A Conversation With Semrush On AI Search, Brand Visibility And Spotlight 2026

On 13 October, 2026, Spotlight lands in London. As leading brand visibility platform Semrush’s premier marketing conference, this year’s Spotlight centres the conversation on AI search and brand visibility for SEOs, digital marketers, marketing leaders, and CMOs navigating the shift to AI-driven discovery.

This year’s Spotlight is the first to combine the brand visibility insights of Adobe and Semrush, following the recent completion of the company acquisition in April 2026. TechRound spoke with Leigh McKenzie, Director of Online Visibility at Semrush, an Adobe company, to chat all things AI visibility and Spotlight, ahead of the conference.

There Are Plenty Of Marketing Conferences Out There. What Makes Spotlight Different?

Spotlight is our flagship marketing conference, and this year we’re orienting everything around what’s happening with AI search and brand visibility. It’s specifically not an SEO conference; there are other events in our portfolio, and from other companies, aimed squarely at SEO practitioners.

We still believe SEO and search marketing are fundamental, but the scope has been expanding for years now. It’s not just the SEO and content teams doing their own thing; it’s brand, product, PR and customer success all coming together, especially in the age of AI. Spotlight is bringing together senior marketing leaders to learn how to stay visible in the age of AI and win what’s next.

We’re planning more than 100 sessions with around 1,000 marketers, and speakers from the likes of OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Uber, plus agency partners like WPP and Flight Story. The main conference is on 13 October, and we’re also running a pre-event AI Search Bootcamp that gets more into the weeds on how to actually approach AI search, including our framework for building brand visibility in AI search called the AI Operating System. Attendees will get hands on, and hear directly from other Semrush customers.

Why London Specifically, After Amsterdam?

Amsterdam has been a fantastic home for Spotlight over the past two years, and it remains an important hub for us. But Spotlight itself has grown both in the audience it attracts and in the conversations we want to lead.

London felt like the natural next step. It brings together one of the most concentrated communities of global brands, technology companies, agencies and marketing leaders in Europe, at a moment when AI is fundamentally changing how brands are discovered and how marketers think about visibility.

That’s really what Spotlight is about this year: bringing the industry together to tackle that change. Moving to London gives us the scale and diversity of audience to make that conversation even bigger.

AI Is In Everything Right Now. What Makes It Different For Marketing, And What Do You Most Want To Put The Spotlight On?

We’re talking about how AI search is fundamentally changing how people discover, compare, and choose brands. And at its core, it still comes down to authentic content, and brand authority.

Brand visibility is a collaborative, cross-functional effort, not just owned by the team responsible for publishing content on the website, as the SEO teams of the past were. We want to bring all the different departments together and show them how they fit into this ecosystem, how they can use the new tools and technology, and how to build the organisational awareness and change management needed to do the work.

Our message to marketers is two-fold: Invest in the right product and tools to measure your brand visibility, and create the best possible content to help your brand stand out, across blog posts, LinkedIn, Reddit, video on YouTube — anywhere you can reach your audience. To win AI visibility with users on LLMs, your third-party content is just as important as your owned properties.

You Run An SEO Team Yourself, So This Is Close To Home – What Has AI Search Fundamentally Changed?

Honestly, I’m more excited to work in this industry as an SEO (or an AEO or GEO, to use the newer terms) than ever before. For people who’ve cared about the technical side of marketing, content and how search engines — and now AI engines — work, there’s so much more to learn and figure out, and much more data available to make strategic decisions.

There’s also a much bigger opportunity to influence what other teams are doing by being part of the conversation on brand and paid budgets, knowing what the social team is up to, understanding how customer success handles support tickets, and even getting involved in real conversations on Reddit.

Early on there was a lot of fear; there were dozens of articles claiming “SEO is dead” and we did see AI organic traffic start to decline. But what we haven’t seen is any decline in people seeking to solve problems and consumers buying things they need, and search is critical to that.

So we’re helping companies adapt to a world where success isn’t judged purely on organic traffic and directly attributable marketing channels. The companies thinking bigger and making the right investments in brand visibility now, with the right tools and teams, are the ones that’ll win in the years to come.

Have We Gone Past “Peak AI” Or Is It Settling Into Where It Realistically Fits?

When it comes to generative AI for content creation, it’s somewhere in the middle. The people who feel strongly about one side or the other are missing the nuance where the truth actually lies. We want to highlight how to invest in content the right way – using AI responsibly to create quality, authentic content, but not just producing ten times more just because you can.

It’s about creating more of the right content: the kind that stands the test of time and stays indexed month after month, rather than popping up and then declining. Content that drives views on YouTube, impressions and interactions on social media, and comments on Reddit is worthwhile, because of the impact it has on brand and downstream conversions. When it’s done right, it all comes together and helps businesses grow.

