brightonSEO San Diego 2026

This is my recap of brightonSEO San Diego 2026, the US edition of the world’s largest search marketing conference. This is the latest in my series of conference reviews, after SEO Week in NYC, Advanced in Boston, and Search SEOul in Korea.

To follow my real-time takes on brightonSEO and other top conferences around the world, follow me on LinkedIn. I’m always sharing useful information related to SEO, AI search trends, and organic marketing for global brands. 

About brightonSEO San Diego 2026

• Dates: September 15-16, 2026 (training day and netwalking tour on September 14)
• Venue: San Diego Convention Center (2nd floor) This was the first year in the Convention Center after three years at a smaller venue.
• Organizer: Rough Agenda, the UK team behind brightonSEO, Hero Conf, and MeasureFest
• Headline sponsors: Ahrefs and OtterlyAI. Most impactful sponsors on the floor included DemandSphere, SOCi, Umoren AI, Prerender, Dragon Metrics, and of course Peec AI.
• Keynote: Andy Crestodina (Orbit Media), “Winning AI recommendations… because visibility isn’t enough”
• Scale: 1,500+ attendees according to the organizers, five stages, 150+ talks across SEO, AI search, content, digital PR, PPC, paid social, and analytics. Every brightonSEO ticket included access to Hero Conf, their dedicated PPC conference.

This was the fourth US edition of brightonSEO (and my second in a row). The UK edition runs twice a year in Brighton, England (hence the name) and it is the defacto “largest” search marketing conference series worldwide. The San Diego version is smaller than Brighton but still the biggest SEO event I attend in the States.

The move to the Convention Center makes a huge difference compared to last year. It definitely gives brightonSEO more of a “big time’ feel compared to SMX Advanced, but sacrifices a lot in convenience for the attendees, which I will get into in the pros and cons below.

Why I went to brightonSEO San Diego

I was offered a free ticket and I had to fly over California on the way back from Search SEOul in Korea anyway, so why miss a chance to meet prospects and connect with other SEO leaders? 

My three main goals at brightonSEO were: 

1. Recognize Ray Grieselhuber’s team at DemandSphere and SOCi as “champions” in our industry. Ray received his belt at brightonSEO two weeks after we both attended Search SEOul. I promised a longer message about Ray in my Search SEOul recap, and you will find it below.
2. Generate demand. Many of the most interesting clients and collaborators in my career came from a connection made at conferences like brightonSEO. 
3. Learn from the best international SEO leaders . Cairrot is investing heavily in serving global agencies and complex orgs, expanding into Japan and Korea, and San Diego is the easiest US conference for leaders from Asia to reach.

All three goals were met. Several of them went better than expected. I was particularly excited about the Japanese presence at this year’s event. Japan was represented at Search SEOul but I’m hungry for more conversations with business leaders who are currently “in the weeds” in Japan… My time getting to know the people at Umoren AI and JADE were blessings. 

Pros and cons of brightonSEO San Diego (2026)

Pros:

• Size and scope. Virtually all the big names make an appearance here. I was constantly meeting high-quality attendees, in-house leaders at enterprise brands, and the people who run the tools I compete with.
• San Diego is beautiful. I was born just over an hour away and spent some of my childhood in Orange County, and I feel something about it whenever I am back in SoCal. The weather is perfect in September and the food is as good as any conference city I visit.
• International audience. Especially from Asia. California is much easier to fly to than NYC or Boston, so the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese business leaders who skip SEO Week and SMX Advanced tend to show up here. I networked with even more Japanese business leaders in San Diego than I did in Korea two weeks prior.

Cons:

• Corporate feel. The Convention Center is massive, and brightonSEO shares it with other events. It feels like a trade show, not a community gathering. Compare that to SEO Week, where it feels like the whole industry is in one room, or SMX Advanced, which feels like it was organized by your friends.
• Convention center logistics and parking. The convention center only takes 10 minutes to walk to from most nearby hotels, but it really forces you to stay confined to one little corner of the city. If you have a car, tickets and towing rules for parking are brutal.
• Scattershot information from speakers. It’s the biggest event, which means mixed quality information will be presented by some sponsors.

brightonSEO is great conference for beginners, a priority event for SEO companies, and one of my favorite events for networking with both in-house and agency marketers. 

Highlights of my brightonSEO experience

My experience at brightonSEO San Diego this year was better than I deserve:

1. The SEO merch was a hit. The custom AEO championship belts we bring to conferences were received even more enthusiastically than they were in Seoul. Three sponsors told me their booth traffic went up once a belt was on the table.
2. Dinner with JADE, DemandSphere, and the SEO Community. Ray Grieselhuber brought me along to a dinner where I got to spend time with JADE’s team and learn more about how deals actually get done in Japan. Noah Learner was a key contributor to this lovely experience, which is a pattern of his that I keep noticing at events.
3. Dinner with Umoren AI. I was so impressed by these young LLM engineers from Japan I had to take them out to dinner. Since then I have learned more about doing business in Japan than I thought was possible in just two months.

