On March 25th, 2026, at the Inter Expo Center, SERP Conf. Sofia 2026 once again gathered professionals from 20+ countries for its Eastern Europe Edition. The event delivered curated expertise, strategies engineered to scale beyond academic knowledge or theories, and high-class networking, as it has done during its 6 editions so far – 4 in Bulgaria and 2 in Austria.
Below, notes from the event – by Mihnea Beldescu.
Full list of follow-ups:
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. Sofia 2026 – guest post by Mihnea Beldescu (Inter Expo Center, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2026.03.25) – eCommerce News
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. Vienna 2025 (October 14, 2025, Vienna, Austria) – eCommerce News
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. – Eastern Europe Conference (Inter Expo Center, Sofia, 2025.03.25) – eCommerce News
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. 2024 (Vienna, Austria, 2024.10.30) – eCommerce News
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. Sofia 2024 (2024, 18 & 19 April, Sofia – Bulgaria) – eCommerce News
- Follow-up: SERP Conf. 2023 (Sofia, Bulgaria – October 12, 2023) – eCommerce News
- Follow-up: SERP Light Conf. 2021 (online – 2021.10.20) – eCommerce News
Written text follow-up
Search Is Changing. So Is Everything Else.
The conference was held in Sofia — a city that feels like it’s figuring itself out in real time. Coffee shops with good espresso on every block, Soviet-era buildings standing next to new construction, your Uber driver with opinions about large language models. That last detail came from one of the speakers, Alexandra Tanasă, and it stuck: AI has made search interesting for everyone now. Not just the people in the industry. Everyone. Which means everyone has an opinion, everyone has a strategy, and nobody’s quite sure what success looks like anymore.
That chaos turned out to be the unofficial theme of the day.
The End of Owned Marketing
Here’s the thing that’s quietly unsettling about the current moment: the brand experience you control is no longer the whole story. Luiza de Lange, who flew in from Sweden, laid out the numbers. The generative AI market is on its way from roughly $16 billion to $85 billion by 2029. ChatGPT alone now handles over 2.5 billion searches a day. And it’s not just retrieval anymore — it’s agentic. AI bots are starting to handle the entire journey from discovery to purchase without ever routing a user through your website.
When that happens, your brand isn’t your website. Your brand is your entire digital footprint — every Reddit thread, every review, every mention across the web that an AI can cite. Brands used to obsess over the owned experience. That era is ending.
For SEO people who spent years optimizing for Google’s crawler, this is a reckoning. But it’s also, as Alexandra put it, the biggest opportunity in the industry. The old SEO was technical execution. The new one is central strategy.
Found, Trusted, Picked
Alexandra Tanasă, Head of Content Marketing at Vertify, described the three-part job of modern SEO in a way that actually feels useful. Your brand needs to be found — which still means visibility, but not just in the traditional sense. It needs to be trusted — authority and social proof that lives outside your own site. And it needs to be picked — which means showing up with the right information at the moment a decision is being made, not just driving traffic and hoping.
This requires getting out of the traffic vanity metric. Stop reporting on sessions. Start reporting on bottom-funnel leads and actual business value. The quality of attention matters more than the quantity of it.
It also requires collaboration that most SEO teams don’t have. Alexandra’s argument: you need the PPC team testing which keywords and questions convert before you build organic content around them. You need sales and support staff feeding you real customer objections — not the ones from keyword tools, which she called „lame.” You need brand and social adding flavor and trust signals to content that’s useful but otherwise bland. Silos are the enemy.
The Data Paradox
One of the more honest moments came from the AI & SEO panel. The question: does owning better data become more important than creating content?
Yes — but not in the way people expect. Most organizations already have enough content. The problem is structural. It’s sitting there, underleveraged, poorly connected. The challenge isn’t production; it’s making what exists actually work.
But then the conversation shifted to a harder question: when AI starts answering questions directly, what happens to traffic? What does SEO ROI even look like then?
Martin Milanov from myPOS gave a direct answer. Semantic coverage matters more than ever. Cover a content space thoroughly — even topics with zero traditional traffic potential — and you build authority that shows up in AI-generated responses. Smaller total numbers, but conversions can hold or improve. The panel’s consensus: stop measuring in blue links. Measure in brand presence in prompts.
Alexandra’s version of this: success is whatever you and your team agree it is. Some brands care about how they appear in certain prompts. Others care about traffic. Neither is wrong. Just make sure everyone’s aligned.
The Technical Layer Nobody Talks About
Luiza de Lange’s talk got into the mechanics that most marketers skip. LLMs don’t read pages the way Google does. Many — including ChatGPT and Claude — skip JavaScript entirely to save on processing costs. If your essential content is loaded dynamically, it may as well not exist for these systems.
The practical implications: raw HTML matters. CDN blocking (Cloudflare, for example) can get you flagged. Server response times affect bot access. And since bots don’t scroll, put the critical information at the top — not buried in a carefully constructed narrative arc.
There’s also a persuasion paradox. AI systems don’t care about your marketing nudges or your carefully crafted brand voice. They want factual, clear, straightforward information. The instinct to load pages with persuasive copy is now a liability.
