SEO IRL 2026 | October 6-7 | Two-Day Event
SEO IRL is not your average industry conference.
Now in its 6th year, SEO IRL curated by Steve Toth (SEO Notebook), is an intimate, two-day experience built for SEO professionals, marketers, founders, and content strategists at every stage of their journey. Whether you're refining a strategy you've run for a decade or just starting to make sense of search, this is where you go beyond surface level tactics and into real strategy, real collaboration, and real relationships.
2 Days · 10+ Speakers · 250 Attendees
SEO & AEO Strategies & Tactics
📅 October 6 & 7
📍 MaRS Discovery District, Toronto
🔒 Lock in your price and your seat — before rates go up
🎯 Why Attend?
Zero fluff, all signal. Hear from top operators and practitioners driving real SEO results across SaaS, B2B, eCommerce, and publishing.
Speakers you actually want to meet. Our lineup includes Lily Ray, Nathan Gotch, Jyll Saskin Gales, and more.
One track. No FOMO, no decision fatigue. Just focused learning, whether you're brand new to SEO or a decade in.
Built-in networking. Designed to help you build lasting professional relationships — without the awkwardness.
No sponsored talks. Every session is 100% pitch-free. No sales pitches, just real insight.
New to SEO? You're in the right place. Sessions are designed to be accessible without dumbing anything down. You'll leave with practical takeaways no matter your starting point.
🎤 Topics We'll Cover
Programmatic SEO & AI content workflows
Topical authority and link-building at scale
Search intent, LLMs, and the evolution of SEO
Case studies, traffic growth breakdowns, and live site reviews
And so much more...
👥 Explore the Speaker Lineup →
Lily Ray
Founder
Algorythmic
Lily Ray is the founder of Algorythmic, an SEO and AI search consulting practice focused on SEO, AI Search (AEO/GEO), E-E-A-T, and Google Discover strategy. She is also the VP, SEO & AI Search at Amsive, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency's SEO client programs. Born into a family of software engineers, web developers and technical writers, Lily brings a strong technical background, performance-driven habits and forward-thinking creativity to all programs she oversees.
Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world, where she helped grow and establish two award-winning SEO departments within 10 years, each delivering high-impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients, including Fortune 500 companies. Lily has worked across a variety of verticals with a focus on publisher, retail, ecommerce, B2B and CPG sites. She loves diving into algorithm updates, analyzing E-E-A-T, optimizing for AI search, assessing quality issues and solving technical SEO mysteries. Through both Algorythmic and Amsive, Lily enjoys sharing her findings and research with the broader SEO industry.
Nathan Gotch
Founder & Co-Founder
Gotch SEO & Rankability
Nathan Gotch is the co-founder and CEO of Rankability, an AEO platform built for agencies. Author of the upcoming AI SEO For Dummies. Nathan has spent more than 15 years building SEO systems, growing companies, and helping marketers adapt to the changing search landscape.
Lidia Infante
SEO Consultant
Lidia Infante is an independent SEO leader and organic growth strategist who previously served as the Head of SEO at SurveyMonkey, where she successfully managed the household brand's organic search channel and international growth.
Grounded by a degree in psychology and a master's in digital business, Lidia specializes in combining technical optimization with behavioral economics. During her tenure at SurveyMonkey, she scaled high-impact organic strategies before moving on to focus on building AI-enhanced content systems and next-generation search optimization. A prominent voice in the digital marketing community, she has shared her expertise on over 20 international conference stages—including BrightonSEO and MozCon—and regularly contributes insights to leading publications like Search Engine Journal and Semrush.
Brian Lee
Client Strategist
Notebook Agency
Brian Lee is a client strategist at Notebook Agency who brings enterprise media and AdTech experience from Time, Yahoo and Dentsu to AEO and AI search.
Jabez Reuben
Founder & CEO
The Blueprints Agency
Jabez Reuben is the founder of The Blueprints Agency. He has over 10 years of experience in SEO, with a focus on link building, content strategy, and more recently, LLM and AI driven search.
Originally from India and now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Jabez has grown The Blueprints into a boutique agency that has supported brands like Adobe, Sleek, Diggity Marketing, Whitepress and more. His current work focuses on helping brands improve visibility across both traditional search and AI platforms.
He also built Link Validator, a SaaS tool for managing and auditing backlinks, and has been hosting a conference for the past two years called Link Building Mastery, now rebranded as LLM Mastery.
Jyll Saskin Gales
Google Ads Coach & Founder
Inside Google Ads
Jyll Saskin Gales is a Google Ads Coach, and the founder of the Inside Google Ads course, podcast, bestselling book and conference. She advises business owners, agencies, marketers and freelancers across industries, helping them get the best ROI from their Google Ads investment. She is also recognized as the world's #1 most influential PPC expert. Jyll worked at Google for 6 years and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is a proud Canadian and Torontonian. You can find her on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Brie Moreau
Founder & CEO
White Light Digital Marketing (WLDM)
Brie Moreau is the Founder of White Light Digital Marketing (WLDM) and a seasoned digital marketer with 20 years of experience. He specialises in SEO, data science, machine learning, and AI. Brie has trained Global Marketing Directors at companies including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, BMW, Audi, and other Fortune 500 organisations.
