BrightonSEO Reflections

🤖 AI, Agencies & A/B Testing Our Sanity

I kicked off my BrightonSEO 2025 adventure with a roundtable for agency owners—essentially a caffeine-fueled therapy session where we shared insights, industry fears, workflow gripes, and the usual "is Google messing with us again?" energy.

One clear theme? AI. And not in a "robots are taking over" kind of way—but more like, "thank the algorithms for helping us survive Q2." I shared how I’ve been using Gemini to streamline the heavy lifting—think case studies, benchmarking reports, and strategy docs—by feeding it curated folders full of scans, reports, and client chaos. It’s been a game-changer, especially during the triage phase of projects where time is short and expectations are very high. Gemini’s been great at turning that jumbled folder into coherent, chronological gold, and it’s even helped support long-term planning like a well-organized robot sidekick.

🔥 Standout Talks from Thursday, Friday & the Women Who Lunch

After a much-needed imposter syndrome–quashing therapy session (aka, the agency roundtable), I genuinely enjoyed every single talk I managed to attend—and, honestly, felt some serious FOMO over the ones I missed.

Thursday highlights kicked off strong with Carl Poxon’s session on Using Content Clusters for Human-Centric Conversions—a great reminder that empathy still has a seat at the SEO table. I also loved Nikolaj Mogensen’s deep dive into Winning Free Listings Through Feed Optimization, and Metehan Yesilyurt’s energetic talk Generative AI & GEO: The New SEO Race and How to Win was full of practical takeaways (and just enough existential AI dread to keep things interesting).

Friday brought an excellent batch of time-saving AI talks, with standouts from Victoria Roscow, Ivan Slobodin, and Oliver Yee, whose case study SEO Without Bottlenecks: How AI Transformed New Look's Search Strategy had everyone scribbling notes like it was 2012 again.

After a quick breather, I packed in Liam Cumbers' brilliant first talk, What the F**k is Alt Text and How Do You Write It?—equal parts educational and hilarious. Then it was off to lunch with the Women in Tech SEO crew (Friday vibes + a cheeky glass of wine =)).

Post-lunch, I stuck to The Future of Search segment and watched all three speakers back-to-back. Folashade Uba opened with From Reactive to Predictive: Using Machine Learning to Anticipate Customer Search Behavior, followed by Tom Vaughton’s razor-sharp The Only 4 SEO Strategies You’ll EVER Need (spoiler: they’re probably not what you think).

Josh Blyskal’s data-rich session We Analysed 10,000,000 AI Search Results: Here's What We Found was as fascinating as it was slightly overwhelming—but in a good way.

To round things off, I loved the pivot to the more human side of SEO with thoughtful talks from Megan Roberts, Akash J. Hashmi, and of course, the always-compelling Lily Ray, who closed out with her keynote The SEO Lifecycle: Lessons from the Past, Strategies for the Future. Bonus giggle: I texted a fellow 🦖 (who appeared in one of her slides!) but sadly missed Brighton this year—not due to an AI apocalypse, just a good old-fashioned household flood.

Sandwiched between talks, networking, rehydrating, and eyeing up tote bags at vendor stands, it was an absolute joy to catch up over lunch and dinner with fellow Women in Tech SEO members, big shout out to Caterina Schamborski. for expanding our bookings as needed, and huge thanks, to the brilliant Areej AbuAli for bringing this inspiring community together! Some of us gals only realised we were all staying in the same hotel on last day -it was truly great to connect IRL with so many people in the wider SEO community too, and I'm still working through follow ups!