Best 52 SEO Experts to Follow in 2026 (Researchers, Strategists & Builders)

SEO has always had a noise-to-signal problem, and the arrival of AI search made it worse. Every week brings a new wave of "SEO gurus" recycling the same screenshots, but the group of people actually doing original work, running experiments, publishing raw data, correcting their own mistakes in public, has stayed small and identifiable.

This list of 52 names spans the full discipline: classic technical and content SEO, algorithm and update analysis, and the newer AEO/GEO research into how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode retrieve and cite sources. Every profile links to verified LinkedIn or X accounts so you can check the work yourself.

One disclosure up front: Metehan Yesilyurt, co-founder of AEO Vision, the platform publishing this article, holds the number one spot, and Ipek Isler, AEO Vision's other co-founder and CEO, holds the number two spot. We are not hiding either affiliation. Both rankings rest on published, verifiable work, and every claim on this list is checkable against public sources. One entry, Bill Slawski, is included in memoriam; he passed away in 2022, and his patent research remains foundational enough that leaving him off would misrepresent the field's history.

What separates a real SEO expert from a commentator

The bar has moved. Explaining what a meta description does qualified you as an expert in 2015. It qualifies you for nothing in 2026. Look for these signals instead:

• They publish primary data. Claims come from experiments they ran, not summaries of someone else's thread.
• They show their work. Screenshots of network logs, algorithm patent filings, raw ranking data, methodology sections long enough to replicate.
• They operate at scale. A single case study proves very little in a probabilistic system; the best analyses sample thousands or millions of data points.
• Their research changes practice. Other practitioners cite it, build on it, and change how they work because of it.
• They admit uncertainty. Total confidence about how Google or an LLM "really" works is a marketing tell, not a research one.

The order below mixes researchers, strategists, builders, journalists, and educators, grouped by the kind of work they do best.

