Agenda 2026

Join Johan von Hülsen for a relaxed 5K before the conference kicks off. No pace pressure, no performance targets. Just Berlin in the early morning, a clear head, and your first connections made before the conference has even started. We will meet in the hotel lobby at 7:00 am. All paces genuinely welcome.

Search authority is undergoing its biggest transformation since the early days of PageRank. As AI-driven systems increasingly evaluate brands, experts and claims across multiple sources, trust is moving beyond links and domains into a broader ecosystem of signals: expertise, brand reputation, social validation, third-party citations and proven usefulness. This keynote explores how brands must evolve from chasing rankings to building trust at scale.

As Generative Information Retrieval reshapes the search landscape, the SEO industry is facing a steep learning curve and a wave of new misconceptions and even more industry myths. In this session, Dawn will dismantle emerging SEO myths and clarify complex new concepts. Discover the true origins of these misunderstandings and learn exactly what generative search actually means for the future of your SEO strategy.  The session delves into the ‘AI SEO misinformation problem’,  examining why the field is prone to subjective interpretations and how the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has exacerbated longstanding debates. By demystifying how search engines actually rank and surface content versus how they are engineered internally, this talk seeks to separate technical reality from the ‘echo chamber’ of trending terminology.

The measurement problem for senior performance marketers isn’t a lack of data — it’s too many sources, too many conflicts, and too little clarity on what’s actually driving growth.

In this session, we’ll discuss the interplay of causal and correlative data and how to orchestrate insights across MMM, incrementality experiments, and attribution solutions for more profitable media optimisation. We will dive into building a resilient measurement stack, tapping AI tools for better analysis, and how to frame measurement findings in terms that land with a CFO to actually influence long-term budget decisions.

You’ll hear Ginny’s perspective on the current state of Meridian MMM, incrementality experiments, Google Analytics, and other measurement solutions, and what a rigorous, joined-up approach looks like in practice.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot: SEO for LLMs may seem interchangeable – but these platforms are built on very different foundations. Creators, investors, media partnerships, retrieval systems, training data and knowledge cut-off dates shape how each model selects sources, frames answers, and surfaces brands.

Viola will break down what differentiates the leading LLMs today and why those differences matter for search visibility. You will learn how to think in LLM ecosystems, how to adapt optimization approaches across models, and how to stay ahead as the balance of power shifts over time. This is about making informed decisions in a landscape where AI systems, not search results, increasingly control exposure.

ChatGPT ads are moving from theory into real-world execution. Enterprise advertisers are already testing the channel with meaningful budgets and clear performance expectations.

In this session, Sam shares first-hand insights from clients actively running ChatGPT campaigns. What formats are emerging, how targeting behaves, where performance diverges from search and social, and what breaks when familiar playbooks are applied. We’ll look at setup realities, measurement limitations, and how teams are adapting to a channel that doesn’t behave like traditional paid media.

If you’re responsible for serious media budgets, ChatGPT is not just another placement to add to your mix. The mechanics, signals, and user behavior are fundamentally different. This session offers an early, experience-based view of what that means in practice.

Indexation used to be simple. Five years ago, it started becoming difficult. Today, it is expensive, and therefore limited. At the same time, the amount of content continues to grow. AI systems require more and more longtail content to generate answers, yet they do not maintain their own index. Instead, they rely on the indexes of Google and Bing. That raises a critical question: what does it actually take to be indexed and to stay indexed, in this environment?

Is crawl budget really the core problem? What truly leads to indexation? What causes de-indexation? And most importantly, what concrete actions can you take to improve your chances of being indexed and remaining visible?

In this session Johan, looks at the mechanics behind inclusion and exclusion, challenges common assumptions, and focuses on practical steps you can implement to improve indexation in a world where content is abundant, AI depends on existing search indexes, and visibility is no longer guaranteed.

