Director of Marketing Acquisition, Elife Group

Most SEOs optimise for traffic. Alex optimises for revenue.

He's the Group Director of Marketing Acquisition at the Elife Group (previously Head Of SEO & GEO at the same company), running organic, paid and AI search across two global transportation brands – hoppa and Elife Transfer – across more than 15 markets. Alex has had experience in many different industries over the years, including Travel, eCommerce, Gambling, Finance. The kinds of industries where ranking means nothing if it doesn't convert.

His case for being on the CMSEO stage: he took Parents Hub, a parenting website in Greece, from zero to 100,000 monthly organic users in 12 months. Built from scratch. No shortcuts.

Alex treats SEO and GEO as revenue systems. Not traffic channels. Not best-practice checklists. The question he's always asking is what did this actually make – and he brings that lens to everything from JavaScript SEO to international content strategy across the US, UK, France, Germany, the Nordics, LATAM, and China.

His work has been featured on the Ahrefs Blog, SEMrush Blog, Marketing Week, HuffPost, MSN, and CNN Greece, and is ranked the number one SEO influencer in Greece. He is also a contributor on Search Engine Land.

At CMSEO 2026, he's not here to talk about potential. He's here to show the numbers.

Founder, Blue Prints, LLM Mastery & Link Validator

Jabez saw the shift coming before most people were talking about it.

He's the founder of The Blueprints Agency, a boutique link building and content operation out of Chiang Mai that has worked with brands like Adobe, Diggity Marketing, and Whitepress. Ten years in SEO, with a track record in competitive link building and content strategy.

But what got him on the CMSEO 2026 stage is what he's doing now. His focus has moved to visibility across AI platforms – how brands show up in LLM-driven search, not just Google. He built Link Validator, a SaaS tool for managing and auditing backlinks, and runs a conference of his own – originally Link Building Mastery, now rebranded as LLM Mastery. That rebrand says everything about where he thinks search is heading.

Originally from India, now based in Chiang Mai, Jabez is part of the SEO community that lives and breathes this industry year-round – not just during conference season.

At CMSEO 2026, he's coming with a practitioner's view on what it actually takes to build visibility in a world where the algorithm isn't just Google anymore.

Managing Director, switch.monster

Will has been building search businesses since 2009. Not from the sidelines, but by putting his own sites, systems, and capital on the line.

His current operation runs 2,000+ websites, generating more than 5,000 phone calls a month. To manage that at scale, Will and his team vibe-coded their own internal tools – opportunity mapping, AI call tracking, rank tracking, site health, campaign execution. Off-the-shelf software wasn't going to cut it.

He learned the hard way what happens when you ignore your instincts. After years of success in affiliate SEO, he watched the market shift, saw the competition pile in, and the economics get harder. At the same time, his lead-gen assets kept proving there was still a bigger opportunity hiding in plain sight. That contrast pulled him back toward lead generation.

His current edge? Small sites and EMDs in niches where most SEOs won't go because the scale feels unmanageable. Will built the systems, the team and the tools to make it manageable.

At CMSEO 2026, he's breaking down the Lead Gen Leverage Window – how to test niches quickly, build fast, scale what works, and turn SEO into a lead generation machine with real, measurable output.

2,000 sites. 5,000 calls a month. He'll show you how.

Co-founder, RankUp

Most SEOs think volume is the answer. Georg didn't disagree – until it stopped working.

He built out a full content cluster strategy for a new site – consistent publishing, proper information gain, everything by the book. It went nowhere. The niche was competitive, the site had no authority, and well-organised information wasn't enough to break through.

That failure is what shaped everything he does now. His conclusion: you can't out-volume your way to authority. You have to bring something genuinely new to the table – proprietary processes, first-hand experience, original research, expert opinions. Things competitors can't copy without promoting your brand in the process.

Georg is the co-founder of RankUp and has spent the last several years building systems to make that approach scalable. Because the reason most SEOs skip it isn't laziness – it's that extracting and implementing unique insights across 20 to 30 pieces a month is brutally time-consuming without the right infrastructure.

His current focus sits at the intersection of that work and where search is heading: helping brands get discovered, trusted, and cited by LLMs through content that's genuinely impossible to replicate.

At CMSEO 2026, he's not coming with a content checklist. He's coming with the system he built after the checklist stopped working.

CEO, BlitzMetrics

Dennis started as a search engine engineer. He knows how the machine works because he helped build it.

That background shapes everything. Two decades later, he's still applying the same systems thinking – but now it's pointed at one question: how do you turn SEO into actual revenue, not just rankings?

He's done it for Starbucks, Nike, and Quiznos. He's done the exact same playbook for roofing contractors, HVAC companies, and landscapers who can't afford to lose a single lead. The scale is different. The principles aren't.

He learned the hard way what happens when you build on technical tricks instead of foundations. He once ran over 2 million keywords in a single Google Ads account, making five figures a day as a dating affiliate – pure arbitrage, penny clicks, brute force. It worked until it didn't. Rebuilding sand castles on the beach, he calls it. He stopped.

The shift: stop chasing traffic and start partnering with the strongest brand in your niche. Better conversion rates, stronger distribution across organic, paid, social, and LLMs – and content competitors can't copy because it's built around someone else's authority, not yours alone.

His current obsession is Dollar-a-Day micro-targeted ads – amplifying what clients and colleagues say about you until you never have to explain to a prospect why you're worth hiring. Through BlitzMetrics and his Content Factory framework, he's trained thousands of digital marketers. And he gives away the actual files – the dashboards, the SOPs, the systems his teams run every day.

