A Day at BrightonSEO by Faryal Raza Bhatti
Arriving in Brighton
Well, I knew BrightonSEO was big. I didn't realise how big.
I walked into the Brighton Centre at 8:30 on Friday. Outside, Brighton was grey and gloomy. Inside, the place was buzzing.
More than 4,000 search marketers. Over 70 sessions across six stages, on Friday alone. You can't see it all. You pick your sessions and accept you'll miss some good ones.
I made it to four sessions and a digital PR roundtable. I could easily have filled two more days.
The Exhibition Hall
Between talks, the exhibition hall was where most of the energy was. GoHighLevel, Ahrefs, WPP Media, Screaming Frog, Dragon Metrics, mondayclicks, Demandsphere and plenty more had stands, and every one of them was busy.
GoHighLevel stood out. Their raffle kept people coming back to the stand all day. Simple idea, smart execution.
I got chatting with one of their team. I've always been curious which tools teams like theirs actually rely on for search visibility. Their shortlist was simple:
Semrush for research
Screaming Frog for technical SEO (their top pick, at around £250 a year, with MCP support)
Ahrefs for backlink data
Different tools for different jobs.
I had good chats at the SE Ranking stand too. And Link Building HQ had an artist drawing caricatures. Yes, I came home with one.
Accessibility Is SEO
The day opened on the main stage with accessibility and inclusivity. Four speakers, one message: if people can't use your content, search engines and AI won't trust it either.
Damien Robert asked a question that stuck with me. Why do SEOs work so hard to make content accessible to bots, but not to people? Title tags, semantic HTML and heading structure were used by screen readers long before they mattered for rankings.
He had the whole room close their eyes and listen to a badly built website through a screen reader. It was painful. His challenge: turn on your computer's built-in screen reader on Monday and try your own site.
His quick wins:
Write out the content of infographics as text
Caption your videos
Turn PDFs into HTML pages
Replace "learn more" links with descriptive ones
Label social icons, and silence alt text that only repeats the heading
Tania Gerard explained that AI tools read your site much like a screen reader does. Missing alt text, no captions and messy headings make you harder to find. Her simplest test: try using your website with only a keyboard. Can you even do it?
Azahara Corrales shared research on how AI models answer "who are the experts in X?". With a neutral question, only about a quarter of the experts named were women. Ask specifically for women and the answer changes completely. She calls this extra step "the prompt tax". Her advice: never take an AI's first list of experts at face value.
Mo Kanjilal closed the session by asking who our strategy ignores. Google tells you which pages aren't indexed. Nothing alerts you when your strategy excludes people. Search data reflects society, biases included.
The Digital PR Roundtable
Late morning, I joined a digital PR roundtable with agency leads, in-house teams and freelancers. I asked the question most of the room was already thinking: how do you prove what digital PR is worth?
The honest answer? Nobody has fully cracked it yet. And I found that oddly reassuring.
A few points came up again and again:
PR and digital PR are merging. AI visibility has pulled the two together. Several people said PR has gone from the first budget cut to a board-level topic.
Real coverage lasts. One founder said links from top-tier publications were still showing in clients' AI visibility nine months later. Quick tactics like Reddit spam tend to get discounted.
Pitch to get into lists. If AI keeps citing comparison articles, ask journalists how you can be considered next time they update them.
Treat it like brand advertising. Tools are useful for benchmarking against competitors, but AI traffic is still small and hard to value directly.
Zero-Click Search
After lunch, I moved to Auditorium 2 for zero-click search. Impressions going up. Clicks going down. Sound familiar?
Simone De Palma focused on measurement. By the figures he shared, bots now make up more than half of web traffic. His approach joins two views: what people search for (Search Console and Bing data) and what AI bots actually request (server logs).
One slide stood out. The tools many of us use to track AI prompts are polluting our own data. Their test queries end up in Search Console as fake searches. He was honest about the limits too: this gives you direction, not precision.