With A Room Full Of People From Both Ends Of That Spectrum, How Do You Avoid It Becoming An AI Echo Chamber – Keeping The Human Input Without Ignoring AI?

It’s something we tackle day to day at Semrush, and I think we’ve struck the balance more successfully in recent months by using AI to do better work, not just more work. When we think about the talks we want to cover at the Spotlight conference, the question is: how are people doing great work for both humans and machines, and how has their workflow changed?

In a lot of cases AI is involved, but we’re not interested in hearing from someone who used ChatGPT to publish 10,000 blog posts and shares what it looks like one month in, because we’d expect that to fall off within three months.

We’d rather showcase the most exciting work in marketing right now. As an example, we’re investing more than ever in affiliate and creator content, partnering with people making content about the real jobs to be done that matter to people in SEO and content marketing. To reach people, you need content that’s actually engaging. Nobody wants to watch an AI read a script with no real substance behind it.

Where Does AI Search Fit Alongside Traditional Google Search?

They’re absolutely tied together, it’s not a pure replacement. I think we’ll continue to see organic traffic to websites decline over time as more activity happens directly within conversational AI, whether that’s Google Gemini, AI Mode, or AI Overviews right there in the SERP – and then ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity beyond that.

But we see them as interrelated and expansive at the same time. We’re investing in YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn as inputs to search, partly because they rank directly on the results page: you’ll see AI Overviews, then the top three videos, blog posts, and an interesting LinkedIn conversation. All of those pieces matter.

We want to help our audience work out the right mix of investment for their business, and then how to track it and operationalise it internally. Tools like Semrush and Adobe Brand Visibility help marketers and enterprises to measure, track, and improve their website performance and overall brand visibility.

If Traditional SEO Now Feeds AI Search, How Do The Two Affect Each Other?

We start from the view that your website is still your foundation. There’s been talk that the website is no longer relevant, but we believe investing in it as the source of truth for your brand is critical – your homepage, your product and services pages.

We’re still managing hundreds blog posts on the Semrush blog, plus our knowledge base and support articles. And everything we publish, we’re evaluating for SEO: is it technically set up to be crawled and indexed? Is it engaging enough that Google wants to keep it in the index over time? How will it perform in the ChatGPT, Bing, and Brave indexes too?

The expansion is everything beyond that. Previously, most SEO teams generally weren’t thinking about publishing a YouTube video on the same topic as a blog post, or about the reputation-management side, considering how important conversations on Reddit can be, or Tripadvisor for local businesses, as examples.

The fundamentals still matter. You still need a technical SEO team and a technically sound website. But even link building has changed a lot: it’s less about getting a followed link and more about earning contextually relevant brand mentions, whether in text, a video script or a LinkedIn conversation. It’s the same outreach and partnership thinking SEO teams have always done, just with a different goal.

What’s Your Message To Brands And Businesses That Feel They’ve Fallen Behind And Need To Catch Up?

It’s still early, and there’s a wide open opportunity for marketing leaders to get in the game. If you’re focused on building a great, well-rounded business, AI search is just one point at the end of the tunnel; it’s also about all the other things you’re doing.

We want to help people work out the right mix of activities and prioritise the work that’ll be most impactful. It’s easy to get caught up in feeling there are a thousand things to do, but for most businesses there are really just a handful of things that, done consistently week after week — whether your team is one person or a thousand — pay dividends over time.

Invest in your brand, make sure your owned digital properties are technically sound and the content aligns with your brand message, and work to match your brand promise with your customer experience.

Why Does This Matter At CMO And Board Level?

AI visibility is not a nice-to-have. There is so much opportunity for brands to capture consumer interest on these new search surfaces they’re using. We recently released a Semrush study that looked at 50,000 brands and found that 85% of topics on ChatGPT still have no clear brand owner. That means they’re up for grabs, and the playing field is wide open.

From a CMO’s perspective, it comes down to integration. What AI search is proving is that the companies telling the same story consistently, day after day, and obsessing over their customers across every channel, are the ones winning. That alignment has to come from the CMO, or even the CEO.

Marketing leaders need to take visibility seriously, because it’s becoming a board-level concern. That’s why Spotlight is so needed right now.

There’s so much value for senior marketing leaders, particularly CMOs, to share their experiences with brand visibility and learn from some of the biggest brands, with more than 80 experts on stage talking through their AI visibility strategies: what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, and what isn’t working so well.

After the initial uncertainty when AI search first arrived, we’re now at a point where there are practical things you can do to build your AI visibility, and attending Spotlight will help teach you how.

Register for Spotlight.