Most platforms tell us “go with the flow” and trust the algorithm – invest Google’s PMax or Meta’s Advantage+. But this blind trust is a recipe for disaster. Platforms push what they think people want to see, wasting your spend on “window-shoppers” while neglecting promising products. The fight for control has moved. It’s no longer about audience buttons or old-school segmentation; it’s about the data you feed the machine. This session provides a playbook for ecommerce advertisers to force the algorithm to flow where it actually provides incremental value for your brand.

The people sitting across from you have the same job, the same pressures, and probably some of the same unsolved problems. These roundtables are consistently the highest-rated part of SMX Advanced. Not because of who’s presenting, but because of who’s sitting across from you. Senior practitioners, in-house leads, agency heads – people managing real accounts, real teams, real budgets. Off the record. No pitches, no positioning. Just people willing to say what they actually think.

Each table works from a specific, pre-defined problem. There’s a facilitator, a shared document, and three concrete takeaways per group that feed back into the room. Come with something real. A method that worked. A decision you’re still not sure about. A problem you haven’t solved yet.

These are your people. The conversation starts the moment you sit down.

Tables:
1. GEO measurement: what are you actually reporting, and do you trust it?
Everyone has cobbled together something. Prompt sets, citation tracking, share-of-voice proxies. This table is for comparing notes honestly — what your setup looks like, where it breaks, and what you’ve stopped bothering to measure because it told you nothing useful.
2. Brand representation in LLMs: what do you do when the sources getting cited aren’t you?
You’ve checked. ChatGPT mentions a competitor. Perplexity cites a review site with outdated information. Your own content doesn’t appear. This table is about the practical response — how teams are identifying where the gap is, what levers they’re pulling, and whether any of it is measurably working.
3. The long-tail content question: keep, consolidate, or let it go?
AI answers a huge chunk of informational queries now. A lot of content that used to pull traffic no longer does — and won’t again. This table is for the decision-making process: how are you auditing what’s worth keeping, what criteria you’re using, and how you’re making that argument internally without it turning into a six-month project.
4. Who owns GEO — and how is that working out?
In some teams it sits with SEO. In others it’s been handed to content, brand, or a new “AI visibility” function that didn’t exist 18 months ago. This table isn’t about org design theory — it’s about what’s actually happening: the workflow gaps, the ownership disputes, the things falling through the cracks because nobody’s sure whose job it is.
5. Open table: AI in search — what’s your biggest unresolved question right now?
No fixed agenda. Bring whatever is keeping you up at night. The only rule: it has to be a real question, not a talking point.

The people sitting across from you have the same job, the same pressures, and probably some of the same unsolved problems. These roundtables are consistently the highest-rated part of SMX Advanced. Not because of who’s presenting, but because of who’s sitting across from you. Senior practitioners, in-house leads, agency heads – people managing real accounts, real teams, real budgets. Off the record. No pitches, no positioning. Just people willing to say what they actually think.

Each table works from a specific, pre-defined problem. There’s a facilitator, a shared document, and three concrete takeaways per group that feed back into the room. Come with something real. A method that worked. A decision you’re still not sure about. A problem you haven’t solved yet.

These are your people. The conversation starts the moment you sit down.

Tables

1. Automation boundaries: where are you holding the line, and why?
Every account has a different answer. Some teams are locking brand, negatives, and budgets and releasing everything else. Others are doing the opposite. This table is about the actual decisions — what you’re controlling, what you’ve handed over, and what made you draw the line where you did.
2. Proving incrementality without blowing up the account: what’s your approach?
Everyone agrees it matters. Far fewer have a method they’d stand behind. This table is for sharing what you’ve tried — holdout tests, geo experiments, MMM — what the results actually showed, and how you explained them to someone who just wanted to see ROAS go up.
3. AI-generated creative at scale: where have the guardrails failed you?
Not a theoretical question. This table is for the incidents — the ad that went live and shouldn’t have, the brand guideline that didn’t survive contact with automation, the approval process that couldn’t keep up. What broke, what you fixed, and what you’re still not confident about.
4. Signal loss and consent: what’s your current tracking setup, and are you comfortable with it?
Server-side, consent mode, modelled conversions — most teams have patched something together under real GDPR pressure. This table is for comparing notes on what’s actually holding up, what’s quietly broken, and what you’d do differently if you were starting from scratch today.
5. Open table: paid search in 2026 — what’s the question you can’t get a straight answer to?
No fixed agenda. Bring the thing you’ve been arguing about internally, or the thing nobody in your organisation wants to address yet. Peer conversation, no vendor spin.

