What We Took From Two Days at brightonSEO in October

We spent 8 and 9 October at brightonSEO in the Brighton Centre, our second visit of the year after the spring edition we wrote about in May. Across the two days we sat in on 23 talks spread over seven tracks, from AI and automation on the Thursday through to accessibility and searches that end without a click on the Friday.

AI search ran through much of the programme, yet the favourite talks of our founders Nathan Yendle and Paul Clapp both sat outside the AI tracks, in content research and accessibility. Below is the full list of talks we attended, grouped by track, followed by a closer look at those two favourites.

The 23 Talks We Attended Across Seven Tracks

The talks we attended covered seven tracks over the two days, four on Thursday and three on Friday. Each card below gives the stage, the speakers and the talks in that track.

Thursday 8 October

Thursday leaned towards AI, with two of the four tracks given over to automation and AI search. The tracks on organic social and search research balanced that out, with Reddit, LinkedIn and audience intent data all on the agenda.

Friday 9 October

Friday moved the focus from tools to people, with accessibility, agency operations and the psychology of searches that never reach a website. AI still came up in all three Friday tracks, from AI literacy for whole workforces to tracking visibility in AI search.

Frank van Dijk on Content Opportunities Beyond Keyword Research

Frank van Dijk’s talk was about finding the content opportunities that keyword research tools miss. In his session on content opportunities beyond keyword research, the DEPT SEO specialist argued that standard content gap analysis lacks context and showed how audience intent data and entity relationships can reveal gaps that traditional tools overlook.

He finished with a practical framework that teams can follow one step at a time, which is a large part of why it was Nathan’s favourite talk of the Thursday. Keyword volumes show what people type, but they say little about what an audience is trying to achieve or how topics connect to each other. That gap is where many content plans have their blind spots.

The talk lines up closely with how we approach a B2B content audit, where coverage is benchmarked against named competitors and gaps are prioritised by impact before anything is rewritten. Frank’s approach is a useful reminder to test those gaps against intent and entity data, not search volumes alone.

Damien Robert on Why Web Accessibility Is SEO

Damien Robert’s talk made the case that accessibility is the foundation of modern SEO. His Friday morning session treated accessibility as more than compliance, presenting it as a way to make websites easier for people and machines to understand, trust and use.

He connected human inclusivity with machine inclusivity through clear structure, meaningful content, organised journeys, accessible media and solid metadata. He also looked at what the direction of WCAG 3.0 says about the future of accessibility and why SEO teams need to think beyond rankings towards usability, trust and findability.

It was Paul’s favourite talk of the Friday because it joins up two pieces of work that are too often treated separately. The same structure that lets a screen reader make sense of a page also helps search engines and AI tools understand it.

Priority Pixels builds every WordPress website to WCAG 2.2 AA as a minimum and carries out website accessibility audits and remediation for organisations working under the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. Damien’s talk, alongside Tania Gerard’s on accessibility and AI search, is a strong argument for bringing that work into SEO planning from the start rather than treating it as a separate compliance exercise.

AI Search Ran Through Both Days

AI search came up in almost every track, whether the subject was automation, research, accessibility or agency strategy. The talk titles alone show the spread, from shifts in which sources AI tools cite to why some AI mentions count for more than others and how to track performance when a search never reaches a website.

For clients, that keeps the focus on the work we already do through our AI SEO services, where AI Share of Voice is measured as a companion metric to traditional rankings. If you would like to talk through how any of the themes from brightonSEO apply to your website, get in touch.