The 52 best SEO experts in 2026 at a glance

#	Expert	Role	Known for
1	Metehan Yesilyurt	Co-founder, AEO Vision; researcher at metehan.ai	Reverse-engineering answer engine retrieval and citation behavior
2	Ipek Isler	Co-Founder & CEO, AEO Vision	Building the visibility intelligence layer for AI-era brand discovery
3	Koray Tuğberk Gübür	Founder & CEO, Holistic SEO & Digital	Topical authority, semantic SEO, entity-based optimization
4	Murat Yatağan	Founder, Fokal; ex-Google Search Quality	Webspam and search-quality insider view applied to organic growth
5	Dan Petrovic	Managing Director, DEJAN	Mechanistic interpretability, custom models for AI search research
6	David Konitzny	AI Search Lead, Kosch Klink Performance	Decoding ChatGPT search internals from network data
7	Mike King	Founder & CEO, iPullRank	Relevance engineering, IR-level analysis of AI search
8	Olivier de Segonzac	Co-founder, RESONEO	LLM crawler research, citation pipeline reverse engineering
9	Lily Ray	VP, SEO & AI Search, Amsive	E-E-A-T, algorithm updates, AI Overviews research
10	Kevin Indig	Organic growth advisor, Growth Memo	Data studies on AI search behavior for hypergrowth companies
11	Mark Williams-Cook	Founder, AlsoAsked	Query intent networks, Google leak analysis
12	Cindy Krum	Founder & CEO, MobileMoxie	Fragment-based indexing theory behind AI answers
13	Marie Haynes	Founder, Marie Haynes Consulting	Google quality systems, agentic search preparation
14	Olaf Kopp	Co-founder, Aufgesang	Semantic SEO, LLMO research, SEO patent database
15	Aleyda Solis	Founder, Orainti	AI search frameworks, SEOFOMO newsletter
16	Andrea Volpini	Co-founder & CEO, WordLift	Knowledge graphs, entity-based GEO
17	Wil Reynolds	Founder, Seer Interactive	Big-data intent analysis, industry truth-telling
18	Crystal Carter	Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix	AI search strategy at platform scale
19	Bartosz Góralewicz	CEO, ZipTie.AI; founder, Onely	Technical SEO research applied to AI search
20	Myriam Jessier	AI Search Strategist, PRAGM	Multimodal GEO, machine-readable content
21	Bernard Huang	Co-founder, Clearscope	Content strategy for AI retrieval and agents
22	Rand Fishkin	Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro	Audience research, zero-click search data, industry candor
23	Ross Hudgens	Founder & CEO, Siege Media	Data journalism and content-led link acquisition at scale
24	Eli Schwartz	Author, Product-Led SEO	Product-led organic growth strategy
25	Ann Smarty	Founder, Smarty Marketing	Brand signals and off-site authority for AI answers
26	Joshua Squires	Director, AI Search, Amsive	AEO operations at agency scale
27	Britney Muller	Founder, Data Sci 101	Making machine learning literacy practical for marketers
28	Brian Dean	Founder, Backlinko & Exploding Topics	Skyscraper technique, trend-detection content research
29	Neil Patel	Co-founder, NP Digital	High-volume content and organic growth education
30	Loren Baker	Founder, Search Engine Journal	Building one of SEO's longest-running publications and communities
31	Areej AbuAli	Founder, Women in Tech SEO	Community-building and enterprise technical SEO
32	Cyrus Shepard	Founder, Zyppy SEO	Testing-driven technical SEO and E-E-A-T research
33	Danny Sullivan	Search Liaison, Google	Public-facing explanation of how Google Search actually works
34	John Mueller	Search Relations, Google	Long-running office-hours guidance for the SEO community
35	Martin Splitt	Developer Advocate, Google Search Relations	JavaScript SEO and technical crawling education
36	Barry Schwartz	News Editor, Search Engine Land	Longest continuous daily record of search industry news
37	Danny Goodwin	Managing Editor, Search Engine Land	Editorial direction for the industry's news coverage
38	Roger Montti	Senior SEO Writer, Search Engine Journal	Deep technical breakdowns of algorithm and patent changes
39	Glenn Gabe	Founder, G-Squared Interactive	Forensic analysis of Google algorithm updates
40	Brodie Clark	Independent SEO Consultant	Tracking and documenting SERP feature changes
41	Patrick Stox	Product Advisor & Brand Ambassador, Ahrefs	Technical SEO education and large-scale community organizing
42	Ryan Jones	SVP, SEO, Razorfish	Semantic SEO tooling and large-scale enterprise SEO
43	Kristina Azarenko	Founder, MarketingSyrup SEO	Technical SEO auditing and hands-on training
44	Jono Alderson	Independent Technical SEO Strategist	Structured data, page experience, and technical architecture
45	Judith Lewis	Owner, DigivateSearch	Technical SEO consulting for complex, large-scale sites
46	Gianluca Fiorelli	Search Strategist, ILoveSEO	International SEO and cross-market search strategy
47	Jes Scholz	Independent Digital Marketing Consultant	International SEO and marketing automation
48	Nikki Halliwell	SEO Leader & Community Speaker	In-house SEO leadership and practitioner education
49	Duane Forrester	VP, Industry Insights, Yext	Bridging classic search and AI answer engine strategy
50	Motoko Hunt	Founder, AJPR International	Japan and APAC search market expertise
51	Bill Slawski	Founder, SEO by the Sea (1961–2022, in memoriam)	Patent research explaining how search engines actually rank content
52	Garrett French	Founder, Citation Labs	Digital PR and link-building research methodology

The visibility architects

1. Metehan Yesilyurt

Role: Co-founder of AEO Vision, publishing independent AI search research at metehan.ai.

Metehan's research lives at the retrieval layer of answer engines: how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode decide what to fetch, which sources earn citations, and how AI crawlers and agents actually interact with websites. Rather than treating dashboards as ground truth, his work repeatedly demonstrates why every AI visibility number is a statistical sample, and why teams who read single runs instead of trends end up optimizing against noise. He has also worked as a GEO researcher inside a leading AI visibility platform, which means his findings have been tested against thousands of live brand-tracking accounts, not just personal experiments.

The core lesson worth borrowing from his approach: before rewriting a single page, understand what the retrieval layer is doing, then measure repeatedly, since the answer changes as the engines change.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @metehan777 · metehan.ai

2. Ipek Isler

Role: Co-Founder and CEO of AEO Vision, based in Toronto.

