Past Events
Catch up on talks and speakers from previous years — all past editions are still available to explore. Browse the full lineup of speakers, read about their talks, and browse the photo galleries to get a feel for each event.
Tech SEO Summit 2026 - Tech SEO Summit 2025 - Tech SEO Summit 2024
Tech SEO Summit Talks 2026
Here you find detailed information about the speakers and topics from our 2026 conference.
Fonts and Web Performance
Only 10 years ago, custom web fonts were a niche feature, but today they are used by 83% of websites. While it’s easy to add and use web fonts, there are many ways that they can negatively impact web performance and user experience. During this talk Paul will provide an overview of custom web fonts and some web performance techniques you can use to optimize them. We’ll look at examples from the HTTP Archive and explore some free tools that can be used to analyze and optimize fonts on your site.
Paul Calvano is a Performance Architect at Etsy, where he helps optimize the performance of their marketplace. Prior to that he worked as a web performance consultant at Akamai and Keynote (now Dynatrace), helping websites optimize their performance since as early as 2000. Paul is a co-maintainer of the HTTP Archive, an open source project that has been tracking the evolution of the web since 2010. He’s an author of various chapters of the 2019 Web Almanac and also a co-organizer of the NY Web Performance Meetup group. He writes about web performance and shares HTTP archive research at paulcalvano.com.
Clippy's Coup: The new search conversion funnel in an AI enabled world
The search "click contract" is broken. In 2026, AI crawlers don’t index your content—they consume it to become the destination. This session is a critical audit of the AI extraction economy and a survival guide for the flattened conversion funnel. As AI Overviews absorb the Awareness and Consideration stages, websites are left to fight for the "Final Click." We will debate high-stakes trade-offs: When should you block crawlers? Does a "citation" actually pay the bills? How must strategies diverge for Publishers vs. Online Shops?
Jamie Indigo isn’t a robot but speaks bot. As the Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive, they study how search engines crawl, render, and index. They love to tame wild JavaScript and optimize rendering strategies. When not working, Jamie likes horror movies, graphic novels, and D&D.
Reverse-Engineering the RAG Black Box: Architecting Content for AI Answer Engines
Forget treating ChatGPT and Perplexity like unpredictable black boxes, because the retrieval phase that feeds them is in some parts deterministic and mathematically driven. We’re going to look under the hood of modern AI answer systems using a custom-built, 10-stage Node.js RAG pipeline simulator. We will nerd out on advanced techniques like Parent-Child chunking, HyDE vectors, and cross-encoder re-ranking to explore exactly how you can systematically architect your content to mathematically dominate the "Share of Context".
René has been working as an independent technical SEO consultant across Europe for more than 7 years while utilizing his SEO knowledge on an executive-level for the bigger players in the market. Mostly focusing on E-Commerce and SaaS clients with an international scope across all sales channels like B2B, D2C and B2C.
Caching as a Competitive Advantage: Rendering, Performance & SEO in Modern Web Architectures
Caching is often treated as a purely engineering concern, yet it has direct and measurable impact on SEO performance, crawl efficiency, user engagement, and ultimately business outcomes. As websites move toward faster development cycles, distributed infrastructure, and hybrid rendering models, the role of technical SEO increasingly overlaps with architectural decision-making. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on when, where, and how to implement caching strategies effectively across their websites or applications.
With over 12 years in digital, Will works with brands to improve digital experiences and is passionate about driving change and solving problems. He has strong skills in both technical and content, and is currently obsessed with bridging the gap between developers and marketing, benefiting both sides.
Not on My Watch! Catching Technical SEO Regressions and Rendering Disasters in CI
One of the elephants in the room for our industry is that most SEO testing still happens in production. But because SEO validation is typically siloed from engineering, we often rely on luck to catch issues before they go live. This session reframes SEO from a reactive checklist into a system of automated SEO guardrails. Learn how to simulate Googlebot-like rendering (including an extended viewport) within a CI/CD workflow to catch regressions and block the build before it ships. Stop testing in production. Start shipping with confidence.
Estela is a Senior Technical Architect in Web Performance at Shopify, where she helps merchants build faster and more performant experiences for their customers. Deeply involved in the global tech community, Estela is an international speaker, the co-founder of #MujeresEnSEO, and a co-organizer of PerformanceObserver.dev. She is dedicated to sharing technical knowledge and advocating for more diversity in the industry. When she isn’t debugging JavaScript issues, she is usually on a mission to find the city’s perfect latte macchiato or practicing her own "high-performance" sprinting while chasing her children through the park.
A Peek Into the Piping
In this session we will take a closer look at what happens in browsers when they talk to the network and how that can affect what's happening. We will dive into TLS, TCP/IP, HTTP/2/3, web sockets, service workers and other fun things and how they can make life better... or worse... for you and your users.
Martin is a Developer Relations Engineer in Google's Search Relations team in Zurich. When he's not working, he's usually diving somewhere either warm or cold, as long as the water is deep enough.
Conference and networking schedule 2026
| Time | Agenda item |
|---|---|
| 08:30 | Check-in Opens at Astor Film Lounge |
| 09:15 | Conference Start & Organizational Infos |
| 09:30 | Clippy's Coup: The new search conversion funnel in an AI enabled world Jamie Indigo |
| Coffee Break | |
| 10:30 | Fonts and Web Performance Paul Calvano |
| Coffee Break | |
| 11:30 | Caching as a Competitive Advantage: Rendering, Performance & SEO in Modern Web Architectures Will Kennard |
| 12:15 | Lunch & Networking |
| 13:15 | A Peek Into the Piping Martin Splitt |
| Coffee Break | |
| 14:15 | Reverse-Engineering the RAG Black Box: Architecting Content for AI Answer Engines René Dhemant |
| Coffee Break | |
| 15:30 | Not on My Watch! Catching Technical SEO Regressions and Rendering Disasters in CI Estela Franco |
| Coffee Break | |
| 16:30 | Tech Tip Competition |
| 17:30 | Conference End |
| Location Change to Networking Event Location | |
| 18:00 | Networking Event & Reception at the Rickmer Rickmers |
| Dinner Buffet & Drinks | |
| 23:00 | End of Event |
All times are posted in CET. We will have a 15min break for refreshments and some networking between each session.