At CMSEO 2026, expect less theory and more of what actually works.

Co-Founder, PageOptimizer Pro, IMG Courses

Most speakers will tell you what works. Kyle will tell you why.

He's the guy who ranked a page of gibberish text on Google – not as a stunt, but as proof. Google's algorithm is math. Kyle ran the numbers, built the test, and got the result. Then Google de-indexed 20 of his sites and quietly changed a rule to bury what he'd found. That's how you know he was onto something.

Over the past several years, Kyle has run more than 400 scientific SEO tests to reverse-engineer how Google's algorithm actually works. Those results became the backbone of PageOptimizer Pro, one of the most data-driven SEO tools in the industry, and are applied daily across his agency's client work.

He's coming to CMSEO 2026 to share what the tests actually show – not theory, not best guesses. The kind of specifics that don't make it into blog posts.

Founder, The Masterminders

Kasra started building websites at 15. By the time most people were still figuring out what SEO was, he was already testing, breaking, and reverse-engineering it.

Today he's a UK-based SEO strategist specialising in entity SEO and LLM visibility – two areas most of the industry is only just waking up to. His work focuses on how search engines and AI systems understand brands as entities, not just keywords, and what that means for visibility in a world where Google is no longer the only answer engine that matters.

He's also the founder of The Masterminders – a global SEO conference he started in 2023 from a small private meetup in Chiang Mai, which has since grown into one of the fastest-growing events in the industry. He knows what it takes to build something from scratch and scale it fast.

At CMSEO 2026, he's bringing a practitioner's view on what it actually takes to get found – not just by Google, but by the AI systems increasingly shaping what people see and trust.

Co-Founder, Surfer

Michał didn't plan to end up in SEO. He was working in forestry. A friend in a neighboring village had an agency and needed help. He started writing PBN content. A year later, he co-founded Surfer.

That origin story matters because it shaped how he thinks. He didn't come up through theory. He came up through data – reverse-engineering SERPs, finding patterns, building systems to do manually what no one wanted to do twice.

As co-founder and Head of Innovation at Surfer, Michał has spent years running large-scale content experiments and building the frameworks that underpin one of the most widely used SEO tools in the industry. His current focus is on what comes after Google – how LLMs generate answers, what makes a source citeable, and what SEOs need to change before the shift becomes impossible to ignore.

Ranked by CMSEO audiences as one of their top speakers each time he's taken the stage, Michal. shares what the data actually shows. Not what sounds right. Not what's safe to say at a conference.

Founder, Ascendily

Kevin runs Ascendily, a 7-figure agency serving clients generating $46m in annual revenue. He also built The Operator Vault – a community teaching operators how to build AI agent stacks for marketing and fulfilment.

He's not theorising about where AI is taking the services industry. He's already rebuilt his agency around it.

His position is simple: the agencies winning right now aren't the biggest ones. They're the ones who figured out how to replicate fulfilment at 90% quality, ship four times the volume, and do it at a fraction of the cost. He's done it at Ascendily – and he's built a community around teaching others to do the same.

At CMSEO 2026, he's opening the hood. What got automated, what stayed human, what's next – and what you can take back to your business after the conference.

SEO Lead, Airtasker & Co-host,
Sydney SEO Collective Meetup

Regan doesn't manage a handful of pages. He manages hundreds of thousands of them.

As SEO Lead at Airtasker, he runs organic growth across a programmatic marketplace operating in six global markets. The kind of scale where manual anything stops working fast – and where data-driven systems and AI-powered automation aren't a nice-to-have, they're the only way to keep up.

His background is in web development, which means he thinks about SEO differently to most. He understands what's happening under the hood – and uses that to build solutions that actually stick across tech, eCommerce, and startup environments.

Outside of Airtasker, Regan co-hosts the Sydney SEO Collective meetup and judges the Global, European, UK, and APAC Search Awards.

At CMSEO 2026, he's coming with the kind of perspective you only get from managing SEO at genuine scale.

Founder & CEO, First Rank

Most agency owners are good at SEO. Fewer are good at running a business.

Jacob is both. He's the founder and CEO of First Rank, a 30-person Canadian agency that has spent the last decade figuring out the part nobody teaches: how to stay profitable as you grow. Not just in the early days when it's lean and simple – but as the team gets bigger, the clients get more complex, and the margins start doing things you didn't plan for.

He's seen what happens when agencies scale without the financial and operational foundations to support it. The revenue goes up. The profit doesn't follow. He built First Rank around solving that problem – and it now generates multi-million dollar revenue with a team that actually runs the way it should.

At CMSEO 2026, he's bringing the messy, unglamorous side of agency ownership into the light. The numbers. The systems. The decisions that determine whether growth makes you richer or just busier.

Co-founder, FE International

Most people in SEO are building businesses. Thomas helps them exit them.

He founded FE International in 2010 with a simple premise: profitable, self-funded businesses deserved a proper exit process – not a rushed sale to the first buyer who showed up. Fourteen years later, FE International is the industry-leading M&A advisor for technology businesses valued between $1m and $100m, with more than 1,500 successful exits to its name.

Thomas has been in and around digital business since the early 2000s. That history matters. He's seen every type of deal, every type of founder, and every mistake that gets made when someone tries to sell a business they've spent years building without the right preparation, the right valuation, or the right buyer at the table.

At CMSEO 2026, he's bringing that perspective into the room. For anyone building an SEO business – agency, affiliate, SaaS, or otherwise – understanding what makes a business sellable, and what kills a deal, is knowledge worth having long before you're ready to exit.