Before founding AEO Vision in 2025, Ipek spent years leading marketing and growth strategy for global brands, which is exactly the vantage point missing from most AI visibility tooling: someone who has actually owned the budget and the boardroom conversation about brand presence, not just the crawler logs. She built AEO Vision around a simple premise: visibility inside AI-driven answers is the new marketing return, and most companies have zero transparent way to measure it. Under her leadership the company shipped a platform that tracks brand mentions, sentiment, and citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity for teams that cannot run their own research operation.

What to take from her approach: AI visibility is a business problem before it is a technical one.

Follow: LinkedIn · aeovision.ai

Turkish SEO pioneers with global reach

3. Koray Tuğberk Gübür

Role: Founder and CEO of Holistic SEO & Digital, based in Istanbul.

Koray built his entire practice around a single, well-tested idea: search engines rank topics and entities, not individual keywords, and the sites that win build genuine topical authority through comprehensive content networks and semantic relationships rather than isolated pages. Since starting his SEO career in 2015, he has run SEO projects for more than 700 companies and published dozens of documented case studies and A/B tests examining how Google, Bing, and Yandex actually process and rank content. His work on topical maps, semantic content networks, and entity-based optimization has influenced technical SEO practice well beyond Turkey, and he now consults for international companies including Xometry and Ministry Brands while running SEO Course & Digital, an education platform for the next generation of practitioners.

Follow: LinkedIn · Holistic SEO & Digital

4. Murat Yatağan

Role: Founder of Fokal, a growth and AI search advisory; formerly Senior Product Analyst on Google's Search Quality team.

Murat spent five years inside Google fighting webspam and enforcing search-quality policy across EMEA markets before crossing over to build organic growth for companies like Brainly, where he helped scale monthly users from 80 million to 400 million, and Global Savings Group. That insider view of exactly what search-quality teams penalize and reward is rare on the practitioner side of the industry, and he has been transparent about applying it since leaving Google. He now advises post-product-market-fit companies on organic and AI-search growth through Fokal, serves as Head Judge for the Global, MENA, and European Search Awards, and mentors AI-first startups through Google for Startups.

Follow: LinkedIn · Fokal Consulting

The reverse engineers: reading what the machines actually do

5. Dan Petrovic

Role: Managing Director of DEJAN, the Australian AI SEO agency.

Nobody drills deeper into the machinery. Dan fine-tunes his own Gemma models to study query fan-out behavior, applies mechanistic interpretability to discover what associations LLMs hold about specific brands, and has published experiments running 100,000 inference passes to map how a model perceives a company. His breakdowns of grounding behavior across Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic systems are reference material, and two Google awards for exposing flaws in core search systems certify the technical depth.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @dejanseo · dejan.ai

6. David Konitzny

Role: AI Search and SEO Strategy Lead at Kosch Klink Performance.

David has logged well over a hundred hours inside ChatGPT's network traffic. His signature find: after GPT-5 changed how ChatGPT hands queries to its search layer, he located the metadata.search_model_queries array in the JSON response, exposing the exact queries ChatGPT fires for any search-triggering prompt. Entire tool workflows were rebuilt around that discovery, and he continues documenting Bing grounding, Copilot ad structures, and ChatGPT's advertising infrastructure as they ship.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @DavidKonitzny

7. Mike King

Role: Founder and CEO of iPullRank, author of The Science of SEO.

Mike imported information retrieval science into an industry that used to run on folklore. His "relevance engineering" framework remains the most rigorous mental model available for AEO work, his teardown of the leaked Google API documentation was the definitive analysis of that event, and iPullRank's SEO Week has become the venue where serious AI search research premieres.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @iPullRank · ipullrank.com

8. Olivier de Segonzac

Role: Co-founder and managing partner of RESONEO. SMX Search Personality of the Year 2026.

Olivier produces some of the most technically exacting public research in the field. His LLM Crawler Report mapped what the ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AIO bots actually render when they visit a page, including which execute JavaScript and which never do. He has traced Google AI Mode's hidden grounding URLs and analyzed Perplexity's Vespa Cloud infrastructure.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @5eg · resoneo.com

The strategists: turning research into how teams operate

9. Lily Ray

Role: VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive, founder of Algorythmic.