Most impactful sponsors and speakers from brightonSEO

These are the people and teams from brightonSEO that made the strongest impact on me. As always, there were plenty of excellent speakers I did not get a chance to watch or meet, so a name missing from this list does not mean I did not like their talk. I may have just missed it.

Ray Grieselhuber and DemandSphere

Cairrot recognizes a small number of people and teams each year as “Champions of AEO” with a custom championship belt. Our first champion was Seyong Park and the Ascent AI team at Search SEOul. In San Diego we recognized two more, starting with Ray Grieselhuber and DemandSphere.

Ray Grieselhuber is basically my favorite guy of 2026. The fact that I always speak highly of Ray and DemandSphere (a competitor to Cairrot) should tell you how respectable I think they are. 

Based in Columbus, Ohio. DemandSphere was founded in Tokyo and still has a strong presence in Japan. Ray built one of the first enterprise SEO platforms and it has evolved into my favorite analytics product in Search marketing (next to Cairrot). 

Why Ray is our second Champion of AEO:

• He is an OG superconnector. Ray went out of his way to take care of me in San Diego, including bringing me to the dinner where I met Jade’s team and got to know Noah Learner better. He was not trying to sell me anything. That is just who he is.
• Enterprise SEO. DemandSphere is the AEO/SEO analytics competitor I respect the most, and one of the only pure analytics tools in the space that I think is reasonably priced. Ray earns major respect for his intelligence, obsession with product improvement, and dedication to customers.
• Japanese expansion. Nobody in the American SEO industry has done more to bridge SEO/AEO professionals between East and West. FOUND Conference in Tokyo is the proof.

Ray presented “Lessons from the Trenches of Enterprise AI Search” at Search SEOul and then gave an updated presentation, “Data strategy & engineering for agentic workflows,” just two weeks later in San Diego. And by the way, his presentation from Search SEOul is already my most revisited presentation of the year.

Ray wrote about the belt on LinkedIn, and it is worth reading:

Shout out again to Takeru Muroya and Aaron Denny on the DemandSphere team, Ray knows how to build a dependable team. 

Follow Ray Grieselhuber on LinkedIn ->

SOCi

The second Champion of AEO we recognized at brightonSEO in San Diego is the first one we have ever acknowledged in the “local” niches, and the first enterprise AEO company that showed me anything worth admiring when it comes to local AI visibility.

SOCi has been on our radar since their CMO Monica Ho showed off their Local Visibility Index at SMX Advanced in Boston. Monica’s session was the most actionable talk of that event for me and easily my favorite presentation. Everyone and their mom has an AI Visibility Index these days (ours releases this year), but SOCi is one of two that I actually reference.

SOCi is based in San Diego, so of course we made this happen at brightonSEO San Diego. I am a 90s kid born just two hours away in Southern California, so our skater-inspired West Coast champion belt has a special place in my heart.

Congratulations to Adam Havey, Andrew Blinn, Alicia Zhang, Riley Levine, and Madisen Ontiveros Jorgensen, who accepted the belt on behalf of the SOCi team. They also told me the belt pulled noticeably more foot traffic to their booth once it was on the table.

We look forward to our future collaborations with the great people at SOCi.

Noah Learner (The SEO Community and Sterling Sky)

I always talk about how Ray just “gets it” when it comes to most SEO topics. I feel the same way about Noah and “organic” marketing in the broadest sense: creating opportunities by building goodwill.

Noah Learner is Director of Innovation at Sterling Sky, one of the most respected local SEO agencies in North America. I first wrote about Noah after SEO Week 2026, where he gave away some of the most useful tools and templates of the week. What impressed me most then was his consistency. He arrived early, stayed late, and was always coaching attendees or supporting other speakers. Polite, kind, zero ego. Rare. Noah makes conferences better just by showing up.

San Diego was more of the same, at a bigger scale. Noah ran the “Claude Code for digital marketers” training on the Monday before the conference, and organized (or assisted with) multiple dinners and hangouts, including the dinner with JADE on day 1.

Noah also told me I have some of the best “spectacle marketing” he has seen, based on how I covered SEO Week 2026. Little did he know how much extra energy that compliment gave me to prepare for Tech SEO Connect.

Follow Noah Learner on LinkedIn ->

Umoren AI

Umoren AI is a Japanese agency focused on LLMO/GEO for enterprise brands. Founded by Einar Soderberg, Umoren easily had the best booth strategy of the entire conference. It was simple, it was effective, and it worked. They showed how effective they are at “engineering” the answers they want in LLMs, and the key visual of the booth showed this off with examples they had done for their own brand.

I was so impressed by these young men. Specifically, I respect:

• The courage it takes for two young men in their 20s fly to a new country and promote themselves
• The risk-tolerance it takes to spend the money and time it takes to sponsor an event as big as brightonSEO
• The hours they have clearly put in the weeds to get so effective at such a young age

I confirmed with Einar how many new deals actually came out of it. They had a respectable number prospect meetings booked and at least one close before flying back to Japan.

