7 takeaways from brightonSEO and Hero Conf San Diego 2026

I spent two days at brightonSEO and Hero Conf in San Diego this week. Five stages, more than 140 talks, and the people who run Google Ads, Meta, and SEO for brands of every size, all in one building.

Here are the seven things I heard that every business investing in ads and SEO should know. Some of them confirm what we already do for clients. A couple changed how I think about the work.

1. You get what you feed the algorithm

This was the main message across more than a dozen paid media talks, and it applies to Google Ads and Meta alike.

Smart Bidding, Performance Max, and AI Max buy whatever you tell them a conversion is. Count a form fill as a conversion and Google finds you more people who fill out forms. Count every phone call and it finds you more callers, including the spam ones. Send it a closed deal from your CRM and it finds you customers.

For lead generation businesses, that means connecting the CRM to the ad platform and passing back the events that matter: a qualified call, a quote sent, a job booked, a job closed. Each one with a value attached. Accounts that skip this step are at a real disadvantage, and Performance Max and AI Max in particular will happily spend the budget on junk.

This is the first thing we set up for every lead gen client, and it was good to hear a room full of practitioners say the same thing.

2. Paid media managers are marketing engineers now

At least twelve speakers across both days made the offline conversion argument. One talk on the program was literally titled “You’re already a marketing engineer.” The idea: you don’t do the marketing anymore. You build the machine that does.

Media buying is a subset of the job. The real work is understanding what the client’s business actually needs to grow, then architecting the stack that makes it measurable:

• A CRM that records where each lead is in the sales process
• Call tracking with a human qualification step, so a spam call never counts
• Click IDs captured on every form
• GA4 and Search Console connected to the same picture
• A path for all of that first party data to flow back to Google and Meta as conversion signals

Most local businesses do not have this yet. Building it is the job.

3. AEO and GEO are SEO. Almost all of it.

Talk after talk on AI search came back to the same fundamentals. Clean, crawlable HTML. Being the recognized official source for your topic. Real mentions on third party sites people trust.

Every shortcut people tested failed. The llms.txt file that was supposed to talk to AI crawlers. Markdown copies of pages. AI content farms. None of it moved the needle, and some of it hurt.

What is genuinely new is the number of engines. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews each pull from different sources. One study presented at the conference found that only about 4% of cited sources are shared by all four. So you measure each engine separately, and you do the same work you would do for Google, faster, with better tools.

4. Sources change fast. Reddit is out. YouTube is in.

The most striking data of the conference came from Metehan Yesilyurt, who analyzed millions of ChatGPT shopping conversations. Reddit fell from about 11% of ChatGPT’s shopping citations in June to under 1% in September. Three months.

My read is that marketers found ways to game Reddit, and ChatGPT responded by restricting its searches to domains it trusts. Google’s AI products still cite Reddit heavily, so this is a ChatGPT story for now. But it shows how fast a source can disappear.

YouTube went the other way. Several speakers showed it as one of the strongest signals for AI visibility. It is hard to convince clients to fund video. The ones who do, especially with small channels that answer their audience’s actual questions, are winning.

5. Claude Code is table stakes. Blind trust is not.

We are in the messy middle of AI adoption. Almost everyone at the conference is using Claude Code, Codex, or a tool like them. But familiarity, confidence, and the quality of what people produce are all over the place.

My opinion: using these tools is now the baseline, including connecting them to your ad platforms and analytics through their APIs. I run most of Mav Ads this way.

What is not the baseline is trusting them blindly. Every serious builder I heard from keeps a human approval step on anything that touches a client account. The AI recommends. A person decides. That is not the training wheels version. That is the version.

6. Workslop is the new spam

Kirk Williams’ closing keynote at Hero Conf put a name on something I have been noticing for months. Workslop is AI-generated work that offloads the thinking onto whoever receives it. The beautiful report, email, or presentation that took thirty seconds to produce and says nothing.

Because it is now easy to produce polished output does not mean you should. If it took you thirty seconds and costs the reader thirty minutes, do not send it.

7. Everyone is building an AI visibility tool. Including me.

The expo floor was wall to wall with AI visibility and intelligence platforms. Peec, Scrunch, Otterly, RadarKit, Similarweb, Yext, Searchable, and a dozen more. Every one of them tracks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention your brand, which sources they pull from, and why.

I built my own. Mav Tools is in closed beta with our clients now. I wanted per-engine tracking, weekly collection, and client reports on my terms, and I wanted to understand the mechanics well enough to give real recommendations rather than a score.

If you are investing in ads and SEO and not measuring AI visibility weekly yet, pick a tool and start.

What this means for your business

If you take one thing from this list, take the first one. The quality of your Google Ads and Meta results in 2026 depends less on who manages the bids and more on what you tell the platform a customer looks like. That is a plumbing problem, and it is the one we solve first for every client.

If you want to talk through where your account stands on any of the seven, get in touch. Happy to share my full notes from the conference.