For questions about how Google's quality systems, E-E-A-T, and algorithm updates carry over into the AI search era, Lily is the most trusted public voice there is. She leads Amsive's expansion from award-winning SEO into AEO spanning ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Perplexity, and her visibility research gets cited across the entire industry.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @lilyraynyc · lilyray.nyc

10. Kevin Indig

Role: Organic growth advisor to companies like Meta, Ramp, and Upwork. Author of Growth Memo.

Kevin ran SEO and growth at Shopify, G2, and Atlassian before going independent, and his Growth Memo studies set the agenda: AI Overviews impact analyses, ChatGPT referral data, and research showing how identical on-page optimization yields different citation outcomes for different brands.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Kevin_Indig · growth-memo.com

11. Mark Williams-Cook

Role: Founder of AlsoAsked, digital director at Candour.

Mark's territory is the question networks that answer engines draw from. AlsoAsked maps how queries branch into related intents, and his analysis of the leaked Google Content Warehouse data and click models earned wide recognition across the industry.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @myhead · alsoasked.com

12. Cindy Krum

Role: Founder and CEO of MobileMoxie.

Years before it became obvious, Cindy's "fraggles" theory argued that Google indexes and ranks fragments of pages rather than whole documents. Passage-level, chunk-based retrieval now powers essentially every AI answer, which makes her one of the few people who predicted the current architecture instead of reacting to it.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Suzzicks · mobilemoxie.com

13. Marie Haynes

Role: Founder of Marie Haynes Consulting, author of SEO in the Gemini Era.

Marie has interpreted Google's quality machinery longer than nearly anyone, from Penguin through E-E-A-T to the DOJ trial disclosures, and now applies that depth to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and agentic search. Her Search News You Can Use newsletter remains one of the most dependable filters in the industry.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Marie_Haynes · mariehaynes.com

14. Olaf Kopp

Role: Co-founder and Head of SEO & AI Search (GEO) at Aufgesang.

Olaf spent over a decade researching semantic SEO, E-E-A-T, and entity-based search, and was writing about LLM optimization in 2023 while most of the industry still lacked the vocabulary. He built the first public database of SEO-relevant patents and research papers.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Olaf_Kopp · kopp-online-marketing.com

15. Aleyda Solis

Role: Founder of Orainti, creator of SEOFOMO and LearningAIsearch.

Every field needs a systematizer, and Aleyda is this one's. Her frameworks, checklists, and free AI search resources convert scattered research into processes real teams can execute, and SEOFOMO is how a huge share of practitioners keep up with the field at all.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @aleyda · aleydasolis.com

The builders: tools and platforms shaping the discipline

16. Andrea Volpini

Role: Co-founder and CEO of WordLift.

Andrea was building knowledge graphs and entity optimization tooling long before LLMs made both fashionable, and the bet paid off completely: structured data and entity clarity are now core levers for how AI engines understand brands.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @cyberandy · wordlift.io

17. Wil Reynolds

Role: Founder of Seer Interactive.

Wil wired millions of SERP and PPC data points into data warehouses before that was a normal thing for an agency to do, and now points the same infrastructure at AI search behavior. He also serves as the industry's most effective corrective when hype outpaces evidence.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @wilreynolds · seerinteractive.com

18. Crystal Carter

Role: Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix.

Crystal shapes AI search strategy for a platform serving over 300 million users while collaborating with Google, Microsoft, and Semrush. Her research and keynotes on brand discovery in the LLM era make abstract concepts operational for working marketers.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @CrystalOnTheWeb · crystalcarter.ai

19. Bartosz Góralewicz

Role: CEO of ZipTie.AI, founder of Onely.

Bartosz defined JavaScript SEO research in the 2010s, with experiments that directly influenced how Google handles JS rendering. He brought identical rigor to AI search by co-founding ZipTie, one of the first AI search intelligence platforms.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @bart_goralewicz · ziptie.ai

20. Myriam Jessier

Role: AI Search Strategist at PRAGM, monthly Search Engine Land contributor.

