Sydney SEO Conference 2026
Speaker By Speaker Breakdown
At nimbl, we love a conference.
More acutely, we love to learn.
As a results-focused digital marketing agency, learning, adjusting and updating are key parts of our process for making sure our clients succeed in the search landscape.
With that in mind, last week a few members of the SEO team headed up to Sydney to head to Prosperity Media’s Sydney SEO Conference.
While at the conference, the team sat through each talk, and wrote down our key takeaways.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussion at the conference reflected the wider SEO discussion being had globally – these all centred around getting businesses cited in AI search.
Here are our main takeaways from each of the speakers:
Kevin Indig – Beyond the SERP: Visibility and Trust in the Age of AI
Kevin Indig opened the conference with some numbers that are hard to ignore. AI Overviews now appear in close to half of all searches, AI mode carries a 100% zero-click share, and organic CTR drops by 50% when an AIO is present. His argument: traffic isn’t coming back, but that doesn’t mean search intent has gone away.
- The click funnel has broken, but conversions haven’t collapsed with it. Traffic and conversions are detaching, which means brand visibility matters more than ever even when clicks don’t follow.
- His framework splits into two layers: the Visibility Layer (Additive content, Webutation, Freshness, Style) and the Trust Stack (Evidence, Experts, Validation, Reputation). Most brands are working one and ignoring the other.
- Content needs to be polymorphic, original, and fresh. LLMs prefer content
under three months old, definitive writing helps them make associations, and web mentions carry a .664 correlation with AI visibility. Reddit is currently the top reference source for LLMs, followed by YouTube, then Quora and mainstream media.
James Norquay (Prosperity Media) – Digital PR and GEO
James made the case that digital PR is the primary driver of LLM visibility at scale. The session covered how to build campaigns that actually earn citations, not just backlinks.
- Campaign strategy sits at the intersection of what your brand cares about and what the news cares about. Two types: Quick Win campaigns (reactive, seasonal, trend-led) and Hero campaigns (original research, FOI requests, data journalism, pitched for broader coverage).
- A few quick GEO wins worth actioning: building an LLM info page on your site, pursuing awards pages for reputation signals, getting listed on Foursquare, and using tools like Hall for AI search tracking and Apify for scraping and AI data.
- The journalist panel that followed reinforced the same point from the other side: pitches need to be tailored, scannable, and pre-packaged as a story. Generic outreach gets ignored immediately.
Lauren Schwartz – Local SEO and Brand Presence
Lauren’s talk focused on what actually moves the needle for local brands in an AI-first search environment.
- Suburb pages still work, but only when the content is genuinely unique. If a competitor can copy your page, it’s not doing enough. Lean into what only you can say: testimonials, local data, team presence.
- Personalise your brand online. Putting a face to your business builds the kind of relatability and trust that AI systems pick up on.
- Be on all platforms. Local brand presence now needs to be built horizontally, not just through your website.
Jes Scholz – Brand Building Beyond Google
Jes pushed back on the idea that SEO strategy should be constrained by Google’s guidelines or Google’s channels.
- Stop tying brand value purely to keyword traffic. Brand building that doesn’t directly drive search rankings can still build meaningful equity and influence AI citation.
- Fame, distinctiveness, and showmanship matter. Content that makes an impression and has a recognisable style is harder to ignore and harder to replicate.
- 1% of share of marketing spend equals roughly 10% share of voice. The brands showing up in AI answers are the ones people already know.
Brodie Clark – Enterprise SEO for Ecommerce
Brodie’s session was ecommerce-specific but had practical applications beyond it.
- Integrating physical store details into your product feeds enriches rich result snippets. Use GSC’s merchant listing filter more, and keep a close eye on store quality via Google Merchant Centre.
- 310 words is the sweet spot for category page performance, though that varies by brand size and category depth. Organisation and website schema on your homepage remains a significant lever for your brand knowledge panel.
- Free listing visibility is worth taking seriously as a response to zero-click traffic, particularly now that purchases can be made directly in the SERPs without users ever visiting your site.
AI & SEO Panel
A broad discussion across practitioners on where AI SEO is heading in practice.
- Programmatic informational content and query fan-out testing are the current frontiers for scaling AI visibility.
- Distribution format matters as much as content itself. How you package content for the platforms people actually use is now part of the SEO brief.
- LLMs in RAG are fundamentally lazy. Invest in a small number of key pages that are genuinely authoritative and make it easy for AI systems to understand your brand there.
Frank Duignan – How LLMs Work and What It Means for Your Content
Frank got into the mechanics of how LLMs actually retrieve and process content, which reframes how you should think about page structure.
- Standard chunk size is 512 tokens (roughly 400 words). You’re not competing against other pages, you’re competing against other chunks. Each section should be self-contained and value-dense.
- Write in semantic triples (subject, predicate, object). LLMs parse structured, declarative sentences far more reliably. Numbers help too: content grounded in specific data is 33.9% more likely to be correctly understood.
- Query fan-out means LLMs run multiple parallel searches to build a response. If your content only targets the head query and ignores the surrounding topic territory, you’re leaving ground open for better-structured competitors.
Destiny Flaherty – Ecommerce and GEO
Destiny’s session covered AI visibility for ecommerce brands, with Princess Polly used as a case study.
- 70% of modern sites can’t be read by LLMs due to JavaScript rendering. HTML is what LLMs work with. Audit your source code and make sure critical content isn’t hidden in JS.
- Reviews are almost always written in JavaScript, which means LLMs can’t read them. Brands with schema markup achieve 57% more AIO appearances. A Shopify app is coming to address review markup specifically.
- Optimise your product feeds fully for each channel and don’t ignore long-tail product-led queries within your content.
Brie Moreau – AI Citation Research Findings
Brie’s talk was the most technical of the day, covering what actually drives AI citation at a structural level.
- Common Crawl is the foundational dataset most LLMs are trained on. Getting indexed there is a baseline for informational authority. It takes roughly 250 documents to meaningfully shift an LLM’s understanding of a topic.
- Harmonic centrality is the relevant backlink concept: who are the influencers in your topic space, and are the sites linking to you linked to by those influencers?
- There’s only a 12% overlap between ChatGPT results and traditional SERPs. Bing sits closer at 26%. Your AI search and traditional search strategies cannot be the same strategy.
Keen to get your brand AI-ready for the new frontier of search?
The team at nimbl are at the forefront of adapting SEO strategy to the rapidly shifting waters of AI search. Explore our AI SEO solutions for more today, alongside our other SEO services for a comprehensive, versatile digital presence that doesn’t miss on opportunities old or new.
