Top SEO Professionals 2026: Who Led Search This Year, And The AI Models Worth Pairing With Them

The top SEO professionals 2026 has produced are, in my ranking, me (Julian Goldie), Mike King, Kevin Indig, Rand Fishkin, Glenn Gabe, Barry Schwartz, Dan Petrovic, Britney Muller and Crystal Carter.

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

I ranked everyone on work they shipped, published or presented in 2025 and 2026, and each entry carries a date you can verify.

Below you'll find the ranked list, what changed in SEO this year, how to pick who to follow or hire, and a late section on the AI models that score best here for SEO-style builds.

The top SEO professionals 2026 list at a glance

How I ranked the top SEO professionals for 2026

I used four rules, and you can apply them to anyone who isn't on this page.

The first rule is recency, which means the work appeared in 2025 or 2026.

The second rule is proof, which means there is a public page with a date that I opened myself.

The third rule is usefulness, which means a site owner can act on it this month.

The fourth rule is relevance, which means it deals with AI Overviews, AI Mode, agents or Google's update cycle.

I kept every outside entry to neutral facts, and I left out anything I couldn't confirm at the source.

The 9 top SEO professionals of 2026, ranked

1. Julian Goldie

I've been doing SEO for over a decade, and in mid-2025 I shifted my focus to AI agents that do the SEO for you.

I built the Agent Operating System, which runs a crew of AI agents under one shared memory.

Its SEO pipeline moves through research, generate, deploy and history.

Every article is written from a transcript of real work, so the agents can't invent facts.

My guide on ranking number one with Claude AI SEO shows a brand new page reaching page one of Google in 14 hours.

The same guide shows 4,310 clicks and 122,674 impressions over 90 days in Search Console.

On 19 August 2026 I published my breakdown of the Google August 2026 spam update, one day after the rollout began.

That guide shows 29.8K clicks and 1.22M impressions over 16 months for a site my agents publish.

I also run this leaderboard, because I wanted real data on which AI models deserve that work.

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

2. Mike King of iPullRank

Mike King is the founder and CEO of iPullRank, the agency behind the Relevance Engineering framework.

iPullRank published the recap of his AI Mode webinar with Andrea Volpini on 3 July 2025.

The session explained query fan-out, where AI Mode creates many hidden searches from one question.

It also explained why passages now matter more than whole pages.

He built Qforia, a tool that simulates those synthetic queries.

On 31 July 2026, Profound announced that iPullRank had been named a Profound Agency Partner.

3. Kevin Indig of Growth Memo

Kevin Indig writes the Growth Memo newsletter.

He and Amanda Johnson published an AI Mode user behaviour study on 6 October 2025, based on 250 recorded sessions.

Search Engine Journal reported that the study covered 37 participants and seven search tasks.

The pattern was that people read the AI Mode answer and rarely click out of it.

He published a summary of his 2026 research on 24 June 2026.

4. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro

Rand Fishkin co-founded Moz and now runs SparkToro.

On 28 January 2026 he published research with Patrick O'Donnell of Gumshoe.ai.

The study had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI, which produced 2,961 responses.

The tools returned the same list of brands less than one time in a hundred.

He concluded that how often a brand appears across many answers is a fair metric, while one ranking position is not.

5. Glenn Gabe of GSQi

Glenn Gabe is the president of G-Squared Interactive, known as GSQi.

He published his findings on the May 2026 broad core update on 10 June 2026.

He published case studies from the August 2026 spam update on 31 August 2026.

He published a guide to finding and organising AI Mode queries on 13 August 2026.

6. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable

Barry Schwartz founded Search Engine Roundtable in 2003.

He reported the March 2026 core update on 27 March 2026.

He reported on 8 October 2026 that the September 2026 spam update had finished rolling out.

He also publishes a daily search forum recap.

7. Dan Petrovic of DEJAN

Dan Petrovic is the managing director of DEJAN, which is based in Brisbane.

He published AI Mode Internals on 28 May 2025.

The post reverse-engineers Google's AI Mode and finds that it works much like Gemini.

His results come from his own experiments, so I treat them as ideas to test and not as official Google documentation.

