Semrush on Spotlight 2026: AI Search, Brand Visibility, and a London Conference for Marketing Leaders

The useful part

A Conversation With Semrush On AI Search, Brand Visibility And Spotlight 2026. This year's Spotlight is the first to combine the brand visibility insights of Adobe and Semrush, following the recent completion of the company acquisition in April 2026. TechRound spoke with Leigh McKenzie, Director of Online Visibility at Semrush, an Adobe company, to chat all things AI visibility and Spotlight, ahead of the conference.

How it works

• Spotlight is our flagship marketing conference, and this year we're orienting everything around what's happening with AI search and brand visibility.
• We still believe SEO and search marketing are fundamental, but the scope has been expanding for years now.
• Spotlight is bringing together senior marketing leaders to learn how to stay visible in the age of AI and win what's next.
• We're talking about how AI search is fundamentally changing how people discover, compare, and choose brands.
• To win AI visibility with users on LLMs, your third-party content is just as important as your owned properties.

What to take from it

What we haven't seen is any decline in people seeking to solve problems and consumers buying things they need, and search is critical to that. Content that drives views on YouTube, impressions and interactions on social media, and comments on Reddit is worthwhile, because of the impact it has on brand and downstream conversions. We're investing in YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn as inputs to search, partly because they rank directly on the results page: you'll see AI Overviews, then the top three videos, blog posts, and an interesting LinkedIn conversation.

Example or evidence

• We're still managing hundreds blog posts on the Semrush blog, plus our knowledge base and support articles.
• The main conference is on 13 October, and we're also running a pre-event AI Search Bootcamp that gets more into the weeds on how to actually approach AI search, including our framework for building brand...
• We want to bring all the different departments together and show them how they fit into this ecosystem, how they can use the new tools and technology, and how to build the organisational awareness and...
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Details worth keeping

As leading brand visibility platform Semrush's premier marketing conference, this year's Spotlight centres the conversation on AI search and brand visibility for SEOs, digital marketers, marketing leaders, and CMOs navigating the shift to AI-driven discovery. There Are Plenty Of Marketing Conferences Out There. Amsterdam has been a fantastic home for Spotlight over the past two years, and it remains an important hub for us.

Related coverage

• Venturebeat: Presented by Contentful Most marketing teams still measure visibility the same way they always have: rankings, click-through rates, and organic traffic.
• Hubspot: AI search optimization tools help marketers understand where a brand appears in answers, which sources earn citations, and what to improve next.
• Hubspot: Something big just shifted in how people find answers online.
• Martechseries: New benchmark study reveals AI models agree on top brands in under 1.5% of queries, prompting SEOPulse to launch real-user session tracking for enterprise marketing teams across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.