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.

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.

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.

Owner, Sterling Sky Inc

Joy Hawkins has been in local SEO since 2006 – long enough to watch the entire landscape shift and still come out ahead.

She owns Sterling Sky, a specialist local SEO agency operating across Canada and the US, and runs both Local Search Forum and LocalU. If you've spent any time trying to understand how Google Business Profiles actually work, there's a good chance you've landed on something Joy wrote or built.

She's a regular contributor to Search Engine Land and a Product Expert on the Google Business Profile Forum – meaning she's not just studying local search, she's inside the ecosystem shaping it.

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, 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.

Founder & CEO, Search Atlas

Manick Bhan started his career on Wall Street. Then he switched to SEO and kept building until he'd created something the industry hadn't seen before.

He's the founder of Search Atlas and the creator of OTTO SEO, the world's first autonomous AI SEO agent, now used by 30,000 customers and 5,000 agencies worldwide. Before that, he founded LinkGraph, a full-service digital marketing agency recognised three times on the INC 5000 fastest-growing companies list.

His background isn't typical for an SEO. He studied neuroscience and chemistry at Duke University, spent time on Wall Street, and built a mobile ticketing app that TickPick, StubHub, and SeatGeek acquired before he turned his attention to search. That combination of engineering, data science, and entrepreneurship is what shapes how he thinks about SEO – less as a discipline and more as a systems problem to be solved at scale.

Principal SEO, Yoast & Co-Founder, Fire Cask

Alex Moss is Principal SEO at Yoast, whose plugins power SEO for nearly 14 million websites, and co-founder of FireCask, the Manchester SEO and WordPress agency he started back in 2013.

Twenty-plus years in search, most of it deep in the technical side, and these days his focus has shifted to something newer: the agentic web, and how it's reshaping the way humans interact with the internet, agents included.

He co-presents The SEO Update, Yoast's monthly podcast, and brings that same lens, technical, forward-looking, allergic to hype, to CMSEO 2026.

SEO Consultant

Charles Floate has been doing this for 18 years, across nearly every vertical in SEO. He's one of the most recognized black hat practitioners in the industry, a reputation that hasn't faded as AI search takes over.

He spoke at CMSEO back in 2017, with a talk called "Modern Black Hat SEO." Nearly a decade on, everything's changed. Charles hasn't stopped testing.

This year he's revisiting that original talk with a 2026 lens: which tactics quietly died, and which ones evolved into some of the most effective ranking strategies working right now.

Acting Head of SEO & Organic Growth, Binance

Plamen Popov has spent 15+ years in digital marketing, moving through organic search, PPC, PR and social across Fintech, iGaming, Cybersecurity, eCommerce and SaaS. For the last five, he's been building something most SEOs aren't: automated systems powered by machine learning and LLM engineering that let lean teams run keyword research, content optimisation and technical SEO at enterprise scale.

He currently leads SEO and organic growth at Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Before that, as Head of Global SEO at Acronis, he drove a 300%+ increase in organic traffic and led more than 20 complex website migrations, the kind of work most SEOs only do once in a career, let alone twenty times over.

He's a Global SEO Awards judge and a regular conference speaker, and the thread through all of it is the same: where AI, machine learning and search are converging, and what that means for how marketing teams actually build, scale and measure their work.

GEO Expert, Peec AI

Tomek Rudzki doesn't guess how AI search works. He tests it.

It started in 2017, when reverse-engineering Google's search engine became the subject of his engineering thesis. He's been at it ever since, most recently running 300 controlled experiments to figure out how ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Claude actually pick sources and decide which brands get recommended. Not theory. Direct experiments against the engines themselves.

He came up through technical SEO as Head of R&D at Onely, where his Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO was read by more than 100,000 SEOs. He went on to co-found ZipTie.dev, one of the first AI search monitoring platforms, and now works as a GEO expert at Peec AI.

At CMSEO 2026, he's bringing the experiments themselves – the exact techniques to test whether your content gets cited and your brand gets recommended, engine by engine.

Founder & Director, SwishDM

Most brands are asking the wrong question about AI. They want to know whether they show up. Jonathan Kiekbusch wants to know what the machine says about them when they do.

He's the CEO of SwishDM, an SEO and GEO agency working with global eCommerce and SaaS brands including EcoFlow, Insta360, Dreame, Casely, and GEEKOM. Twelve years in search, with a track record across eCommerce SEO, complex site migrations, and winning competitive categories.

What his team does now is different. They measure the exact words AI uses about a brand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews, then change them. Not by inventing claims, but by finding things that are already true and missing from the internet, and putting them where the machines actually read. He calls it Perception Engineering.

This is his third time on the CMSEO main stage. He's bringing 30 minutes of real numbers from category-leading brands this room will recognise, and the exact method behind them.

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.

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.

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.

