SMX Next 2026 Session Frames SEO, AI Agents and Assistive AI as One Discovery Strategy

SMX Next 2026 will feature a session titled "SEO, agents, and assistive AI: One strategy for the new search ecosystem" on November 18, 2026. The session will be led by Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube SAS, and moderated by Danny Goodwin, Editorial Director of Search Engine Land and SMX. The session aims to explore how brands can prepare for the changing search landscape where users move between traditional search engines, AI answer tools and AI assistants.

The session does not introduce new search products or universal technical standards, but it reflects an emerging strategic view that visibility work may need to support multiple systems that discover, interpret, rank and recommend brands in different ways. This includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Assistive Agent Optimization (AAO).

SEO focuses on visibility in search results, including technical and content signals, while GEO extends this thinking to how AI systems find and cite information in generated responses. AAO considers whether an AI assistant or agent can identify, understand and act on reliable brand information. These concepts overlap, but they are not interchangeable, as SEO addresses visibility in search results and AAO focuses on AI agents and assistants.

The session emphasizes the importance of entity clarity in AI-assisted discovery. AI-driven systems need to resolve basic questions about a business, such as its identity, offerings, products, services, locations, people and authoritative sources. One practical concept associated with AAO is an entity home, a clear web destination that anchors a brand's identity and core facts.

The session also highlights the need for clear, consistent information across key pages and authoritative pages, easy-to-find essential facts, current structured data, and alignment between third-party profiles and a brand's published facts. This strategic approach recognizes that search visibility increasingly depends on a coherent body of evidence about a brand, rather than optimizing individual pages for keywords.