Reddit has become one of the most influential platforms for organic visibility in Google and LLM-driven search — and one of the most unforgiving environments for corporate brands.
In this session, Benjamin shares how he and his team built a sustainable Reddit SEO strategy under real-world corporate constraints. From taken usernames and moderator roadblocks to legal review cycles and internal governance, he explains what it actually takes to operate on Reddit without triggering bans, backlash, or long-term brand damage. You will also learn what it means to engage on Reddit in a way that is perceived as genuinely helpful rather than corporate, how to navigate community and moderation dynamics, and how to build a community setup that earns visibility and trust, and ranks in both Google and LLM results.

Google’s ABCDs turn ten next year. Do they still hold up? A lot has changed. Demand gen thinking has infected every format. The best ads are answers, not interruptions. And YouTube has evolved from a viewing destination into a cultural force, pulling audiences from passive scrolling to participation to full permeation. The path from curiosity to checkout has never been shorter, or more competitive. 

Juliana will look into what a decade of YouTube creative actually teaches us, why creative intelligence matters more than ever when the funnel is just a conversation, and how to achieve it. She will dive into where creative insight meets performance data, what asset contribution really tells you about your campaign, and how to write better briefs, because in 2026, a great brief is a translation of signals into creative direction a team can actually execute.

Search no longer runs on a single track. Organic, paid, and AI-driven discovery now overlap, but most teams still plan and measure them separately. In this session, Anu Adegbola and Jono Alderson speak with brands about how they are dealing with that reality. You’ll get a direct look at how teams are restructuring strategy, budgets, and workflows to reflect how search actually works today. The conversation focuses on practical questions: how to evaluate visibility across AI and traditional search, how to move beyond last-click thinking, and how to align SEO, PPC, and AI efforts into something that compounds instead of conflicts. You’ll leave with concrete ideas you can apply, grounded in how other teams are solving the same challenges right now.

After the first day of sessions wraps up and the networking reception winds down, we’re heading out for dinner.

Here’s how it works: we’ll meet at 7:00 PM in the hotel lobby, then split into SEO and PPC groups and walk to nearby restaurants — tables already reserved. Whether you end up with the paid search crowd or the SEO contingent, the format is the same: good conversations, no agenda, good food.

This is exclusively for registered SMX Advanced attendees. No additional signup needed. Dinner is pay-your-own-way — we handle the logistics, you just show up.

The conference is in full swing, and this is one of the best ways to start Day 2. Join us for another relaxed 5K with Johan von Hülsen. No pace pressure, no performance targets. A clear head, easy conversation, and a chance to make new connections or pick up where yesterday’s left off.

We meet in the hotel lobby at 7:00 am. All paces genuinely welcome.

Your rendering strategy was probably decided by your engineering team, for your users. Sam Torres makes the case that it’s also one of the most consequential SEO decisions you’re not actively managing. That gap is only growing as AI crawlers and agents become a meaningful source of traffic and visibility.

This session goes beyond traditional crawler considerations to address two converging shifts: the growing popularity of LLM-driven search and the coming agentic web. Sam maps each rendering approach to its real-world impact on discoverability, structured data accessibility, and agent compatibility, and offers a practical framework for auditing and future-proofing your site for what comes next.