Becky Simms gave my favourite talk of the day. Her point: nobody ever searched because they wanted to click. People search to reduce uncertainty, and they stop once they feel confident enough to act.
Her best story was about a US petrol station chain. They learned that clean toilets decided where families stopped, so they invested in having the cleanest toilets on the road. Her question to us: what is your version of the toilets?
If AI can't find evidence of what your customers care about, it can't recommend you.
It reminded me of a recent campaign where we added more specific, niche keywords to our pages. Last month, with the same traffic, our leads were up 32% month on month. Same visitors. More confidence.
Gaetano Romeo compared two brands owned by the same company in the same market. Both were ranking better but getting far fewer clicks, especially on blog content. Leads held up, and brand strength made the difference. His advice: split branded from non-branded data, and stop treating sessions as the headline number.
I also caught part of Giulia Panozzo's talk on "decision distance". She broke one search, "payroll software", into the worries behind it: security, compliance, reputation, data handling and risk. Close the gap between the question and the confidence to decide.
AI Prompting
My last session of the day was on AI prompting.
Alex Fox spoke about how his neurodivergent pattern recognition shaped his prompting framework. His argument: the skill isn't prompting. It's spotting the pattern, then building it into a process. His framework makes the AI rate its own confidence, stop and ask when information is missing, and wait for approval before applying rules.
Amy Podrasky talked about using AI more sustainably. By her estimate, one PR's AI use in a year adds up to about 217k Wh of energy and 106 litres of water. Her framework is short: map where you use AI, match the right model to the task, brief it properly, and question whether you need it at all.
Two tips I'll use straight away:
Add "-ai" to a Google search to skip the AI Overview
Ask AI to teach you what to improve, rather than just fixing your work
Thijs van Beers told an SEO-versus-Google story. His team captured the highlighted text Google added to links from AI Overviews and sent it into GA4. Free data on which paragraphs were being quoted. Google has since stopped adding that text, so the trick has mostly ended. His bigger message: stay creative and build your own data.
What I'm Taking Back to Work
I went to BrightonSEO to check my thinking against the wider industry. Search changes almost daily, and I wanted to know whether what I was seeing was just us or everyone.
It's everyone.
I came back reassured that I'm not the only one slightly worn out by the constant changes. And just as excited by them. There's always something new to learn and bring back to the business.
Accessibility is commercial. As marketers, we think commercially first. But the more accessible your site is, the more people can actually use it, and buy from you.
Zero-click is industry-wide. Most days, our Search Console numbers look weak while our month-on-month leads keep growing. Tracking where those leads come from is harder than it used to be. Hearing that everyone sees the same thing was a relief. Clicks and impressions shouldn't be how we judge performance.
Practical takeaways I can actually use. A few speakers shared their slides afterwards. Simone De Palma's deck was full of practical to-dos, and he kindly sent it over on LinkedIn.
My Honest Take
Search isn't dying. It's changing shape.
The brands that win won't be the ones chasing clicks. They'll be the ones that make it easy for people, and AI, to trust them.
Simple to say. Harder to do.
So, is BrightonSEO worth it?
It's the question a lot of marketers ask themselves before booking. My answer: 100% yes. It was for me.
I learned something new from every speaker. The roundtable showed me the problems other marketers are facing right now, and they're the same ones I deal with every day.
That matters more than you'd think. When the whole industry is still working things out, you're not behind. You're part of figuring it out.
My advice: plan before you go. With 70+ sessions in a day, you can't wing it. Put the talks that matter to your role in your calendar before you arrive, and know who you want to speak to. The right conversations with the right people are worth as much as the talks.
BrightonSEO, thank you. See you next time.
Quick Reference
Accessibility is SEO. Alt text, headings and captions help people, Google and AI alike.
Measure confidence, not clicks. Fewer clicks doesn't mean less impact if people still choose you.
Be the evidence. If what your customers care about isn't published, AI can't recommend you.
Check your data. Prompt trackers can add fake queries to Search Console.
Use AI on purpose. Right model, clear brief, and only when you need it.
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