Most “AEO conferences” in 2026 are SEO conferences wearing a name tag. The genuinely AEO-native events you can count on one hand. The rest are good SEO programs with an AI track bolted on — useful if that’s what you want, misleading if you booked a flight expecting otherwise.
Disclosure up front, because it matters for this post: I’m Nick Lafferty, Head of Growth at Profound, and I’ve helped plan all four Zero Click conferences we’ve run so far (NYC October 2025, London November 2025, San Francisco April 2026, and NYC again on June 11, 2026). I’m not going to pretend the recommendation below is neutral. I will tell you what I know about every event on this list, including the ones I help organize, including the ones I’d skip, and give you the inputs to disagree with me.
This post covers the same 13 events the Profound roundup does. Same universe. Different cut. Instead of three neutral buckets, I grouped them by how much of the program is actually AEO versus classic SEO with an AI track bolted on — and added the line every operator actually asks: is this worth my time and budget?
TL;DR: All 13 conferences ranked by AEO density and verdict
Verify dates and prices on each event’s site before booking — pricing tiers shift through the year and a couple of these events were still finalizing programs as of May 2026.
| Event | 2026 Date | Location | Price | Format | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero Click NYC | Jun 11 | New York, NY | Free | Half-day in-person | Go |
| GEO Conference | Jun 18 | Washington, DC | $1,250 | 1-day in-person | Depends |
| GEO Know How | Oct 1 | Berlin | TBD | 1-day in-person | Depends |
| SEO Week | Apr 27–30 | New York, NY | $599–$1,999 | 4-day in-person | Go |
| BrightonSEO | Apr 30–May 1 / Sep 15–16 | Brighton, UK + San Diego | £580 / $1,090 | 2-day in-person | Go (with caveats) |
| Ahrefs Evolve | May 14 / Oct 12–13 | Singapore + San Diego | $439–$2,099 | 1–2 day in-person | Depends |
| SMX | Mar 9–10 / Mar 9–11 / Sep 29–Oct 1 | Paris, Munich, Berlin | €950–€2,295 | 2–3 day in-person | Depends |
| MozCon | Jul 14 / Nov 13 | NYC + London | $849 / £520 | 1-day in-person | Skip |
| SERP Conf | Mar 25 / Oct 16 / Nov 3 | Sofia, Rome, Vienna | €199–€749 | 1-day in-person | Depends |
| SEO Mastery Summit | Mar 10–13 | Ho Chi Minh City | $800 | 4-day in-person | Depends |
| Chiang Mai SEO | Nov 9–13 | Chiang Mai | $897 | 5-day in-person | Depends |
| Friends of Search | Mar 12 | Amsterdam | €570 | 1-day in-person | Skip |
| Demand & Expand | May 19–20 | San Francisco | $349–$499 | 2-day in-person | Depends |
Prices are taken from each event’s public 2026 pricing as of May 2026 and assume mid-tier (not super-early-bird, not on-site). Convert at the published rate of the host country. Zero Click is genuinely free — there’s no premium tier, no upsell. You register and you get in if there’s space.
Why conferences matter more for AEO than they ever did for SEO
This is the part competitor roundups skip: why bother going at all in 2026? You can read every conference talk on YouTube three weeks later. The reason to fly is the network, and for AEO specifically the network is the strategy.
Look at where ChatGPT actually pulls citations from:
📊 Profound analyzed 27M real answer-engine prompts and responses and found that Tier-1 publishers (Forbes, AP, Bloomberg, the names a PR team chases) account for only 2.6% of citations. The other 97.4% comes from non-Tier-1 earned media — practitioner blogs, niche publications, podcasts, community sites. When a user names a brand in the prompt, social citations rise from 5.4% to about 15% — roughly 3x.
Where does that earned media originate? In rooms where practitioners know each other.
💡 LinkedIn jumped from the #11 to the #5 most-cited domain on ChatGPT in three months (Nov 2025 to Feb 2026, per Profound’s 7-day rolling domain rank). The shift wasn’t profile pages — those fell from 33.9% to 14.5% of LinkedIn’s citation share. The growth came from posts and long-form articles, which climbed from a combined 26.9% to 34.9%. ChatGPT is increasingly citing what named experts publish, not just where they work.
Reddit tells the same story. Of 180,994 Reddit citations Profound analyzed on ChatGPT, 99.2% point to specific discussion threads — not subreddit pages, not user profiles. ChatGPT is citing conversations. Practitioner conversations. The kind that start because two people met at a conference, traded notes on a Slack DM, and one of them posted the recap on r/SEO or r/marketing the next week.