You’ve been playing the bidding game for years. You know how it used to work. But what once delivered reliable results is now being reshaped by automation, AI, and shifting platform dynamics. Today, you have to challenge every assumption you’ve ever made about bidding.In this session, Jyll reexamines the foundations of Google Ads and rewrites the playbook for advanced bidding. She’ll dispel common bidding myths, question long-held best practices, and show how to rethink control, signals, and optimization in a landscape where automation is no longer optional.

The way we find, filter, and act on information is being fundamentally transformed by AI agents. No longer limited to retrieving links or ranking results, today’s AI systems can understand intent, synthesize vast amounts of data, and take action on behalf of users. In this keynote, Farah draws on her experience building AI-powered search and intelligence products at Feedly to explore how autonomous agents are reshaping search, from passive keyword matching to proactive, context-aware information delivery. She’ll share practical insights on building agents that don’t just find answers but analyze, prioritize, and act, and what this shift means for search professionals, marketers, and organizations looking to stay ahead.

AI Search is often discussed through patents, predictions or opaque model behavior. This session takes a different route: real evidence. Using Chrome DevTools, network logs and script analysis, we will examine how ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini actually operate behind the scenes. You will see how request patterns, embedded metadata, source handling and internal feature flags reveal concrete mechanisms that shape AI-generated answers. The talk demonstrates a practical methodology for identifying signals, understanding system logic and uncovering hidden functionalities. Attendees will leave with a technical framework they can use to analyze AI search systems independently and extract insights that inform strategy, optimization and competitive research.

AI isn’t just another tool in the paid media stack – it’s changing how we build the stack itself. In this advanced session, Matt goes deep on using AI to create custom tools that genuinely improve how you work.

You’ll see how multi-model workflows – passing specs, plans, and code between Claude and OpenAI – produce sharper, more reliable outputs than any single model alone, and how this approach applies directly to paid media problem-solving.

The session covers how AI is reshaping software development for marketers who aren’t traditional developers. Matt will draw a clear line between two modes of thinking: AI as a productivity tool, and AI as an enhancement tool that combines your strategic ideas with platform data to generate outputs at a scale you just couldn’t produce manually.

Expect live examples, working code, and practical frameworks you can take back and start building with immediately.

Many GEO teams still evaluate AI visibility with a few prompts and a tracking screenshot. That is no longer enough. Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Grok, Perplexity and other systems, answers, cited sources and grounding behavior can vary dramatically. In this session, I will share a vendor-neutral framework for classifying prompts by grounding likelihood before generation, measuring answer and citation stability, and distinguishing cited from non-cited source patterns. I will show where GEO tracking breaks in practice, what actually drives retrieval and citation, and how search teams can build a reliable testing and optimization workflow for AI search visibility.

AI Max for Search introduces powerful automation, but many even advanced advertisers miss many opportunities to make this campaign type work to optimize profits? Join scripting wizard Nils Rooijmans, Google Ads Performance Architect, as he shares the latest AI Max strategies. You’ll learn how to use scripts to reduce wasted ad spend, control your brand, monitor performance, and adjust settings when needed

After this session, you’ll be able to understand the algorithms behind AI Max and what role this campaign type plays in AI Overviews, translate your business objectives into a setup for your ‘AI Max for Search’ campaigns and use a set of provided tactics and scripts to optimize your campaign setup to increase _your_ profit.

Most ICP documents are built once and trusted too long. This session shows what happens when you actually interrogate them with data. Ashley shares how SearchLab rebuilt their ICPs using behavioral intelligence, first-party marketing data, and AI-assisted analysis — and what they found contradicted several existing assumptions. Who consumes content versus who actually influences buying decisions. How target audiences describe their problems in search queries. Where messaging frameworks diverge from real decision-stage concerns. You’ll see how those signals were triangulated, what they pointed to, and how they translated into concrete changes in content strategy, topic prioritization, and search alignment.

At scale, performance data doesn’t just become less reliable, it starts to distort the decisions built on top of it.

A stable CPA can mask volatility that erodes profit. ROAS can improve while contribution margin declines. Attribution models consistently reward what is easiest to measure rather than what actually drives incremental outcomes. In large accounts, these effects don’t cancel out, they compound.

