BrightonSEO recap and speaker decks

BrightonSEO-a-go-go

Hello from the Sitebulb booth, my friend! This isn't a paid endorsement– rather Patrick Hathaway and Jo Furnival were kind enough to let us hang at their booth in a prime intersection. If you haven't been to a BrightonSEO event before– this is the vibe. Impromptu pop-up communities take over nooks and crannies between sessions before flowing into ballrooms and local eateries.

We are mid-day two of the event. This edition is going to curate some of my favorite learnings, moments, and malarky so far.

When I arrived at the speaker's dinner, Martha van Berkel and Dan Taylor were already locked into a spirited conversation. The topic? Do AI crawlers use schema markup to understand the page?

The pair had a wildly different views on the matter and each came ready with a powerpoint to make their point. Martha's session, entitled 'From schema markup to strategy: unlocking the full value of knowledge graphs for SEO and AI', is all about how powerful schema can be when you move from the out-of-the-plugin options and utilize it to build a robust knowledge graph. Good schema yields 3 layers of value:

SEO – Rich results, higher click-through rates, AI Overviews
Content Insights – Mapping entities reveals topic authority and gaps, guiding content strategy.
AI Readiness – A content knowledge graph becomes a reusable data layer that feeds into agents, copilots, and enterprise AI initiatives.

Dan Taylor's session, Technical SEO for LLMs, was so good that I immediately bugged him for the deck and a link to the write up. Dan did not have a write up– but he does now! His session looked at the assorted and oft questionable paid services claiming to move the AI needling– including structured data. Dan is skeptic about the efficacy and self-awareness enough to ruin my chance to ask him why he hates schema during the Q&A.

Here's the thing– Dan doesn't hate it. He just doesn't loved shilled services with shaky premises. His study looked into structured data markup in AIO citations and shows the data isn't there to call this a silver bullet. URL length? Yeah, probably not the horse to bet on either. You know what he did find though? A direct relationship between Core Web Vitals and AIO representation. In particular:

Sites with CLS ≤ 0.1 recorded a 29.8% higher inclusion rate in generative summaries compared with sites above this threshold.
Pages delivering LCP ≤ 2.5 seconds were 1.47 times more likely to appear in AI outputs than slower pages.
Crawlers abandoned requests for 18% of pages larger than 1 MB of HTML, highlighting the need for lean markup.
TTFB under 200 ms correlated with a 22% increase in citation density, particularly when paired with robust caching strategies.
His study shows that performance improvements do more than enhance user experience. They directly increase the probability of being cited or surfaced by AI systems.

That was a great follow up to Matthew Brown's audacious Do Core Web Vitals Actually Matter for SEO?. (Apparently no one gave this delinquent the memo that's it's all AI now.) Matt gave 3 unexpected reasons why you might just still want to concern yourself with CWVs:

They aren't a ranking signal
The Google leak shows their role as user engagement signals
AI search relies on technical SEO

Turns out that CLS from your ads might be messing up your CWV and put you in the crosshairs for the Helpful Content update. Matt also shared his notes on what's worse the chase and a couple of excellent performance testing WebPageTest tips.

Tuesday afternoon I had the privilege of moderating a pair of sessions for underrated concepts: User Experience and Video. Celeste Gonzalez from RicketyRoo understands that SEO might get people to your site– but if they have a terrible experience then its wasted efforts. That's the premise of Turning traffic into results: demystifying search experience optimization. Google's aglo leak showed us how important user experience signals are in SERP. AIOs role in click decline likely already has this top of mind for those responsible for sharing worrying year over year metrics. She offered data sources to understand user behavior and a framework for getting the most out of your clicks.

The mainstage held incredible talks. Jennifer Long talked about winning stakeholder hearts and minds with Using SEO to improve your product. Josh Blyskal shared insights from 40M AI searches, gleamed while being the lead researcher at an AEO tracker SaaS. Amanda Jordan talked about How AI is rewriting the rules of local search (and what you can do about it).

There was… a lot of AI.

If you weren't able to attend and the weight of the FOMO is crushing– then I have the perfect gift for you. Many lovely speakers were kind enough to send out there decks! Here are 22 of this year's finest

Published on 10/24/2025 by Jamie Indigo