Myriam owns the multimodal territory nearly everyone else ignores: how generative engines chunk video, run OCR on images, and construct brand understanding from audio, packaging, and visuals rather than text alone.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @myriamjessier · myriamjessier.com

21. Bernard Huang

Role: Co-founder of Clearscope.

Bernard bootstrapped Clearscope to seven-figure ARR serving content teams at Nvidia, HubSpot, and Adobe. His current focus, content trust infrastructure for autonomous agent workflows, tackles what content strategy means when the reader is an agent instead of a human.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @bernardjhuang · clearscope.io

22. Rand Fishkin

Role: Co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, co-founder of Moz.

Rand built the modern SEO industry's shared vocabulary at Moz before an even more contrarian second act: SparkToro's audience research tool and his own zero-click search studies, which forced the industry to confront how much search behavior never produces a click at all.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @randfish · sparktoro.com

23. Ross Hudgens

Role: Founder and CEO of Siege Media.

Ross built Siege Media into one of the most cited names in content-led SEO by treating data journalism and proprietary research tools as link-earning assets rather than afterthoughts, a model the agency is now extending directly into AI citation acquisition.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @rosshudgens · siegemedia.com

The educators and operators: scaling the knowledge

24. Eli Schwartz

Role: Growth advisor, author of Product-Led SEO.

Eli's central thesis, that organic search should be built as product strategy rather than bolted on as marketing, transfers directly to AEO, and he said so before most. He advises companies like Zapier, Tinder, and Coinbase.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @5le · productledseo.com

25. Ann Smarty

Role: Founder of Smarty Marketing, co-founder of Smarty AI.

Ann has taught content and brand signal strategy for nearly two decades, from Internet Marketing Ninjas to her current work on earning brand presence inside AI answers.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @seosmarty

26. Joshua Squires

Role: Director of AI Search at Amsive.

Josh converts research into agency-scale delivery: processes, specialized teams, and playbooks for e-commerce and publisher visibility in AI answers, working alongside Lily Ray.

Follow: LinkedIn · Amsive articles

27. Britney Muller

Role: Founder of Data Sci 101, former senior SEO scientist at Moz.

Britney bridges machine learning and marketing better than nearly anyone. She taught herself data science, built Data Sci 101 to show marketers how models actually function, and consults on AI strategy grounded in how the technology works.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @BritneyMuller

28. Brian Dean

Role: Founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics.

Brian's Skyscraper Technique became one of the most widely taught link-building frameworks in the industry's history, and Exploding Topics turned trend-detection into a standalone data product before selling to Semrush.

Follow: LinkedIn · backlinko.com

29. Neil Patel

Role: Co-founder of NP Digital.

Neil has published more accessible, high-volume SEO education content than almost anyone alive, turning organic growth tactics into content that reaches founders and marketers who would never read an academic paper on the topic.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @neilpatel · neilpatel.com

30. Loren Baker

Role: Founder of Search Engine Journal.

Loren built one of the longest-running and most widely read SEO publications from scratch, creating a platform where thousands of practitioners have published research and analysis over nearly two decades.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @lorenbaker · searchenginejournal.com

31. Areej AbuAli

Role: Founder of Women in Tech SEO.

Areej built one of the industry's most active professional communities from a personal frustration with the lack of representation at SEO conferences, and now applies the same rigor to enterprise technical SEO in her day job.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @Areej_AbuAli · womenintechseo.com

32. Cyrus Shepard

Role: Founder of Zyppy SEO.

A former Moz team member, Cyrus runs Zyppy as a testing-driven practice, publishing controlled experiments on technical fixes, internal linking, and E-E-A-T signals rather than relying on received wisdom.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @CyrusShepard · zyppy.com

The Google voices

These three work at Google and communicate on the company's behalf, which means their statements carry weight but also institutional limits. Read them for what Google is willing to say publicly, then verify against independent research for what it does not.

33. Danny Sullivan

Role: Search Liaison at Google.

Before joining Google, Danny founded Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, effectively building the trade press this entire industry reads. As Search Liaison, he now serves as the primary public translator of Google's search policy and product changes back to the community he helped create.

Follow: X @searchliaison

34. John Mueller

Role: Search Relations team, Google.