This session assumes you already know the limitations of standard metrics. Instead of revisiting them, it focuses on six specific statistical failure modes that emerge in high-spend Google Ads environments and quietly bias optimisation over time.

Drawing on analysis of $770M+ in ad spend, Igor will walk through how these distortions show up in real datasets, how to quantify their impact, and how to recalibrate your evaluation frameworks accordingly. The session connects variance, distribution effects, and incrementality with the day-to-day decisions that shape account performance, with a focus on separating apparent efficiency from actual economic impact.

You’ll leave with a diagnostic lens for interrogating your own data more rigorously, and a clearer understanding of when performance improvements are real, and when they are artefacts of the way your metrics are constructed.

Every SEO tool has an MCP now, but connecting your stack to an LLM interface doesn’t automatically make workflows faster, cheaper, or better.  So, is the hype really worth it? In this session, Gus explores multiple use cases for MCP Servers, what worked, what failed – and how to use your tokens wisely.

In this talk, you’ll learn about advanced use cases you can’t easily achieve with the regular UI from these same tools, to make sure a newer (and more expensive) technology brings true advantage. Some examples are:

Layered keyword research: group keywords by topic and organize by meaning and intent, not just words. Turn thousands of keywords in smaller, more meaningful groups.
SERP Scraping: Understand SERP features at scale and map opportunities across multiple SERPs at once. 
AI-features reporting: compare results across multiple SEO tools at once. 
When to avoid MCPs: some “at scale” tasks are better handled by Python scripts – which can also be created using LLMs. Comparing the currency and time cost when trying MCPs vs Vibe Coding.

Google’s shift toward AI-powered ad formats has changed what “good” lead gen looks like. Default settings and old “best practices” aren’t enough anymore! This session covers the advanced playbook for lead gen accounts: where Demand Gen, AI Max and Performance Max actually fit (and where they don’t), and how to use micro conversions to teach the algorithm what a qualified lead looks like. We’ll look at what’s working in practice across accounts large and small, including the operational changes needed to get full value from these newer formats. You’ll leave with specific tactics to stress-test and sharpen the lead gen setups and elevate them to the next level. 

Google Ads Scripts give you superpowers. You already know that.

Yet, this superpower sometimes feels somewhat out of reach. 

You already played around with Google Ads Scripts before, BUT
you ran into some errors you couldn’t fix on your own, OR
you wanted to make some changes to the script but didn’t know where to get started.

You do not have a lot of programming experience,  BUT you want to be able to read JavaScript and really understand what is going on.

You DO WANT to create your own scripts, BUT so far, you just didn’t have the right skills and time to get started.

If you recognize any of the above, this workshop is for you.

This workshop will help you understand, fix and _create_ Google Ads Scripts to optimize your workflows and your accounts.

We are going to be using the latest AI tools to take your Google Ads Scripting skills to the next level!

During this hands-on Deep Dive you will learn:

• How ChatGPT can teach you basic and advanced JavaScript concepts (and enjoy the experience too),
• How to create Google Ads scripts yourself, with the help of ChatGPT
• How to have ChatGPT fix errors in your scripts (and some of the errors in all those free scripts out there as well)
• BONUS: How scripts can use the ChatGPT API to automatically put ChatGPT to work for your account(s).  Yes, you read that right; we are going to ask ChatGPT to come up with a script idea that leverages the ChatGPT API to make our PPC life better, AND create the script for us.  Welcome to AI Wonderland

After this workshop you’ll have increased your Google Ads Scripting skills to make you shine as the scripting star in your team!

