BrightonSEO April 2025 – Our Event Summary

As #DelanteTeam, we attend numerous conferences each year, both local and international. So, we couldn’t miss this year’s Brighton, especially since this event has a special place in our hearts. We’ve been attending it for 7 years already, our 6-person team keeping the tradition in April 2025!

Why do we love this event so much? It’s one of the biggest conferences, with 6 simultaneous panels for each segment, which gives you a broad choice of topics. Whether you’re interested in link building, technical SEO, R&D, team management or social marketing, you’ll find relevant talks from the best experts in their relevant fields. Plus, BrightonSEO has a wonderful networking atmosphere – you won’t find such a concentration of SEO nerds anywhere else in the world! At the same time, every attendee is respectful – you’ve got plenty opportunities to network, but nobody forces you to do so if you’re sharp-focused on the talks.

So, what was BrightonSEO April 2025 like? What did we learn and like the most? Here’s my summary – enjoy!

Let’s start with a brief overview of the talks – the ones we found most interesting, inspiring or innovative. So, what was on the agenda?

Veronika Höller’s talk was about Google’s monopoly for search being divided, with a specific focus on generative AI. During this talk, we could delve into the ways users consume content after writing a prompt in a genAI engine. While Google prefers older, more authoritative texts, AI models like Perplexity show fresh information. This prompts several questions:

Liam Cumber’s talk revolved around alt-text from the perspective of people with various types of disabilities. It went into detail about the purpose of alternative descriptions both in theory and in practice, showcasing what they should look like, how to create them, and explaining why generative AI might fail to create such descriptions for us.

It’s my fifth visit to BrightonSEO, and as usual, I wasn’t disappointed, so it certainly won’t be my last visit to this conference. 😊 I feel that the more experience I have in SEO, the more value I extract from the talks – it’s often the details, small things that inspire me, or clever case studies that matter, especially since I can compare the latter to what I do on a daily basis. What’s more, when I see that people from different industries confirm our approach at Delante during their talks, it’s super validating.

This year, very much as usual, there were a lot of interesting speakers (choosing from 6 panels at once always helps you find something to your liking), but I would like to single out Thursday’s Google in 2025 panel held in auditorium 2. All three speakers were exceptional:

The title FAST content is an acronym for the English words: First Person, Authentic, Social, and Trusted content. According to Jon, the whole world is now focusing heavily on optimization for AI or AIO, and in fact, we are witnessing a bigger change that should shape the way we build our strategies. After all, the whole search is changing in three aspects:

All of these three aspects are closely tied together. LLM development led to people searching in, for instance, ChatGPT rather than Google. However, we also need to remember that other variables shape this change, such as the generational change and the following social media development, with young people more frequently trusting their Instagram or TikTok feeds and searching directly on social media platforms. It all leads to a shift in Google search results – previously, we could find there long, often boring content (is there anybody here who has never searched for a pasta recipe and instead found an article on the history of pasta or Italy as a whole?). Now, LLMs and AI Overviews give more direct answers, which is also reflected in organic search results – we need to adjust our content to that. Google search results also provide us now with more video and social platform results – they have a potential that we mustn’t underestimate.

Jon also mentioned the SPAM update and how much it changed in the search engine results pages. He underlined that Google sees this shift in user behavior and will keep adjusting to them. So, to keep up, we’ll need to build our strategies based on the FAST content principles – we need to put the user first, not the search engine or the LLM.

In her talk, Megan Roberts focused on human-friendly SEO – something also touched upon by Jon Earnshaw. She underlined that to achieve business goals, the optimization efforts need to include simplification, comprehensibility, and intuitiveness. As Roberts said: People don’t buy the best products; they buy the product they can understand the fastest.

While BrightonSEO has a strong agenda when it comes to talks, it’s much more – the event simply resonates this SEO atmosphere, with over 4000 people from the industry gathered in one place. It’s also an opportunity to grab some fun gadgets from the exhibits of your favorite tools, catch up with old friends from the industry, and network SEO experts from different companies and industries casually, during two great after parties at the venue. How did we find it? Let our photos speak for us 😄

And, let’s see what some people on our team have to say 😉

Finally, like every year, let’s sum up the key points and themes from Brighton SEO – what’s up in the industry?