Our Key Takeaways from brightonSEO October 2025

Another year, another brightonSEO. And the latest instalment of the world’s biggest search conference didn’t disappoint.

With over 150 expert speakers from SEO, digital PR and beyond, it was a brilliant couple days down on the south coast. Here are my three key takeaways from October’s event:

AI was everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Every session, every stand, every conversation. How is AI changing search behaviour? How is it shifting buying habits? How is it transforming work capabilities? You couldn’t get away from it if you tried.

But, despite this massive focus, I came away without any groundbreaking findings or silver bullets that transformed my perspectives on AI. It’s clear that we’re all still working it out – and that’s actually pretty exciting.

Instead of a shocking revelation, my takeaway was exactly that: it’s exciting. If you’re proactive, innovative and excited to learn, this is a brilliant time to be in search (and PR in particular). If not, you could be in for a tough time.

So we’ve got a lot to learn about AI (and the future of search as a whole). But how do we learn it?

Experiments.

From SEO to digital PR, so much of the content at brightonSEO explored the need for experimenting, testing, and, ultimately failing.

AI has changed the game. And tried and tested strategies simply aren’t working anymore. So we need to experiment. And we need to fail. Only then will we actually learn anything.

Yes, AI is exciting. And yes, it’s driving HUGE changes in both our capability and behaviour. But it’s also driving us to place a much higher value on humanity and trust.

Automated search results, AI-generated content, unreliable hallucinations. Our audiences are searching for real engagement with real people. So that’s exactly what we should be prioritising.

Here at Energy, we’ve been saying it for years. Your audience should always come first. They’re the human beings who’ll actually buy from you. So why wouldn’t you focus on them?

Audience-led marketing is a future-proof, algorithm-proof approach, and one that realistically, every brand should be using. So it’s great to see this finally reflected across our industry.

• Luke Cope’s brilliant overview of creative strategies that build category page visibility in search
• Mary Olivia Hibberson’s research-based insights into what drives a great PR headline (and what really doesn’t)
• Erin Simmons session on talk on why trust starts with people (not brands), and how we can use communities to better earn it
• Tazmin Suleman, Sarah McDowell and Greg Gifford’s inspiring talks on the mindset for a successful career

I covered a few more of my favourite sessions in this LinkedIn post. But I’d also recommend checking out all the speakers and their sessions on the brightonSEO website – there’s an absolute goldmine of insight.

If you’d like to chat about brightonSEO, or just want to talk all things digital PR and SEO, drop me an email at ben@energypr.co.uk.