This Deep Dive is for you if you want to

• Learn more about JavaScript (enough to be able to make changes and create scripts yourself)
• Fix broken code and error messages (in scripts of your own, as well as 3rd party scripts)
• Create your own scripts
• Connect with other PPC Pros that love to automate stuff

This Deep Dive if NOT for you if

• you have less than 2 year experience in managing Google Ads
• you don’t know about the benefits of Google Ads Scripts
• you’ve never installed a Google Ads Script before

Who is Nils Rooijmans?
Nils is a Dutch PPC specialist with a background in artificial intelligence and computer programming. He currently runs a remote PPC agency where he applies his automation skills to manage Google Ads accounts for his clients. He’s also a teacher for other PPC professionals, and has been teaching Google Ads scripting skills since 2015. Nils loves to share his knowledge as a speaker at international PPC events and as a blogger.

Modern buyers no longer move in a linear funnel, they loop through the Messy Middle, constantly exploring and evaluating options before making a decision. Most brands produce content for a simplified TOFU–MOFU–BOFU model, leaving huge gaps exactly where buyers are making up their minds.

This advanced Deep Dive shows SEOs how to map the real buyer journey along the Messy Middle and connect it with a structured, AI-supported content audit. The result: a complete, journey-aligned content ecosystem that removes friction, fills critical gaps, and drives more conversions and revenue.

Deep Dive Focus

Participants will learn:

• Understand the Messy Middle: What the Messy Middle is, why it disrupts classic funnels, and how exploration & evaluation loops shape buying decisions.
• Messy Middle Analysis (Step-by-Step): How to identify decision moments, comparison triggers, psychological heuristics, and search behaviours that drive purchase choices.
• Journey-aligned Content Audit: Using Screaming Frog + ChatGPT, attendees will learn how to:
  • Evaluate each URL by intent, quality, performance & buyer relevance
  • Identify gaps where content is missing along the Messy Middle
  • Classify all pages into Keep / Improve / Consolidate / Delete
  • Map pages to ICP, value proposition, and journey stage
  • Detect where users drop out — and where new content is needed most
• Create Content for Every Journey Step
  • Exploration vs. evaluation content
  • Preference-reinforcing content
  • Competitive decision helpers
  • Content that addresses the psychological shortcuts buyers use to decide

Outcome for Participants

• A complete Messy Middle journey map tailored to their ICP
• A full AI-supported content audit framework
• Clear identification of content gaps with the highest business impact
• A 6-month roadmap for pruning, improving, and creating content across the journey
• Optimized buyer journeys → higher conversion rates and more revenue

This Deep Dive is for advanced practitioners looking to expand their Google Ads skills beyond search campaigns and keywords. Jyll will cover advanced setup and optimization techniques for Performance Max, Demand Gen, and YouTube campaigns. You’ll master the three key pillars for Google Ads success – bidding, targeting, and creative – through deep dives on sophisticated smart bidding deployment, advanced audience and content targeting techniques, and actionable frameworks for creating effective text, image and video assets. The workshop will be interactive and collaborative, with an opportunity to put your new skills into practice right away alongside industry colleagues.

Raves for Johan’s Deep Dive:
„I had the great opportunity to meet Johan during the SMX Advanced in Berlin. An amazing opportunity to hear Johan’s share his expertise on fundamental technical SEO notions such as crawling budgets and indexing optimizations. It was also a great chance to discuss and share some of our own ongoing SEO projects and challenges, and get his feedback on them. An intense day, full of rich and insightful information, useful and highly recommended for experienced veterans and curious new-comers in the SEO space.“
Andrej Zafirov, Digital Marketing Manager at autobiz Deutschland GmbH

„From my experience working with Johan, I can confidently say that he is one of the top technical SEO experts from Germany. Expect a high density of information, although Johan will still take plenty of time for further explanations. This is the reason why I regularly recommend Johan’s workshops to employees. Anyone who wants to take their technical SEO knowledge to the next level is in the right place with Johan.“
Stefan Vorwerk, Head of SEO, GetAway Group 

Why technical SEO (and this Deep Dive) is relevant for you

Technical SEO is the basis of a successful SEO strategy. At least if your domain has more than 1k indexable urls technical SEO will decide whether your content will be ranking or not.
Understanding and optimizing technical SEO is therefore crucial for your SEO success (and career). This has not changed with the rise of AI as a tool and GenAI as a search engine.

