5 Takeaways From Edge of Search 2026: Newcastle’s SEO Conference

Last Friday, Edge of Search took over Newcastle’s City Hall. It was a full day of technical SEO, AI search strategy, marketing leadership and some delicious doughnuts. As a Newcastle-based SEO agency, we love that our city now has a search marketing conference punching well above its weight, and we came away with pages of notes.

Here are our top 5 takeaways from the day:

1. Google (and AI) reward the sites that answer a topic fully

Nik Ranger, Senior SEO Consultant at DEJAN Marketing, gave one of the day’s most technical talks, and the big idea behind it was simple: stop trying to rank for one keyword at a time, and start becoming the single best, most complete source of information on a topic. SEOs call this building topical authority, and the process of getting there is called topic mapping and query fan-outs.

The idea, as Nik lays out in her article A Technical SEO’s Adaptation for AI Visibility, is that AI Overviews and AI search tools don’t just reward a page for matching the right keyword, they cite the page that is the most definitive, comprehensive answer for an entire topic. In practice, that means mapping out every question a customer (or an AI tool answering on their behalf) might have about a topic, then making sure your website answers all of them, not just the one or two you’d normally write a page for.

What this looks like: imagine a local plumber who currently has one page targeting “blocked drains Newcastle.” A topic-mapped approach would turn that a comprehensive “Blocked Drains” hub page, interlinked with dedicated pages covering causes, DIY fixes versus when to call a professional, cost guides, tree root intrusion, and emergency out-of-hours callouts. Individually, none of those pages competes with a single high-volume keyword. Together, they make the plumber’s site the most complete answer to the entire topic, which is exactly what gets cited by AI Overviews and ranks well in traditional search.

2. SEO is about protecting your greatest asset: your website

Sally Mills, Senior SEO Lead at InfoChoice, opened the day with a talk called The Last Webmaster, and her argument was that SEO isn’t really a marketing add-on. It’s website maintenance, rebranded.

Google has renamed the “webmaster” job title around eight times over the years, but every task a webmaster used to do — keeping a site fast, secure, findable and error-free — still needs doing by someone. These days, that someone is the SEO.

• Can search engines actually find and read every page, or are broken links, dead-end redirects and accidental “don’t index this” tags getting in the way?
• Is the same content duplicated across multiple pages, leaving search engines unsure which version should rank?
• Is the site fast and mobile-friendly enough that people (and bots) don’t give up halfway through loading it?
• Is it secure, with no missing padlock or mixed-content warnings?
• Does every page have the basics covered — titles, descriptions, and the behind-the-scenes markup that tells search engines and AI tools what the page is actually about?
• And, increasingly, which AI crawlers are allowed in the front door, and which ones aren’t?

Her closing message to the room: you’re not hiring an SEO to chase Google’s algorithm. You’re hiring the person who owns and protects your most important business asset — your website.

3. Showing up in AI requires great marketing, not just great SEO

Luke Gosha, Head of Search & AI Strategy at Edge Marketing, made the case that SEO is a function of the broader marketing ecosystem, not a siloed technical discipline sitting off to one side.

As he put it in a recent Mediaweek interview, “it is really important that the role of SEO sits across multiple different channels.” Consumers now discover brands through social platforms, LLMs, forums and review sites as much as through a Google search box. So ranking well requires the same holistic thinking a good marketer already applies everywhere else: brand, content, channel strategy and long-term positioning, not just technical fixes.

This was probably our favourite takeaway of the day, because it’s exactly the argument for outsourced marketing done properly. SEO in isolation only gets you so far — it needs to sit inside a genuine, holistic marketing strategy to earn visibility in an AI-driven search landscape.

One slide from his talk, “Win in AI Search with GREAT Marketing,” summed it up well. It mapped the entire “search ecosystem” as two branching halves: on one side, social, reviews, awards and accreditations, PR, CRM and online communities; on the other, thought leadership, testimonials, tech, UX, video, partnerships and accessibility. None of those are traditional “SEO” levers on their own, but together, they’re what actually earns visibility in AI search today.

4. No matter how AI evolves, we’re still optimising for humans

Despina Gavoyannis, SEO Strategist at Ahrefs, spoke on personalised search and human-centred search experiences. Her core message was that the technology keeps changing, but the humans we’re optimising for don’t.

Her argument was that search journeys have changed for good, and audiences are no longer defined by marketers — they’re modelled by algorithms, built from real behaviour. She broke down what search engines use to personalise results into three groups:

• things about the person themselves (what they’ve searched and clicked before),
• things about their situation right now (location, device, time of day),
• and patterns learned from millions of other people doing something similar.

Her advice: rather than building customer personas around demographics like age and gender, build them around what people are actually trying to achieve — and optimise your content for that goal, not just the keyword they typed.

5. Attribution is dead.

Ashley Liddell, Co-Founder of Deviation, closed the day with a talk called The FYP is a SERP (“FYP” being the For You Page on TikTok/Instagram, and “SERP” the search results page you’d see on Google) — and it reframed how the whole room thinks about the customer journey.

His team’s BullyBillows case study mapped a real customer’s path to a branded Google search and found several other surfaces doing the real work first. His team found out that discovery took place on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube before anyone did any typing. His conclusion: brand search doesn’t lead the journey any more, it follows it — and every one of those upstream social surfaces already behaves like a search engine, with its own ranking system and its own version of relevance.

What this means for your business

Here is the common thread: SEO isn’t a standalone checkbox any more, it’s woven into everything else your business does. If you take nothing else from this list, here’s where to start:

• Map the whole topic, not just one keyword. Pick a core service and build out every question a customer might have about it, not just the single page you already have.
• Get a proper technical check-up on your website. Broken links, slow load times and pages that crawlers can’t read are costing you visibility and rankings right now.
• Stop running SEO in isolation. It only earns visibility when it’s connected to the rest of your marketing — social, PR, reviews, content — not sitting off in its own silo.
• Design around what people are trying to achieve, not just what they typed. A persona built around a goal will serve you better than one built around age and postcode.
• Watch your brand searches, not just your clicks. If people are searching for your business by name after seeing you on social or hearing about you elsewhere, that’s your marketing working, even when the analytics can’t draw a straight line to it.

If working through all of that alongside actually running the business sounds like a lot, that’s exactly the gap an outsourced marketing team is built to close. Get in touch if you’d like a hand with it.