the brightonSEO and Hero Conf 2026 badge collection at the Brighton Centre.

brightonSEO. returns to the Brighton Centre on 8-9 October 2026 and Paul and I are already booked in for the autumn programme. If you are going, do come and say hello. If you would like to talk about how the spring takeaways apply to your business in the meantime, get in touch.