Best SEO Professionals In 2026: The Ranked List, And The AI Models Worth Pairing With Them

The best SEO professionals in 2026, in my ranking, are me (Julian Goldie of Goldie Agency), Rand Fishkin, Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Lily Ray, Mike King, Barry Schwartz and Ross Hudgens.

This is my site and my list, so I've put myself at number one, and I'd rather you judge the evidence than trust the ranking.

Every other name is here because of a long public track record that you can check on their own website.

Below you'll find the ranked list, how to choose an SEO professional, the red flags to avoid, and a late section on which AI models score best on GoldieBench for SEO-style work.

The best SEO professionals at a glance

How I ranked the best SEO professionals

I used four tests, and you can run the same tests on anyone you are thinking about hiring.

The first test is a public track record that has lasted years, such as a company, a publication or a training library.

The second test is whether what they teach or deliver can actually be applied to your own site.

The third test is clarity, so you know whether you can hire them, learn from them or simply follow their updates.

The fourth test is relevance in 2026, when AI Overviews, AI Mode and answer engines sit beside classic rankings.

I only used facts I could confirm on each person's own site or in reputable coverage.

The 8 best SEO professionals, ranked

1. Julian Goldie of Goldie Agency

I've been doing SEO for over a decade, and it started with a cryptocurrency website I built while travelling in Asia.

That site got zero Google traffic for months, and learning link building is what turned it around.

Once it worked on my own affiliate sites, I started selling link building as a service, completely solo.

That became Goldie Agency, a 7-figure SEO and link-building agency in Bangkok with 70+ people.

The agency publishes its case studies, including Prialto doubling its traffic between April 2024 and July 2025 through steady link building.

In mid-2025 I moved my focus to AI agents that do the SEO for you, and I built the Agent Operating System around that idea.

I also run this leaderboard, GoldieBench, because I wanted real data on which models are worth trusting with that work.

You can book a free SEO strategy session or join the SEO Elite Circle if you want my help directly.

2. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz, which started as SEOmoz, and later founded SparkToro, an audience research tool.

He also wrote "Lost and Founder", a book about building a startup.

He's the person I'd read when I want to understand where an audience spends its attention.

3. Brian Dean of Backlinko

Brian Dean founded Backlinko, which Semrush later acquired.

He's widely known for the Skyscraper Technique, and Backlinko's guides remain one of the clearest ways to learn SEO from scratch.

4. Neil Patel of NP Digital

Neil Patel co-founded the agency NP Digital and runs the Ubersuggest SEO tool.

Before that he co-founded Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, and today he publishes a huge amount of free marketing content.

5. Lily Ray

Lily Ray's own site says she founded Algorythmic, an SEO and AI search consultancy, and is VP of SEO and AI Search at the agency Amsive.

She's known for her research on algorithm updates, E-E-A-T and visibility in AI search.

6. Mike King of iPullRank

Mike King founded iPullRank, an agency known for technical SEO, enterprise SEO and content engineering.

He's the person I'd study when a website's problems are deeply technical.

7. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable

Barry Schwartz founded Search Engine Roundtable in 2003, runs the web firm RustyBrick as CEO and writes news for Search Engine Land.

When Google changes something, his site is usually one of the first places it gets reported.

8. Ross Hudgens of Siege Media

Ross Hudgens founded Siege Media in 2012 and grew it from a one-person operation into a content-led SEO agency.

His work shows how content people want to share can earn links without endless cold outreach.

Professionals versus consultants

An SEO professional is anyone doing SEO at a high level, including agency owners, educators, researchers and journalists.

An SEO consultant is a professional you hire one to one for advice on your own site.

If you already know you want a 1:1 advisor, my sister post on the best SEO consultant covers that hiring decision.

How to choose an SEO professional

These are the questions I'd ask before paying anyone a penny.

Ask for case studies with real numbers and real dates, ideally in your own niche.

Ask exactly where links will come from and how the content will be written.

Ask how they handle AI Overviews, AI Mode and other answer engines.

Ask what they will report on each month, and make sure clicks and leads are on that list.

Ask to start with one small project that you can measure before you commit to anything long term.