Dinner with the Umoren team was one of the highlights of my trip. They walked me through the Japanese deal cycle from the inside and are great guys to hang with regardless of topic.

Noriaki Ito and JADE team

Another gift from the conference gods, delivered through Ray Grieselhuber, to educate me on Japanese deal cycles.

Noriaki Ito is the head of JADE is a Tokyo-based Japanese SEO and LLMO agency that also builds Amethyst, their SEO/SXO analysis platform. Rather than sponsor a booth, they organized a dinner for prospects in collaboration with the SEO Community and DemandSphere. Noriaki has a great mind for search marketing and I appreciate the time he took to share notes on international deal cycles, particularly in Japan.

JADE was also represented by Alisa Padur, a highly competent SEO and a great expert to follow for tips from the agency perspective.

There is more on JADE’s team in our Japanese SEO and LLMO guide. JADE is a Tokyo-based Japanese SEO and LLMO agency that also builds Amethyst, their SEO/SXO analysis platform.

Dragon Metrics

Great to see the Dragon Metrics team again after meeting Sara Droke at SMX Advanced. As I wrote then, Dragon Metrics is still behind when it comes to AEO/GEO insights, but the thoroughness of the SEO features makes me feel like there is some real expertise on the product team. More “SEO love” than you find in the funded crowd.

Prerender

Hannah Pelletier spoke for the first time, and did a killer job. It was titled “Before SEO: The layer that decides if your content even matter.” It was focused on AI visibility issues caused by javascript, which went great with the notes I took from Jonathan Moore’s javascript talk at Search SEOul the same month.

Shout out to James Condon and Marcos Withington for their enthusiasm about the custom belts. See you all at the next one!

Peec AI

Peec AI is my favorite of the “Big 3” VC-funded AEO platforms (Peec, Profound, and Scrunch AI). I reviewed Peec after hanging out in person at SEO Week and called them the “scariest” competitor: wildly talented, fast-moving, and unreasonably likable. The team feels like they have worked together for a decade even though they are so young.

And they have grown so much since then. Since my SEO Week review, Peec has:

• Hit their $10 million and $20 million ARR milestones.
• Finally launched Agents in their product.
• Added many new team members, and every one of them fits the usual Peec profile: intelligent, put together, reserved yet enthusiastic.

Peec has been dominant in Europe and has grown tremendously since adding a New York branch in America. In San Diego I noticed some early signs that they are considering what to do about Asia, which makes sense given their growth.

Funny story, Marius Meiners’ girlfriend was working the booth, and she was the only familiar face I recognized from SEO Week. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a secret, or if her official job in the company isn’t supposed to be common knowledge, but there is something interesting going on there. Anyway, it was great meeting some of the new American faces representing Peec and I look forward to giving them a little gift at Tech SEO Connect.

Lessons and reflections from brightonSEO San Diego 2026

The attitude should be gratitude

I had mixed feelings at the end of this conference, and in hindsight I am a little embarrassed about it.

Sure, I was tired. San Diego was the end of three straight weeks on the road, with Seoul and Shenzhen before it. Sure, I was annoyed that my car got towed and I had to spend $300 to get it back, not counting the Ubers. And the convention center can grind you down after two days.

But look at what actually happened. Ray Grieselhuber went out of his way to take care of me, including bringing me to a dinner where I got to meet Jade’s team and learn more about Noah. Brad Weatherall let me use one of his free tickets for the second year in a row. Umoren AI took me to dinner and explained the Japanese deal cycle to me. SOCi, DemandSphere, and Umoren all put our belts on their tables. I booked the follow-up meetings I came for.

In retrospect, it was an incredible conference experience. I just was not in the right state of mind to notice it while it was happening. How blessed.

So the first lesson is for me, not you: the attitude should be gratitude. If you leave a conference grumpy, write down what people did for you before you write down what went wrong.

A booth is not enough for sponsors looking for ROI

brightonSEO has the biggest expo floor of any SEO conference in America. That means more booths competing for the same attention, and most of them look the same.

You need something to pull attendees in and then make something out of it. Umoren AI did this best.

The belts were the other proof point. DemandSphere, Umoren AI, and SOCi all reported much more foot traffic after they had one of our belts on their tables. People stop, they ask what it is, they take a photo, and the booth staff get a conversation they would not have had otherwise.

Noah’s “spectacle marketing” comment landed because this is what I think most B2B marketers get wrong about events. The booth is the venue. The spectacle is the content. If you do not bring something worth photographing, you are paying for floor space to hand out stickers.

Let’s connect at an upcoming conference

Next up for me: Tech SEO Connect in North Carolina this month. This is the most recommended conference of the year by many of the people I look up to, including Aleyda Solis, Ray Grieselhuber, Patrick Stox, JR Oaks and many more.

If you see we’ll be at the same event, reach me on LinkedIn. Follow for real-time takes on global marketing conferences, search news, and pragmatic tips for SEO and AEO.

See you out there!