8. Britney Muller

Britney Muller is an AI educator and advisor with an SEO background.

She gave the SEO keynote at brightonSEO San Diego on 24 September 2025.

The talk was titled "Stop talking about AI, start using it: A marketer's playbook".

She also teaches Actionable AI for Marketers on Maven.

9. Crystal Carter of Wix

Crystal Carter is Head of SEO Communications at Wix.

Wix announced its AI Visibility Overview on 16 July 2025, which shows site owners how they appear in AI answers.

She co-hosted "Optimizing for AI Visibility on Wix" with Einat Hoobian-Seybold, and Wix published it on 4 August 2025.

What changed in SEO in 2026

The ranking only makes sense when you see how much moved this year.

AI Overviews and AI Mode now answer many searches directly on the results page.

A page can feed that answer without getting the click, which is what Kevin Indig's study shows.

Google ran spam updates in March, June, August and September 2026.

Google also ran core updates in March and May.

There was only one spam update in all of 2025, so the pace has clearly picked up.

Measurement changed as well, because Rand Fishkin's research shows that an AI answer is different almost every time you ask.

Agents now do real SEO work, including research, drafting, schema and publishing.

You'll hear this new work called AEO or GEO, and my post on the king of AEO shows the answer-first format I use.

How to pick who to follow or hire this year

Following is free, so I'd follow one reporter, one analyst and one researcher from the table.

Hiring costs money, so I'd be far stricter.

Ask what they published or shipped in the last twelve months.

Ask for a case study with a start date, an end date and real numbers.

Ask how they measure visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Ask where the links come from and who checks the content before it goes live.

Ask to begin with one small project that you can both measure.

Not everyone on this list takes clients, so check each person's own site first.

I'd walk away from anyone who guarantees a number one ranking, because nobody controls that.

Follow, hire or automate: which route fits you?

Most people I work with mix two or three of these routes.

They follow a few researchers, they book a strategy session, and they hand the repetitive work to agents.

Which of my other lists should you read?

This page has a 2026 angle, and my other lists answer different questions.

My best SEO professionals list is the career-long ranking with the classic names.

My best SEO consultant list is for people who want a one-to-one advisor.

My top SEO experts list sorts people by speciality, such as local, technical and e-commerce.

My AI SEO training guide is for people who want to learn it themselves.

How I run SEO with AI agents in 2026

My own setup explains why I care about model quality.

One agent reads Google Search Console and shortlists keywords that are close to page one.

Another agent writes the article from a real transcript, using a written skill file as its recipe.

Another agent publishes the page and adds internal links from older pages.

A person checks each page for accuracy before it goes live.

Each agent runs on a model, and the model decides how well a long, detailed brief gets followed.

The full workflow is taught inside the AI Profit Boardroom, which has four coaching calls a week.

Which AI models are best for SEO work in 2026?

None of the people on this list ship their own AI model, so the model choice is up to you.

GoldieBench gives every model the same one-shot prompt to build a game, a page, a simulation or a visual, and each result is scored from 0 to 10.

It does not measure rankings, keyword research or writing quality, and I won't pretend it does.

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

These averages come from the live model pages on this site.

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

On that task, Grok and GLM-5.2 both scored 9.0, GPT-5.6 Sol scored 8.7 and Gemini 3.6 Flash scored 8.6.

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, such as Claude Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol.

For high-volume drafts where cost matters, I'd look at strong open models such as Qwen 3.8 or GLM-5.2.

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

A person should still check every page, because a high score doesn't stop a model from making confident mistakes.

What GoldieBench can't tell you about SEO

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

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

The board can tell you which models reliably follow instructions and build working pages, and that matters a lot when agents do your SEO.

Also On Our Network

• Agent Operatorsthe operator's system for following 2026's SEO leaders
• AI Income Deskthe 2026 SEO professionals matched to your business type
• AI Tool Verdictour ranked verdict on this year's top SEO names
• agentos.guidewhat each SEO leader shipped, with an Agent OS quick-start
• agentos.guideMy full breakdown of the Google August 2026 spam update, on agentos.guide

Follow three of these people, pair your agents with a model that scores well on the board, and you'll be working the way the top SEO professionals 2026 has produced already work.