Red flags when hiring SEO professionals

A guarantee of a number one ranking is a promise that nobody can honestly make.

Secrecy about where links come from usually hides risky placements.

Reports full of impressions with no clicks or leads are often hiding a lack of results.

No public track record means you have nothing to judge.

A long contract before any results puts all of the risk on you.

A plan with no mention of AI search is already out of date in 2026.

Google's spam policies call out link schemes and scaled low-value content, so the method matters as much as the result.

Hire, learn or automate: which route fits you?

Before you pick a name from the list, decide which route you're actually taking.

Most of the people I work with end up mixing routes rather than picking just one.

They learn the basics from free material, hire help for the hard parts like links, and hand the repetitive work to agents.

What the best SEO professionals have in common

When you line these eight people up, a few patterns stand out.

Every one of them has published their thinking in public for years, so you can judge their work rather than their pitch.

Every one of them is specific about their lane, whether that's link building, technical SEO, research or news.

Each of them teaches or delivers something you can check and apply to your own site.

AI search is now part of the conversation for anyone serious about SEO, and that's the biggest shift since mobile.

That's the bar I'd hold any SEO professional to, including people you meet locally.

How I run SEO with AI agents today

Here's what my own setup looks like, because it explains why the model question matters so much.

One agent pulls click and query data from Google Search Console every week.

Another agent drafts answer-first articles with FAQ schema for the queries that are close to page one.

Another agent checks internal links and adds them where they genuinely help the reader.

A person on my team checks every page for accuracy and quality before it goes live.

Each of those agents runs on a model, and the model decides how well the agent follows a long, detailed brief.

That's exactly why I built this leaderboard and why I care which models score well on page builds.

If you want to see the full workflow, it's taught step by step inside the AI Profit Boardroom with four coaching calls a week.

Which AI models are best for SEO work?

This is the question I get most from SEO professionals who have started using AI agents.

GoldieBench is my leaderboard, and it gives every model the same one-shot prompt to build a game, a page, a simulation or a visual, then scores the result from 0 to 10.

It does not measure rankings, keyword research or how well a model writes a blog post, so I won't pretend it does.

What it does measure is how well a model follows a detailed brief and ships a working page first time, which is close to the work an SEO agent does when it builds landing pages and tools.

The most SEO-relevant task on the board is the landing page task, where every model gets the same brief to build a modern marketing landing page in one shot.

These numbers come from the live model pages and the live landing page task on this site.

Claude Opus 5 has the highest single-model average on the board at 8.27, with GPT-5.6 Sol close behind at 8.16.

On the landing page task itself, Grok and GLM-5.2 both scored 9.0, and Fugu Ultra took the win on that task with a 9.0 build as well.

The multi-model Fusion panel averages 8.59 across the board, but it's an ensemble of several models rather than one model.

How I'd use these scores as an SEO professional

For the main brain of an SEO agent, I'd pick a model with a high average and a strong landing page score, such as Claude Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol.

For high-volume drafts where cost matters, I'd look at strong open models like Qwen 3.8 or GLM-5.2, which both score well on the landing task.

For running models on your own machine, the local models board shows which free models are good enough to try.

Whatever model you pick, a person should still check every page before it goes live, because a high bench score doesn't make a model immune to confident mistakes.

What GoldieBench cannot tell an SEO professional

The board can't tell you which model will rank a page, because ranking depends on your site, your links and your competition.

It can't tell you whether a model's facts are correct, so fact-checking stays a human job.

It can tell you which models reliably build working pages and follow detailed instructions, and that's a big part of running SEO with agents.

The best SEO professionals I know test models on their own tasks as well, and I'd encourage you to do the same.

Also On Our Network

• Agent Operatorshow operators can learn from the best SEO professionals
• AI Income Deskthe best SEO professionals matched to your business type
• AI Tool Verdictour ranked verdict on the top SEO experts
• agentos.guidethe Agent OS quick-start for working with SEO experts
• aiprofitboardroom.comWhat the SEO Elite Circle covers, on the AI Profit Boardroom blog

Pick one expert from the list, pair them with a model that scores well on the board, and you'll be working the way the best SEO professionals work.