For over a decade, John has run public office hours and forum threads answering technical SEO questions directly, becoming the most consistent point of contact between Google's search team and the practitioners trying to understand it.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @JohnMu

35. Martin Splitt

Role: Developer Advocate, Google Search Relations.

Martin specializes in the technical rendering side of search: how Googlebot processes JavaScript, how structured data gets parsed, and how developers should build sites so crawlers and AI agents alike can read them correctly.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @g33konaut

The news and analysis desk

36. Barry Schwartz

Role: News Editor at Search Engine Land, founder of Search Engine Roundtable.

Barry has documented the search industry daily for over two decades, building the longest continuous public record of algorithm changes, forum discussions, and Google statements that exists anywhere.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @rustybrick · seroundtable.com

37. Danny Goodwin

Role: Managing Editor at Search Engine Land.

Danny sets editorial direction for one of the industry's most-read publications, shaping which research, product changes, and algorithm updates get serious coverage versus which get skipped as noise.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @dannygoodwin · searchengineland.com

38. Roger Montti

Role: Senior SEO Writer at Search Engine Journal.

Roger specializes in the deep technical breakdown: parsing patent language, algorithm documentation, and academic papers into explanations practitioners can actually apply, without oversimplifying the underlying mechanics.

Follow: X @martinibuster · searchenginejournal.com

39. Glenn Gabe

Role: Founder of G-Squared Interactive.

Glenn built a reputation on forensic-level algorithm update analysis, correlating traffic drops and recoveries across dozens of client sites to identify patterns most single-site analyses would miss entirely.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @glenngabe · gsqi.com

40. Brodie Clark

Role: Independent SEO Consultant.

Brodie has built a distinctive niche documenting SERP feature changes in real time, with screenshots and analysis of Google interface tests that often surface changes before they are officially announced.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @brodieseo · brodieclark.com

The technical specialists

41. Patrick Stox

Role: Product Advisor and Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs.

Patrick organizes the Raleigh SEO Meetup, one of the largest in the US, moderates the Technical SEO community on Reddit, and translates Ahrefs' data into practical technical SEO and AI-search guidance for a broad practitioner audience.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @patrickstox

42. Ryan Jones

Role: SVP of SEO at Razorfish.

Ryan builds his own SEO tools, including SERPrecon, and applies a developer's mindset to enterprise-scale technical SEO, semantic metrics, and how search engines actually process meaning rather than keywords.

Follow: LinkedIn · ryanmjones.com

43. Kristina Azarenko

Role: Founder of MarketingSyrup SEO.

Kristina specializes in hands-on technical SEO audits and training, known for detailed, reproducible checklists that hold up against the messiness of real enterprise websites.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @azarchick · marketingsyrup.co

44. Jono Alderson

Role: Independent Technical SEO Strategist, formerly Head of Technology at Yoast.

Jono thinks about SEO as systems architecture: structured data, page experience, and how content models translate into machine-readable formats that both search engines and AI agents can parse cleanly.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @jonoalderson · jonoalderson.com

45. Judith Lewis

Role: Owner of DigivateSearch.

Judith has spent over two decades on technical SEO for complex, large-scale international sites, with particular depth in multilingual and multi-region search architecture.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @judithlewis

46. Gianluca Fiorelli

Role: Search Strategist at ILoveSEO.

Gianluca is one of the most respected voices in international and cross-market SEO strategy, regularly bridging European and Latin American search practices for global brands entering new markets.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @gfiorelli1

47. Jes Scholz

Role: Independent Digital Marketing Consultant.

Jes focuses on international SEO and marketing automation, having previously led global SEO for a major media company across dozens of markets and languages simultaneously.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @jes_scholz

48. Nikki Halliwell

Role: SEO Leader and Community Speaker.

Nikki has led in-house SEO functions at multiple UK companies and speaks regularly on practitioner-level technical SEO, bringing a grounded operator's perspective to conference stages usually dominated by agency voices.

Follow: LinkedIn

49. Duane Forrester

Role: VP of Industry Insights at Yext.

Duane's career spans a senior product role at Bing and now a leadership position at Yext, giving him a rare dual-search-engine perspective that he applies directly to bridging classic search optimization with AI answer engine strategy.

