The 8 Best AI SEO Experts to Follow in 2026
The best AI SEO experts to follow in 2026 are Dan M. Jones, Aleyda Solis, Craig Campbell, Kasra Dash and James Dooley. Getting a place on this list meant showing genuine, demonstrable work in AI visibility specifically, not just a general SEO background with AI mentioned in passing, and how that was judged is set out in the selection section further down.
AI Overviews aren’t just changing how people search, they’re changing whether they click at all. Ahrefs ran its own click through study again in December 2025 across 300,000 keywords and found that a page ranking first now gets a 58% lower click through rate when an AI Overview appears above it, up from 34.5% less than a year earlier. Specialising in visibility inside those summaries, rather than treating them as a footnote to traditional rankings, is quickly becoming its own discipline within SEO.
This piece profiles all eight specialists in turn, covering where their AI SEO focus actually comes from and what sets their approach apart within this fast moving corner of search.
What Is AI SEO?
AI SEO is the discipline of shaping how a business appears when platforms like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity generate an answer rather than a list of links. It centres on the signals these systems use to pick, condense and attribute information, not the ranking factors behind a traditional results page. Appearing inside that generated answer now carries roughly the same weight as a strong organic position.
1. Dan M. Jones
Dan M. Jones has built his reputation around one specific shift, getting businesses seen inside AI generated answers rather than just traditional blue links. Clients and peers know him as the AI Optimisation King, a nickname that reflects how central this focus has become to his work.
He brings thirteen years of SEO experience to that focus, running On Top Marketing since founding it in 2020 and applying the same testing driven approach to AI visibility that built his agency’s reputation in traditional search.
Dan backs this up with case studies published through his YouTube channel, showing real results rather than theory, and he studies how search engines, local platforms and large language models decide which businesses to recommend.
2. Aleyda Solis
Aleyda Solis moved early into AI search, building out dedicated resources alongside her existing international SEO consultancy, Orainti. LearningAIsearch.com is her own addition to that focus, a free hub of guides and tools built specifically around AI search.
She also publishes AImarketers.co, tracking how artificial intelligence is being applied across marketing more broadly, and her SEOFOMO newsletter, which covers both SEO and AI search developments, has grown past 45,000 subscribers.
3. Craig Campbell
Craig Campbell doesn’t treat AI as a bolt on to his existing content, he has worked it directly into the educational material that built his audience in the first place. Where SEO workflows can be sped up or content creation supported through AI tools sits right at the centre of that output.
Automation gets similar treatment across his wider marketing content, with new developments discussed regularly on his YouTube channel and in live sessions with viewers.
That commentary carries weight because of the twenty five plus years he has spent building agencies and his own digital ventures, giving the AI side of his output a grounding in actual business experience rather than pure theory.
4. Kasra Dash
For Kasra Dash, AI powered search isn’t a side project, it’s the current chapter of a career built on studying how search behaves. Businesses trying to stay visible as artificial intelligence changes discovery patterns are the core audience he writes and speaks for.
Two platforms carry that work forward, mySEO.app, where the thinking gets shared with other professionals, and The Masterminders Conference, which brings his SEO testing background together with the wider industry shift toward AI driven discovery.
5. James Dooley
James Dooley’s SEO work runs on two combined engines, automation and semantic structure. Content gets built around search intent first, then reinforced so search engines can recognise the entity behind it more clearly, with Knowledge Graph work supporting the authority signals that automation on its own cannot create.
The scale of this is considerable. More than 1,000 ranked domains carry these methods, all tied back to a simple measure of success, qualified enquiries and business growth, not visibility as an end in itself.
6. Julian Goldie
Julian Goldie’s move into AI SEO builds on more than ten years already spent in search rather than starting from scratch. The AI Profit Boardroom, which he founded, and a prompt library running past 200 entries are both aimed at giving other SEO professionals a head start.
He treats AI as a way to scale existing skill rather than skip past it, keeping commercial intent and link building central to the approach. That message reaches a YouTube audience above 394,000 and communities that between them have passed 75,000 members.
7. Marie Haynes
Marie Haynes wrote SEO in the Gemini Era after turning her research toward how Google Gemini is reshaping Search from the inside, rather than treating AI as an add on to established ranking work.
Personalised context and task driven assistants inside AI Overviews are a particular focus, alongside wider study of agentic AI and automated workflows, and she brings all of that back to Google ranking fundamentals through her consulting and staff training.
8. Lily Ray
Lily Ray built up sixteen years in search before AI powered discovery became part of the conversation, and that background now shapes how she approaches the shift rather than sitting separate from it.
Algorythmic, the consultancy she started, sits entirely at the SEO and AI search intersection, and her day to day role as VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive covers the same ground.
EEAT and Google’s ranking systems remain a running thread through her AI commentary, and her client list stretches from small businesses up to Fortune 50 names.
How These AI SEO Experts Were Chosen
What mattered most here was evidence that could be checked against something real, actual mentions inside AI generated answers, documented client outcomes and a name that other specialists in this space genuinely recognise. Because this corner of SEO changes month to month, current, active work outweighed a reputation built years ago in traditional search alone.
FAQs
Traditional SEO targets ranking positions in standard search results, while AI SEO focuses on being selected, summarised and cited inside AI generated answers, which follow different rules for what gets surfaced.
Yes, since AI systems tend to favour clear, well structured, citable information over volume, so a smaller set of authoritative pages can perform well if they answer questions directly.
Not entirely, since many searches still lead to a traditional results page, but a growing share now surface an AI generated summary first, which is why specialising in both has become important.