Classic SEO didn’t need this. You could rank a page on backlinks, schema, and crawl budget without ever meeting another human. AEO can be optimized that way at the margins, but the structural lift comes from being one of the named experts whose name shows up in posts and threads that LLMs cite. Conferences are where that network forms.
If you only remember one thing from this post: citation share is the new market share, and citation share is built on named-expert exposure. Pick the events that maximize that.
Tier 1: Pure-AEO events worth flying for
Four events make the cut. Three of them are genuinely AEO-native; the fourth (SEO Week) is a classic SEO event that has invested so heavily in AEO programming it deserves a top-tier slot on density alone.
Zero Click NYC — June 11, 2026
A half-day summit, 1:30 PM to 10 PM, in New York City. Free to attend, in-person only, space limited. Sixteen confirmed speakers as of May 2026, including operators from Delta Air Lines, LinkedIn, Coca-Cola, Ramp, Reddit, CVS Health, U.S. Bank, and G2, plus Profound’s leadership team and customer marketing engineers. The format is two blocks of programming (2:30–4:30 PM and 5–6 PM) sandwiching a break, then four hours of cocktails and networking.
I help plan Zero Click at Profound, so this is the most biased recommendation in this post. Here’s why I’d still tell a stranger to go:
Track density. Every session is AEO/GEO/AI search. There is no classic SEO track to wander into, no paid media programming filling the gaps. If you have one day to absorb the current playbook for showing up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and AI Overviews, it is the densest day on the 2026 calendar.
The room. The October 2025 inaugural Zero Click at Ramp’s HQ in NYC drew 300+ brand leaders from Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, Google, and Pfizer. Zero Click SF in April 2026 brought 750+ marketers. Zero Click NYC in June 2026 caps lower — it’s a half-day, in-person only, free, advance registration — so the room is operators and platform people, not vendors hawking lead gen.
Free. It’s the only conference on this list with no ticket price. We don’t sell tickets and we don’t run a “pro” tier. If you’re worried about budget approval, this is the easy yes.
The honest counter: because it’s a half-day, you’re not getting the same volume of sessions you’d get at a four-day event. Go to Zero Click for density and the network; go to SEO Week or BrightonSEO for breadth. They’re complementary, not competitive.
What’s happened at the past four Zero Click events
I get asked what Zero Click is actually like more than any other event we’ve run. Quick recap of all four so far:
🗽 Zero Click NYC — October 8, 2025 (Inaugural)
Hosted at Ramp’s headquarters in New York City. 300+ leaders attended. The speaker lineup was Profound’s first attempt at a full AEO-only program, with James Cadwallader (our CEO), Dylan Babbs (our CTO), Josh Blyskal (AEO Strategist), Sartaj Rajpal (Research), Rob Gaige (Reddit, Global Head of Insights), Lily Ray (Amsive, VP SEO Strategy & Research), Mike King (iPullRank), Ross Simmonds (Foundation Marketing), Erin Lanuti (Omnicom PR Group), Tarik Mughisuddin (WPP Media), Michael Dobbs (dentsu Media), Brian Buchwald (Edelman), and George Bonaci (VP Growth & Demand, Ramp). The numbers James shared in his keynote — “$33,000 in commerce influenced by AI every 10 seconds,” 33.8% of AI responses containing unprompted product recommendations, ChatGPT results overlapping with Google’s first page only 19% of the time — became the data anchors that have shown up in every AEO post and slide deck since. George Bonaci from Ramp shared lessons from their “Parabolic Experimentation with AEO” work — long-tail keywords Google didn’t care about that AI loved, a 24.6% lift in visibility for their test cohort, 149% growth in site sessions between June and August by focusing on fresh, crawlable pages with proprietary Ramp data.
🇬🇧 Zero Click London — November 19, 2025
At Outernet London (off Tottenham Court Road). The UK’s first event focused entirely on AI Search and agentic discovery. Half-day, free, similar format. The London room was a mix of UK agency leaders, in-house EMEA operators, and a strong contingent of B2B marketers. Jonny Bentwood from Golin spoke about the shift from “critical thinking to anchor bias” — the way users are moving from scrolling through ten blue links to trusting the first answer they’re presented with. The takeaway that kept coming up in post-event coverage: 90% of AI visibility is driven by citations from earned media. Niche specialist sites shape AI opinions more than traditional major outlets — which is why Tier-1 PR alone doesn’t move the citation needle.