The Performance Max Reality
Over in the Google Ads panel, Stefka Georgieva cut through the hype around Performance Max with a simple reality check. It needs roughly 50 conversions in your account history before it can optimize properly. No tracking, no data, no magic bidding strategy — it just won’t work.
The analogy from the moderator: it’s like having a board of directors and lying to them. The algorithm can’t succeed if you don’t give it accurate information. Businesses that refuse to share data „because privacy” aren’t being cautious — they’re opting out.
On AI Max (AMX), the Bulgarian market verdict was blunt: it doesn’t work well yet. But the same was said about Performance Max two years ago. The advice: test it on your worst campaign, be patient, revisit in a year.
Lead Quality and the Form Filter
A persistent problem: traffic looks fine, leads are garbage. The panel had different perspectives on this, but some practical advice surfaced.
One approach: add a qualifying step. Not three fields — add a fourth. Force the person to make a decision (budget, timeline, something) before they submit. Fewer total leads, significantly more qualified.
For larger operations with data: build a scoring system, upload lists to the algorithm, and let it learn which leads you actually want. Tell the system who to exclude, not just who to target. If you’re generating 5,000 leads a month, you have enough to train it.
The CRO perspective from Luiza: you want friction as low as possible on the front end. The qualifying filter approach works for quantity — but quality starts with listening. One example from the iGaming industry: users were dropping at account creation because password requirements were unclear. Stating the requirements plainly increased accounts created, revenue, and games played. Sometimes the experiment is just watching where people get stuck.
Logistics Will Ruin You
The ecommerce panel surfaced something that gets lost in all the AI discussion: logistics is still the thing that can kill you.
You might skip ads. You might skip SEO. The site might practically run itself. But if there’s no product to deliver, none of it matters. For smaller businesses, building logistics expertise is a financial pit — the world’s largest platforms have entire departments dedicated to this. The advice: don’t reinvent it. Find partners who’ve made the mistakes and learn from them.
On the technical SEO side for ecommerce, three things matter first: ensure search engines and LLMs can actually access your content, verify that categories and products are properly indexed, and check your schema markup. Basic. But that’s exactly where most operations slip.
The Measurement Trap
Kalin Karakehayov, Founder at Seo.Domains, gave a keynote that took a different road entirely. He’s been running a domain business for 12 years — buy domains for $5, a few sell for $500, renew the rest for $5. He describes himself as someone with no discipline, no goals, no willpower. The company still works. He’s spent years trying to understand why.
His model: the brain has priorities. Not achievement. Safety. Not getting kicked out of the tribe. Not going crazy. Everything else is secondary.
His framework divided the internal world into „boxes” and „blankets.” Boxes are measurable — goals, metrics, objects, social expectations. Blankets are immeasurable — self-love, meaning, freedom, growth, connection. Modern work, he argued, runs on boxes. The obsession with measurement started in the Industrial Revolution when humans were treated like factories. We’re still living with that distortion.
The biological argument: measuring progress triggers danger signals in the brain. We counted steps in the Stone Age only to spot cliffs. The moment you quantify, the brain interprets it as threat — and gradually, that accumulated threat makes people feel anxious even while doing nothing. The prescription: stop celebrating small wins. The only thing that matters is whether your curve is going up. Not the milestones. The direction.
This landed strangely in a room full of marketers who live by dashboards. But the underlying point had some resonance: the obsession with measurement shapes what gets measured, and plenty of important things don’t fit on a spreadsheet.
Where Humans Still Matter
Across panels, a through-line emerged. AI executes fast. Human strategy finds the new thing. When everyone has access to the same tools, the tool isn’t the differentiator — it’s knowing which problem to solve next.
Kalin’s version: the internet may crash and rebuild in some other form. The only constant is change. The question isn’t whether to embrace it. It’s whether you’re paying attention to where it’s going.
Martin’s version: think about what happens when there are no blue links at all. When everything is AI-generated based on your search bubble. Professionals who thrive will be the ones who can locate the next iteration, not just optimize the current one.
Alexandra’s version: SEOs need to lead the narrative inside their companies. Shared dashboards, cross-functional collaboration, human-centric strategy — not chasing the algorithm.
What Actually Doesn’t Change
One thing kept surfacing, in different words: trust is at the center. Whether it’s payments, logistics, content, or AI-generated answers — the businesses that will survive the transition are the ones that people trust.
Embedded finance, invisible payments, transparent data practices — the panel on ecommerce put it simply: trust is the product. Technology serves the experience. Not the other way around.
A version of this was discussed at SERp Conf. Sofia. The conference was small, the conversations were specific, and the Sofia coffee was reliably good.
Featured speakers: Alexandra Tanasă (Head of Content Marketing, Vertify), Luiza de Lange (CRO Enthusiast), Kalin Karakehayov (Founder, Seo.Domains). Additional insights from panel discussions with representatives from myPOS, iBank, euShipments, Trackian, Serpact, ADvantage, Minuttia, and Inbound.BG.
