Found, Read, Shortlisted: How Search and AI are Reshaping Buying in the Space Industry
A SmallSat 2026 side meeting with Kartik Kumar (satsearch) and Anastasia Hamel (Anastasia Consulting), featuring a live panel with practitioners from the space supplier community.
A large fraction of the technical buying process in the space industry happens before anyone talks to sales.
Buyers shortlist suppliers through online search, directories, peer recommendations, and increasingly, tool-assisted research. Your website isn’t a brochure. It’s the first stage of procurement. Chances are, by the time someone contacts you, they’ve already decided whether you’re worth a call.
The session features a live panel: hear directly from space suppliers actively investing in how they are found, understood and evaluated online before a direct conversation ever begins.
From there, the session addresses the problem from two angles:
First, what the data shows: drawing on insights from satsearch’s marketplace, Kartik Kumar will share what engineers actually search for, where the supplier discovery process breaks down, and what emerging demand patterns reveal about how space capabilities are evaluated online.
Second, what suppliers can do about it: Anastasia Hamel will show why the foundations that improve visibility in traditional search increasingly determine whether suppliers appear in AI-assisted research.
Built around real data and real examples from the space sector, this session will leave you with a practical SEO and AI search checklist you can use to review your own capability pages.
Who should attend
This session is designed for:
Space suppliers and technical founders
Business development and commercial leaders
Marketing and communications professionals working in the space sector
Speakers
Kartik Kumar
CEO, satsearch
kartik@satsearch.com
Anastasia Hamel
Founder & Fractional CMO, Anastasia Consulting
hello@anastasia.consulting
Event details
Date: Tuesday, August 25
Location: Salt Palace Convention Center
Time: 12:40 p.m. - 1:25 p.m. MDT
Room: 251 B/C