🌉 Zero Click SF — April 8, 2026
The biggest Zero Click yet. 750+ marketers. Speakers included representatives from OpenAI, Stripe, Figma, Reddit, G2, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Expedia, Webflow, Parallel, and iPullRank. Brian Halligan (HubSpot co-founder) joined a surprise fireside conversation. Parag Agrawal of Parallel spoke about agentic commerce. Mike King and the iPullRank team co-hosted a “Zero Click Eve” pre-event the night before for the SF practitioner crowd. The full 13-session library is now available on-demand at tryprofound.com/zeroclick/sf — free, with downloadable speaker decks. If you want to feel the temperature of where AEO programming sits in 2026, watch those sessions. They are the current state of the practice.
🗽 Zero Click NYC — June 11, 2026 (next)
Coming up. Half-day, free, in-person only at NYC. Speaker lineup includes operators from Delta, LinkedIn, Coca-Cola, Ramp, Reddit, CVS Health, U.S. Bank, and G2, with the Profound team running proprietary research presentations. Request your spot.
Best for: anyone who is full-time on AEO and needs the densest one-day shot of current playbook plus the network to compare notes for the next six months. Especially worth it if you can pair it with another NYC trip — the room compounds when you stack it with adjacent meetings.
SEO Week — New York, April 27–30, 2026
Four days at $599 single-day to $1,999 general admission. Technically a classic SEO event, but the 2026 program leans so heavily into AEO that it ranks in the top tier on track density. Enterprise crowd, deep technical content, strong AEO programming from named in-house operators.
Best for: senior in-house operators at mid-market and enterprise companies who need both classic SEO depth and AEO programming in one trip. The total dollar value for an enterprise team is the best on the list outside of free Zero Click.
GEO Conference — Washington, DC, June 18, 2026
One-day in-person, $1,250. Two-track format (marketing and technical) with confirmed speakers from OpenAI, Yext, and Gemini. The technical track is rare among AEO events and is the reason to go — most events keep the conversation marketing-side; this one is willing to get into structured data, schema, and the engineering of being citable.
Best for: technical practitioners who want serious depth on the engineering side of AEO, and DC-based operators who can attend without a flight. If you’re going to Zero Click NYC on June 11, the DC trip a week later is a logical pairing — same coast, same week of focus.
GEO Know How — Berlin, October 1, 2026
Germany’s first AEO conference. Pricing TBD as of May 2026. Speakers from SISTRIX, dm, Claneo. Strong on user-behavior research and the SEO-to-AEO transition, with a DACH-region lens that you don’t get at events run out of London or New York.
Best for: teams operating in German-speaking markets, where the AEO playbook diverges materially from the English-language one. (Worth noting Profound’s research found Brazilian Portuguese and Mexico/Spain Spanish over-index on Google AI Overviews citations versus the English baseline by +5 to +12 percentage points, while German under-indexes by 2–3 points. If you’re optimizing for DACH AI search, the playbook is different and a regional event helps.)
Tier 2: SEO conferences with a real AEO track
These four events have invested seriously in AEO content but aren’t built around it. The AEO programming is roughly 20–40% of the agenda — meaningful, but you’re paying for the whole conference.
BrightonSEO — Brighton (Apr 30–May 1) and San Diego (Sep 15–16), 2026
£580 in Brighton, $1,090 in San Diego. The biggest search conference on the calendar, and the AEO track has grown every year. Largest pool of AEO-adjacent speakers of any 2026 event, spread across a multi-stage agenda that includes plenty of classic SEO, plus 2026-specific topics like AI slop prevention and entity management.
Best for: people who want maximum optionality — pick from dozens of sessions, including a real AEO track. The ratio of price to AEO content is genuinely good if you’re disciplined about which talks you attend.
Ahrefs Evolve — Singapore (May 14) and San Diego (Oct 12–13), 2026
$439–$1,139 in Singapore, $1,199–$2,099 in San Diego. Ahrefs has invested heavily in the event franchise and the 2026 agenda includes a clear AEO/AI-search track on top of emerging SEO trends and content strategy.
Best for: APAC-based operators (for the Singapore edition) and anyone who specifically wants to hear from the Ahrefs team and adjacent speakers on AI search.
SMX — Paris (Mar 9–10), Munich (Mar 9–11), Berlin (Sep 29–Oct 1), 2026
€950–€1,190 in Paris, €999 in Munich, €995–€2,295 in Berlin. Long-running search marketing conference with multiple 2026 editions in Europe. AEO content is solid and named, covering Reddit SEO, AI agents, and ad management across AI surfaces — but it sits alongside heavy paid search and classic SEO programming.