AI Search & AI Content Systems Consultant, Victoria Olsina Growth Marketing Consultancy

Victoria Olsina is a Web3 SEO and AI Search (GEO) consultant. She builds the SEO and AI content systems that make crypto, fintech and Web3 companies discoverable – across Google, ChatGPT and every AI search platform in between.

She's done this from the inside. Victoria was Head of SEO at ConsenSys and a Search and Acquisition Manager at Barclays, and has worked directly with Polkadot, NEAR Protocol, Aztec and others – brands where discoverability isn't optional; it's survival.

She's also one of the people the industry turns to for answers. Victoria has spoken at Devcon, the British Computing Society and BrightonSEO, and run webinars for Semrush and NeuronWriter. She was nominated for Best SEO in Europe by the LatAm Awards and named Top AI Content Expert of 2026 by the Masterminders.

She wrote the book on it, literally. Victoria is the author of Mastering AI Search for Crypto and Web3 Brands, and in 2025 alone, she trained over 2,500 founders, marketers and product teams in AI marketing.

Founder & CEO, Seo.Domains

Kalin Karakehayov spent 18 years playing chess at a professional level before most people had figured out what SEO was. The same thinking that makes a great chess player – pattern recognition, long-term strategy, staying several moves ahead – turns out to be exactly what makes a great SEO.

He's the founder of SEO.Domains, the world's largest supplier of aged domain names. Over 220,000 domains and 30,000 websites across every country and niche, with powerful homepage links and brand mentions available through GigaLinks.com. If you've ever wondered how the biggest operators in SEO build their link profiles at scale, there's a good chance Kalin's infrastructure is part of the answer.

He's also the author of I Grow Younger, a self-help book that reframes how we think about knowledge, language, and personal growth.

At CMSEO 2026, he's bringing 18 years of pattern recognition to the main stage.

Head of SEO & Growth, Campeon Gaming

Emilio Takas has been working at the intersection of design, data, and search for 23 years. That's a long time to watch the industry change, and long enough to know which fundamentals don't.

He's currently Head of SEO and Growth at Campeon Gaming, where he focuses on scaling organic performance across products and markets in one of the most competitive search environments in the world. Before that, he spent two decades helping brands turn their online presence into measurable growth through a mix of data-driven strategy and creative execution.

Outside of his day job, Emilio teaches SEO and Marketing Analytics at Athens University of Economics and Business and is a regular on the international conference circuit, having spoken at BrightonSEO, SEO Estonia, SBC, iGB, and Sigma. He's also judged at The Drum Awards, Global Search Awards, and several iGaming industry awards.

At CMSEO 2026, he's bringing 23 years of pattern recognition to the stage.

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.

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.

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.

Founder, TrustLuna

Michal Rochwerger has spent twenty years in SEO, most of them in the niches where rankings have to convert, or you don't survive. Gambling. Payday loans. More than a dozen European markets.

That kind of operating environment teaches you something the rest of the industry only theorises about. When the rules change every few months and there's no room for vanity metrics, you learn fast how to engineer growth rather than just visibility.

Today, Michal runs TrustLuna and Vistrix, two international SEO and AI agencies working with some of Europe's biggest brands. Different niche, same principle: real revenue or nothing.

Senior Growth Marketer for SEO & Website Products, HighLevel

Jeremy Burgos is the Senior Growth Marketer for SEO & Website Products at HighLevel, where he drives growth and adoption across the company's SEO and website solutions.

With more than a decade in digital marketing, Jeremy specialises in technical SEO and web systems – turning complex website challenges into practical improvements that actually move the needle for businesses.

Director, Woww & Co-founder, Brand Axis

Felix Norton runs two businesses built on the same instinct: figure out what actually works, then build the tool to prove it. He's director of Woww, a South African digital marketing agency doing more than $2M in ARR, and co-founder of BrandAxis, an AI Search Analytics platform that helps brands measure their visibility across LLMs and turn AI recommendations into revenue.

For the past two years, he's been testing, relentlessly, what makes a brand more likely to be understood, cited and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

That obsession has made him one of South Africa's leading voices on AEO, GEO and AI Search, known for turning emerging AI visibility tactics into strategies you can actually measure.

Co-founder, DMCA Boss

Ivana Flynn works where SEO gets messy: iGaming and adult content, niches most conferences won't touch.

She built DMCABoss to fight back against content theft. It's now used across both industries to monitor and counter DMCA abuse.

She also co-founded iGaming Boardroom, a VIP program where she works directly with operators on search, brand protection, and copyright enforcement.

Her latest focus: fraudulent DMCA takedowns, a tactic increasingly used to knock legitimate sites out of search overnight. She breaks it down on her YouTube channel and from stages internationally, alongside technical SEO, AI search, and digital reputation.

If your business runs on rankings you can't afford to lose, this is worth your time.