Event
SEO Leaders: The WordPress Agency Conference
Event details
Meet other WordPress agency leaders and make sense of what SEO looks like now.
Get first-hand insight into how agencies are navigating AI, automated traffic, accessibility, and performance as one connected system — and learn how to build clearer, more resilient WordPress work that clients can trust in an increasingly noisy web.
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Event Manifesto
The Wordpress Agency Conference
Event curated by:
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Abi Donoghue
Agency Hackers
The internet is changing faster than a lot of agencies are comfortable with. WordPress agencies are being asked to deliver more value, more certainty, and more reassurance at a time when budgets are tighter, expectations are higher, and the systems underneath websites are getting harder to explain.
Agencies are telling me that performance is no longer just about speed, SEO is no longer just about optimisation, and potentially the most difficult part – traffic no longer actually guarantees people. Bots now account for a growing share of activity on the web, quietly affecting cost, analytics, and infrastructure, while compliance and accessibility have shifted from “nice to have” to baseline expectations that many sites still don’t fully meet.
This is where SEO Leaders comes in. It’s a
space for WordPress agencies to talk honestly about:
- What modern SEO actually looks like now.
- Managing automated traffic and performance as one system.
- Using AI in ways that protect quality.
- Treating accessibility and consent as part of the work rather than optional extras.
The future of WordPress SEO depends less on chasing new tools and more on clear thinking, strong standards, and agencies who know how to build work that holds up when the pressure’s on.
SEO Leaders is sponsored by WP Engine. The global technology company empowers companies and agencies of all sizes to build, power, manage, and optimise their WordPress websites and applications with confidence. It serves over 1.5 million sites, providing premium, enterprise-grade solutions, tools, and services, including specialised hosting platforms for WordPress, industry-tailored agency solutions, and developer-centric tools like Local, Advanced Custom Fields, NitroPack, and more. Learn more at wpengine.com.
SPEAKERS
⏳ Your speakers
The State of the Web 2025
Our partners for SEO Leaders are kicking off the day by unpacking the Web Traffic Trends Report.
Liam will be talking about the “Discovery Gap”, the decline of traditional organic CTR and the rise of synthetic traffic (AI Agents/Bots).
You will come away knowing how to upsell strategy and performance since the shift into mobile and understand how to utilise this big opportunity to do so.
Building the Future of Organic
“It’s all well and good saying you’re an expert on your website, but who is actually… how do you validate that?”
That’s the centre of Ben Wood’s views: organic isn’t dying, it’s mutating. And the mutation is quite simple at its core: users aren’t “searching” in neat keywords anymore. They’re chatting their needs, asking messy, contextual questions… and getting a stitched-together answer without clicking on anything.
Ben believes SEO still matters. But GEO runs on trust, not tweaks. For LLMs, the biggest ranking lever isn’t your title tags, it’s “mentions, brand mentions, reviews, social media mentions… building a reputable brand across the internet broadly.” The currency is authority that can’t be faked inside your own CMS.
He’ll break down how generative engines behave differently too – the “query fan out” effect, where a single prompt triggers 50 related questions behind the scenes before the model compresses it into one response. If you’re not covering those angles (and doing it better than everyone else), you don’t get referenced.
The job now is proving value in a no-click world – and measuring visibility where the click never happens.
Building the Future of Organic
Abbie will be talking about how agencies can navigate the move from Search Engine Optimisation, to Generative Engine Optimisation.
This panel will explore how users are now ‘chatting’ with their needs rather than ‘searching’ for them and how agencies can prove value when users never reach the website.
You will come away from this session understanding exactly what to tell clients when they ask about ChatGPT and AI’s impact on their traffic and how to effectively measure AI visibility and discoverability.
The AI Pivot in Practice
“I was sat in a McDonald’s picking my kids up from Cubs when my phone started going nuts.”
That was May 2024. Google had just launched AI Overviews, and for James Bavington and his team at StrategiQ, everything changed overnight.
“We work with some big publishers,” he says. “They were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be catastrophic to our viewership.’”
And it was in some cases, with traffic down by 50%. “There is no silver bullet,” James admits. “There is a tectonic change in the way people are consuming news.”
But it’s not the end of the story.
While some brands panic, others are growing because they’ve shifted their mindset.
One global B2B brand James works with simply ungated years of hidden content: Guides, thought leadership, technical docs. The result? A bigger footprint in AI-driven discovery – and growth that compensated for normal attrition.
Meanwhile, e-commerce is entering a new battleground. “You can now start to buy things agentically in Google search results and ChatGPT,” James explains. “So product optimisation is the new frontline.”
This isn’t theory any more, this is exactly what James is pitching in boardrooms right now.
In this session, he’ll set the scene, share three real-world case studies and unpack what’s happening next: agentic commerce, ads inside ChatGPT, and how agencies can stay valuable in a world that’s moving fast.
What’s Possible in 2026: Using AI to think bigger and better
“It’s not an all-in-one magic solution.”
That’s where Olivia Suleman wants to start when we talk about AI in 2026.
Because by now, the novelty has worn off and most agencies have dabbled.
But dabbling isn’t thinking bigger.
For Olivia, the real question isn’t how do we use AI? It’s how do we use it to fundamentally expand what’s possible?
“It’s about understanding how you operate as a business,” she says. “Where AI fits to the touchpoints.”
At Flipside, they’ve explored the whole spectrum, from image-to-video experiments and proof-of-concept builds using core code, to speeding up content production and elevating “pitch theatre”. But the biggest lesson hasn’t been technical.
AI is about embedding smarter systems, freeing up creative and strategic headspace so agencies can design bigger activations, sharper ideas and more ambitious work.
In this session, Olivia will break down what’s genuinely possible in 2026 across three sharp segments: principles and lessons learned, practical tooling and pro tips, and how those same foundations unlock more powerful client activations.
Architecting Websites for Two Audiences
“The reality has changed. And it’s changed very quickly.”
That’s how Kimb Jones describes the shift currently happening across the web.
For years, agencies built websites for two main things: search engines and human visitors. But the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude has quietly introduced a third actor, systems that don’t just crawl the web, but interpret it.
“Websites are no longer just visual brochures,” Kimb explains. “They’re becoming data sources that AI systems learn from.”
In some ways, the fundamentals remain reassuringly familiar. Speed still matters, clear content still matters, and trusted websites still win.
But the way people discover that content is evolving rapidly.
Instead of scanning ten blue links on a search results page, users increasingly ask a question and receive a single summarised answer. That shift changes everything about how traffic arrives and how agencies explain performance to clients.
Discovery might now happen inside an AI conversation, but when someone finally clicks through, the website’s job becomes clearer than ever: build trust and deliver clarity.
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