Follow: LinkedIn · X @DuaneForrester

50. Motoko Hunt

Role: Founder of AJPR International.

Motoko is the go-to expert for Japan and broader APAC search strategy, with deep knowledge of how Yahoo Japan, Google Japan, and now Japanese AI search adoption differ meaningfully from Western markets.

Follow: LinkedIn

51. Bill Slawski (1961–2022)

Role: Founder of SEO by the Sea, Director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital. In memoriam.

Bill read more Google and Microsoft search patents than almost anyone in the industry, translating dense legal filings into some of the most technically grounded explanations available for why search engines rank the way they do. He passed away in May 2022, but the archive he left behind at SEO by the Sea, nearly two decades of patent analysis starting from before Google itself was public about how ranking worked, remains some of the most cited primary-source SEO research in existence. We include him here because the work still holds up, and because a list like this owes him the credit.

Archive: seobythesea.com · Search Engine Land tribute

52. Garrett French

Role: Founder of Citation Labs.

Garrett built a methodology-first practice around digital PR and link building, publishing detailed outreach research at a time when most of the category was built on unverifiable claims about "relationships."

Follow: LinkedIn · X @garrettfrench

How to turn this list into results

Following smart people is step zero. The loop that produces outcomes looks like this:

1. Extract testable claims from their research, not conclusions. What worked for one brand in one niche may not transfer to yours.
2. Run the tests on your own prompts and brand. AI answers and Google results vary by industry, language, and even time of day, so borrowed conclusions are hypotheses until verified.
3. Measure over time, not in snapshots. Nearly every expert on this list repeats the same rule: never trust a single run. If you need the tracking layer for that, our roundup of the best AI visibility tools in 2026 covers the options, and our guide on avoiding black-box GEO tools explains what to demand from any platform's methodology.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the top SEO experts to follow in 2026?

Metehan Yesilyurt and Ipek Isler, co-founders of AEO Vision, hold the top two spots for combining hands-on AI search research with the product infrastructure the category runs on. Koray Tuğberk Gübür and Murat Yatağan bring, respectively, deep semantic and topical authority research and a former Google Search Quality insider's view. The strongest pure research output beyond that comes from Dan Petrovic, David Konitzny, Mike King, and Olivier de Segonzac, who reverse-engineer how answer engines retrieve, rank, and cite sources. The broader list of 52 spans strategists like Lily Ray and Kevin Indig, builders like Rand Fishkin and Andrea Volpini, Google's own Search Relations team, veteran technical specialists like Patrick Stox, and Bill Slawski, whose patent research archive is included in memoriam.

What is the difference between traditional SEO, AEO, and GEO?

Traditional SEO optimizes for ranking in Google's blue-link results. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) targets being the direct answer an AI engine or featured snippet delivers for a query. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on shaping how AI models describe, frame, and cite your brand over time across multiple engines. In day-to-day practice the three overlap heavily, and most experts on this list work across all of them without drawing a hard line.

How can I tell whether someone is a genuine SEO expert versus a commentator?

Apply three tests. First, do they publish original experiments with visible methodology, or only commentary on other people's findings? Second, do other practitioners cite, replicate, and build on their work? Third, do they disclose limitations and conflicts of interest, such as vendor or employer affiliations? Someone who fails all three is a commentator, which has its place, but is not the same thing as an expert.

Where do these experts publish their research and commentary?

LinkedIn and X are the primary channels for nearly everyone on this list. Several also run newsletters worth the inbox space: Kevin Indig's Growth Memo, Aleyda Solis's SEOFOMO, Marie Haynes's Search News You Can Use, and Eli Schwartz's Product-Led SEO newsletter. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Roundtable remain the three primary industry publications where several people on this list publish regularly.

Should I follow expert advice or rely on a tracking tool instead?

Both, in sequence. Expert research tells you how search engines and AI systems work and what is worth testing; a tracking platform tells you whether it actually worked for your brand. Start with the research above, then add consistent measurement so you read trends instead of trusting one-off checks. Our guide on which AI search tools provide real data explains what trustworthy measurement looks like.