WLDM is a US-based multinational agency specialising in portfolio-level growth for top-tier US private equity firms and leading e-commerce brands, with a focus on scaling traffic into revenue and supporting successful exits. Through his work at WLDM, Brie helps enterprise teams understand how AI models select and recommend sources, and why traditional SEO signals fail inside LLMs.
Michal Suski
Co-Founder & Head of Innovation
Surfer
As co-founder and Head of Innovation at Surfer, Michał Suski has spent years running large-scale content experiments and building the frameworks that underpin one of the most widely used SEO tools in the industry. His current focus is on what comes after Google – how LLMs generate answers, what makes a source citeable, and what SEOs need to change before the shift becomes impossible to ignore.
Jess Joyce
SEO Consultant
Organic search lead with 20+ years in technical SEO, focused on AI search visibility and turning organic discovery into pipeline.
Amy Aitman
COO
Venture 4th Media
Amy Aitman is a digital publishing and content operations powerhouse who thrives where theory meets reality. As the COO of Venture 4th Media, she oversees the growth and operations of a massive portfolio featuring over 150 niche authority websites.
In a volatile, post-HCU landscape, Amy has become a leading voice on building resilient, multi-channel brands. She pioneered the "three-legged stool" strategy—diversifying organic traffic across Google, Reddit, and YouTube—and co-founded Red Visible to help brands capture visibility in the age of AI search and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Known for her unfiltered, actionable insights, Amy excels at scaling massive content teams, mastering content intelligence tools, and building sustainable digital moats that survive algorithm updates
Joyanne Hawkins
Founder & Owner
Sterling Sky
Joy Hawkins is the Owner/Founder of Sterling Sky, a leading local SEO agency, and also owns the Local Search Forum and LocalU. Self-taught in SEO, she's been working in the local SEO industry since 2006. At Sterling Sky, her day-to-day work centers on troubleshooting ranking issues for complex accounts and advising on Google products, SEO tools, and tactics.
Joy is a regular columnist for Search Engine Land and a well-known figure on the Local SEO conference circuit, having spoken at events including MozCon, Pubcon, LocalU, SearchLove, State of Search, brightonSEO, and SEO IRL. She's also a longtime Google Business Profile Product Expert and a moderator/faculty member with LocalU.
Sacha Fournier
Founder
JournoFinder
Sacha Fournier has spent his career in SEO and digital PR, running campaigns long before he built software for them. He is the Founder of JournoFinder, an AI-powered platform that SEO and digital PR teams use to find the right journalists and land coverage in world-class publications.
Before building the tools, Sacha was using them, growing increasingly frustrated with the clunky, inaccurate, and overpriced platforms the industry has accepted as standard. So he built something better. Sacha has previously spoken at SEO Estonia, Chiang Mai SEO Conference, Shenzhen SEO Conference, and the Digital PR Summit.
Chris Porteous
Founder
SearchEye
Chris is a serial entrepreneur who grew SearchEye to mid 7-figures in just a few years, working with startups and Fortune 100 companies alike. SearchEye is democratizing access to PR, using industry-leading technology to connect brands with world-class publishers in just a few clicks to boost search presence and visibility.
Chris has been featured in AdWeek, Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, and Inc.com. He's passionate about building high-growth teams, driving world-class operations, and leveraging network effects to create impactful global solutions.
Steve Toth
CEO & CSO Notebook Agency
SEO Notebook & Ainotebook
Steve Toth is an independent SEO Consultant and creator of SEO Notebook, a newsletter with over 19,000 subscribers. He has created award-winning SEO strategies to rank #1 for multiple keywords with over 300,000 monthly searches. He has driven over 50 million clicks for FreshBooks.com, including a page that generated traffic valued at $50,000 per week.
In March 2020, Steve left FreshBooks, turning his former employer into a client. 2 years later, Steve grew his consulting firm Notebook to over 1M in revenue. Growing companies around the world trust Steve to guide their SEO campaigns.
🧠 Who's This For?
SEO IRL is built for the people actually doing the work:
SEO Leads & Managers
In-House Marketing Teams
Technical SEOs & Strategists
SaaS & DTC Founders
Content & Growth Marketers
Agency Owners & Consultants
If SEO drives your business, this is where you need to be.
📍 Location
Downtown Toronto — right in the heart of the city's innovation hub.
MaRS Discovery District
101 College St, Toronto, ON M5G 0A3, Canada
🎟️ Secure Your Spot
Tickets are intentionally limited to keep this a curated, high-quality experience — not a massive trade show. Last year's event sold out, so don't wait until it's too late.
🎖️ Exclusive VIP T-Shirt
VIP pass holders receive this exclusive SEO IRL 2026 t-shirt — not available for purchase.
🔥 SEO IRL 2026: Come for the tactics. Stay for the people.
Now entering its 6th year, SEO IRL keeps getting sharper, bigger, and more worth the trip.
📸 Please Note: SEO IRL will have professional photography and videography on-site throughout the event for promotional and archival purposes.
Visit the SEO IRL Website for speaker reveals, content drops, and updates.