iPullRank Launches SEO Week 2026, Spotlighting AI Search Strategy

AI search took the center seat at SEO Week 2026, as iPullRank framed its New York conference around a simple but telling idea: “Where AI Search Becomes Strategy.” The event ran from April 27 through April 30 at Center415 in New York City, with 39 speakers, 32 hours of talks, and early registration set for April 26 from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM. AirOps served as the exclusive presenting sponsor, a sign that the market now sees AI-driven discovery as a commercial category with real weight.

That positioning mattered more than the usual conference gloss. SEO Week was not just gathering search marketers for another round of ranking talk. It was built around four themed days, The Science, The Psychology, The Ecosystem, and The Future, which mapped neatly onto the profession’s current reset: less emphasis on page-by-page tactics, more focus on how brands show up inside answer engines, AI summaries, and search experiences that do not always send users to a blue link. For iPullRank, which has long operated at the performance-marketing end of the SEO world, the conference made a direct claim about where the discipline is headed.

The speaker list reinforced that shift. Mike King anchored the event, alongside Krishna Madhavan of Microsoft AI, Ruth Burr Reedy of Microsoft, James Cadwallader of Profound, Christian Ward of Yext, John Shehata of NewzDash, Carrie Rose of Rise at Seven, Aleyda Solis, Rand Fishkin, Lily Ray, and Wil Reynolds. That mix brought together practitioners working across technical SEO, AI search products, content strategy, and digital visibility, which made the agenda feel less like a trend panel and more like a working summit for the next phase of search.

SEO Week’s own 2025 recap showed how quickly the event had gained status. The inaugural conference featured nearly 40 speakers and more than 450 attendees, and the organization said last year’s edition “reset the standard” for an SEO conference and became “a reference point for AI Search discussions for months.” The party circuit also signaled the event’s cultural pull, with Busta Rhymes headlining the 2025 Algorhythms after-party and The LOX and Method Man lined up for 2026.

The timing lined up with a broader industry realignment already underway at Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Google said AI Overviews rolled out to everyone in the United States in May 2024, then reached 1.5 billion monthly users across 200 countries and territories by May 2025. In August 2025, Google said AI in Search was driving more queries and higher-quality clicks. Microsoft introduced Copilot Search in Bing in April 2025, and OpenAI launched ChatGPT search in 2024. Together, those moves explain why SEO Week could center an entire conference on AI search without treating it as a side conversation.