Best for: enterprise teams who run both paid and organic and want a single event that covers everything. If you’re AEO-only, you’re paying for content you won’t attend.
SERP Conf — Sofia (Mar 25), Rome (Oct 16), Vienna (Nov 3), 2026
€199 (Sofia) to €749 (Vienna). Underrated event with surprisingly strong AEO programming for the price, including an AI lab for brand visibility analysis. Speakers skew European, technical, and practitioner. Travel logistics are the limiter for non-EU attendees.
Best for: technical SEOs and founders already in or near Europe who want substantive AEO content at a tier-2 price point. The Sofia edition is the cheapest serious search conference on the 2026 calendar.
Tier 3: SEO conferences where AEO is a sidebar (and that’s fine, just know what you’re buying)
Five events. AEO content exists — usually one or two sessions — but isn’t the draw. The reason to go is networking, classic SEO depth, or location. Don’t book a flight expecting an AEO conference.
SEO Mastery Summit — Ho Chi Minh City, March 10–13, 2026
Four days, $800. Agency-focused, with talks, workshops, and masterminds on AI systems, scaling operations, and traffic. AEO content is woven through but the orientation is agency operations.
Best for: agency owners and senior consultants — particularly those operating in or near APAC — who want a masterminds-style event with AEO included rather than centered.
Chiang Mai SEO Conference — Chiang Mai, November 9–13, 2026
Five days, $897. Cult-classic event for consultants and agency owners. Has evolved to cover AI search but the center of gravity remains classic SEO, link building, and the community experience. The location is half the appeal.
Best for: people who are already going for the community and the experience. If that’s not you, skip.
Friends of Search — Amsterdam, March 12, 2026
One day, €570. 13th edition of a well-run boutique event. The 2026 agenda includes LLM mentions and PR strategies for AI citations, but AEO content remains a sidebar.
Best for: Benelux-based search teams. The AEO content alone doesn’t justify the trip from outside the region.
MozCon — NYC (Jul 14) and London (Nov 13), 2026
$849 in NYC, £520 in London. Moz brand event with classic SEO heritage. The 2026 agenda includes AEO sessions (past topics include keyword research for AI search), but the AEO speaker affiliation skews generalist-SEO-consultants-discussing-AI rather than AI-search-native operators.
Best for: SEO teams that want a community event and don’t mind AEO being one track among many. If AEO is your specific reason for attending, you can do better.
Demand & Expand — San Francisco, May 19–20, 2026
Two days, $349 single / $499 two-day. B2B GTM conference with AEO programming alongside AI search attribution and agentic workflows. Includes an invite-only CMO summit. AEO is one strand inside a broader revenue-and-demand-gen program.
Best for: B2B GTM leaders who want AEO content embedded in a broader pipeline conversation, especially CMOs at mid-market and enterprise companies.
Price-per-AEO-hour: what each ticket actually buys you
This is the cut competitor roundups don’t run. Ticket prices look comparable when you list events alphabetically; they look very different when you divide by hours of explicit AEO programming.
| Event | Ticket (USD-eq.) | Approx. AEO hours | $ per AEO hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zero Click NYC | $0 | ~5 | $0 |
| SERP Conf (Sofia) | ~$220 | ~3 | ~$75 |
| Demand & Expand | ~$500 | ~5 | ~$100 |
| SEO Week | ~$1,800 | ~12 | ~$150 |
| GEO Conference | ~$1,250 | ~7 | ~$180 |
| BrightonSEO (Brighton) | ~$770 | ~5 | ~$155 |
| Ahrefs Evolve (Singapore) | ~$800 | ~4 | ~$200 |
| SMX (Munich) | ~$1,100 | ~5 | ~$220 |
| MozCon (NYC) | ~$849 | ~2 | ~$425 |
| Chiang Mai SEO | ~$897 | ~2 | ~$450 |
| Friends of Search | ~$620 | ~1 | ~$620 |
AEO hours are my own estimates from the public 2026 agendas as of May 2026 — count keynote, panel, and workshop sessions explicitly framed as AEO/GEO/AI search. The numbers will shift as programs finalize. The point is the order of magnitude: Zero Click is free (so the math breaks), SERP Conf Sofia and Demand & Expand are the cheapest paid options for AEO content per dollar, and Friends of Search and MozCon are the most expensive on a per-AEO-hour basis even though their absolute ticket prices look reasonable.
This ignores travel and lodging, which can flip the math entirely. If you already live in Amsterdam, Friends of Search is cheaper than Zero Click. If you live in New York, the opposite by a wide margin.