In this workshop we will boost your knowledge about technical SEO. This workshop will not only discuss theory, but go into details and examples of your domain (and the domains of other attendees). Throughout the workshop we will discuss opportunities to improve your workflows with AI systems. We will also discuss how Generative AI or AI search engines differ from traditional search engines.

You have the opportunity to submit topic ideas and problems in advance that we can discuss and work on.

Your expert guide to technical SEO

Johan has been doing technical and strategic SEO for big websites for 15 years now and is one of the best known technical SEOs in Germany.

Did you ever delete a url and were wondering if this will help your SEO? Than you can imagine how Johan felt, when he led a relaunch project deleting 300 million urls from a domain. You wonder how that worked out? Johan will tell you.
This Deep Dive is an excellent opportunity to profit from his knowledge about how Google (and bing) works.

Johan is working with some of the biggest websites in the world. Domains he’s helping contain shops and content publishers with more than 20 million indexed pages. He loves internal linking, SEO strategy and doing things that are good for users and SEO. So accessibility is important for him.

Benefits of attending

Attending this Deep Dive will not only help you to better understand technical SEO in an AI world. You will:

• Gain practical solutions and strategies for your domain (utilizing state of the art AI knowledge)
• Better understand why things don’t work as intended and what to do about it
• Prioritize the improvements you defined
• Write tickets that developers love to implement
• Improve your search engine rankings and Gen AI performance with state of the art in-depth SEO knowledge
• Access to exclusive SEO Resources

You will also get:

• Practical solutions for your domain you can implement after SMX
• Refreshments and networking opportunities
• A nice lunch break
• Funny SEO anecdotes from 15 years of technical SEO fails

You will not only have a full day of SEO-discussion at the highest level with experts like you.

Requirements for attending

We want to make sure all attendees have a good experience and benefit from this workshop. Therefore everybody should know the basics of technical SEO:

• HTML
• Server-/Browser-Communication (Status Codes)
• Indexation Rules (robots.txt, Meta-Robots, X-Robots, Canonical)
• XML-Sitemaps

You don’t need 5 years of experience to follow the Deep Dive, but you should have a solid basis in technical SEO. Also a basic understanding of how an LLM works will make it easier to follow throughout the workshop. The workshop will however repeat some of the basics to make sure everyone is on the same page and can follow the following expert part.

To prepare for the workshop, we recommend reading the following:

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing
• https://www.semrush.com/blog/technical-seo/
• https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/resources/intro-llms

The Agenda

• Basics: How Google works and why technical SEO is (still) important in an AI world
• Crawling: How to save Googles resources and save money on server costs by optimizing crawling
• Indexation: Why getting your content indexed is crucial and gets harder every year (and What we can do to improve indexation especially with Gen AI systems)
• HTML and information hierarchies: How we can improve Googles understanding of what is important on our pages
• Internal linking: How we can improve Googles understanding of which pages are important

Optional additonal topics (only covered if there is time and if required):

• What about bing (and other search engines and AI systems)
• Server side rendering and JavaScript
• Page loading and Google Core Web Vitals optimization
• Benefits of schema.org besides fancy snippets
• AMP/Mobile pages and other sources of canonicalization problems
• Technical International SEO (hreflang, content languages, optimized server setup and things people often miss to optimize)
• PageRank and PageRank simulation
• Pagination and other sources of crawl waste
• Automated linktext relevance and optimization
• Shaping topical relevance

About the Deep Dive leader:

Johan is an SEO and the founder of Wingmen Online Marketing GmbH. Starting out as a technical SEO, Johan increasingly focuses on optimizing strategic, UX, and content-related aspects. Internal linking is the area where content, UX, and SEO are most closely connected. So internal linking must be a true passion for Johan. He leads a team of 20 SEO specialists at Wingmen Online Marketing GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany — each with an average of 10 years of SEO experience.