What I’m skipping in 2026 — and why
Every roundup ranks every event as worth attending. They aren’t.
Friends of Search. Well-organized, well-respected event. The 2026 AEO content is one session on a packed program. At €570 plus travel, the price-per-AEO-hour is the worst on the list. If I already lived in Amsterdam I’d consider it for the network. Flying for it doesn’t pencil.
MozCon. The Moz brand and community are great. But the AEO programming in 2026 leans on generalist SEO consultants speaking about AI rather than operators building inside it, and $425 per AEO hour is hard to justify when SEO Week, Zero Click, and BrightonSEO exist at a fraction of that ratio. If you go to MozCon, go for the community and the classic SEO content. Don’t go expecting AEO depth.
If you can only attend one in 2026 (or two)
Free Zero Click changes the math for everyone. If budget is the constraint, go to Zero Click NYC on June 11. It costs nothing, the programming is 100% AEO, and the room has been a who’s-who of brand-side operators at every event we’ve run so far.
If you can go to one paid event and AEO is half your job alongside classic SEO: SEO Week. The AEO programming is dense enough to count as a top-tier event, and you get a full classic SEO program alongside it. The total dollar value for an enterprise in-house team is the best on the list among paid options.
If you can go to two and have a real budget: Zero Click NYC + BrightonSEO. Pure-AEO depth (free) plus the broadest practitioner network in search. Cross-Atlantic if you’re US-based, which is the cost.
If you can go to two and you’re EMEA-based: Zero Click London (when we announce the 2026 edition) + BrightonSEO Brighton. Same logic, EU side. In the meantime, the Zero Click London 2025 recap and the SF on-demand library are both worth watching.
The reason these pairings make sense is the structural one from earlier — Profound’s data shows 97.4% of AI citations come from non-Tier-1 earned media, LinkedIn published content overtook profile citations on ChatGPT in three months, and Reddit citations are 99.2% thread-level. The events that maximize named-expert exposure are the ones that compound. Pick for the network, not the slide decks. The slide decks will be on YouTube in three weeks anyway.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AEO conference to attend in 2026?
Zero Click is the only conference where 100% of the programming is AI search — every keynote, every panel, every workshop. It’s also free. I’m biased (I help plan it at Profound), but the agenda is public and you can pull it up and compare. Beyond Zero Click, SEO Week (New York, April 27–30) has the densest AEO programming inside a multi-day classic SEO event, and BrightonSEO has the largest pool of AEO-adjacent speakers across two 2026 editions.
Is BrightonSEO worth attending if I only care about AEO?
BrightonSEO has the largest AEO-adjacent speaker pool of any 2026 event, but AEO content is roughly a quarter to a third of the program. It’s worth it if you also do classic SEO; if you’re AEO-only, Zero Click NYC on June 11 is free, dense, and a denser use of your time.
Are virtual tickets worth it for AEO conferences in 2026?
For the talks, yes. For the reason you actually go to a conference — meeting the named experts whose LinkedIn posts and Reddit threads end up cited by ChatGPT — virtual tickets are a poor substitute. Profound’s data shows LinkedIn jumped from the #11 to #5 cited domain on ChatGPT in three months, and that network forms in hallways, not Zoom rooms. Zero Click SF made its full session library available on demand for free after the event, which is a good model — go in person if you can, watch the recordings if you can’t.
When do 2026 conference prices increase?
Most events run tiered pricing with super-early-bird, early-bird, and standard rates. Super-early-bird typically closes 4–6 months before the event and standard pricing kicks in 30–60 days out. Always verify on the event site — prices in this post are accurate as of May 2026 and will shift. Zero Click is the exception: it’s free, but seating is limited and requires advance registration.
Which AEO conferences have the most enterprise attendees?
Zero Click NYC drew 300+ brand leaders from Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, Google, and Pfizer at its October 2025 inaugural event, then 750+ marketers at SF in April 2026. SEO Week (New York) and SMX (Munich and Berlin) draw heavy enterprise crowds on the SEO side. BrightonSEO is broader but mid-market-heavy. Pure-play GEO events outside Zero Click still skew agency and consultant in 2026.
See Also
- What Is A Marketing Engineer?
- Goodie AI Alternatives: Best AEO Platforms for Enterprise Teams (2026)
- Profound Alternatives: A Complete Guide to the AEO Landscape (2026)
- Profound vs Ahrefs: Purpose-Built AEO vs. SEO-First GEO Add-On (2026)
- Profound vs Goodie AI: Which AEO Platform Owns the Data Advantage in 2026?