Keypers at SEO Restart 2026

SEO is changing faster than ever before. Users are increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity instead of traditional Google searches, and Google itself is responding via AI Overviews. For us as an SEO and GEO agency, it’s therefore essential to know what works in practice. And SEO Restart is exactly the right place to look for answers.

SEO Restart 2026

SEO Restart is the largest Czech conference on search, SEO, optimization, and data. It is organized by the Taste agency (Taste Academy) and took place for the twelfth time this year, as usual in the conference hall of the Staropramen Brewery in Prague’s Smíchov district. Moderator Michael Koch guided the audience through the entire day; questions for the speakers were submitted via the Eventee app, and between sessions, there were two Kahoot quizzes with prizes.

This year's program focused almost entirely on AI and visibility, exploring the topic from many angles: data, technology, content, off-page factors, and warnings about charlatans.

Program from seorestart.cz.

What Was Discussed: Key Takeaways from the Presentations

AI Is Already Generating Revenue—You Just Can't See It (Tomáš Novák)

The share of e-commerce orders generated by AI assistants has doubled in half a year. Analytics show this accounts for roughly 1% of revenue, but according to Tomáš, the actual impact is three to four times that. People learn about the brand through AI responses and then arrive at the website via branded searches on Google. Furthermore, when searching for products, ChatGPT draws from Google Shopping, so a high-quality feed with unique descriptions and complete product details is a direct ticket to AI recommendations.

Each AI recommends a different person (Daniel Duriš)

A study by Basta Digital based on approximately 120,000 data points from the V4 markets showed that the brands that rank highest in AI Overviews are often not the ones recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini. In the finance sector, AI Overviews appear in up to 90% of queries, and in the automotive sector, in about 65%. Interesting fact: chatbots also translate queries into English or Italian in the background, so foreign sources find their way into Czech responses.

Technical SEO Is More Important Than Ever in the Age of AI (Ján Januška)

The golden rule: Don’t block bots—not in robots.txt, not on your hosting server, and not on your CDN. If the server takes longer than 4–5 seconds to respond, ChatGPT’s live fetcher will give up and won’t include your content in its response. Pure client-side JavaScript is a risk; server-side rendering is the safe bet. And the myths? According to Jank’s tests, Markdown versions of pages, llms.txt, and even structured data itself have no direct impact on AI visibility.

What Customers Ask AI (Richard Klačko)

There is no Search Console for AI, so search queries must be simulated. AIVA has an internal tool for this: it generates prompts based on the purchase phase from a detailed brand profile, repeatedly submits them to AI platforms, and tracks whether the brand is recommended first or simply appears on the list. The cited sources then serve as a ready-made list of tips for off-page optimization. The data often reveals purely business-related issues as well, such as a lack of lower-priced products.

A brand isn't built with gimmicks, but over the years (Pavel Ungr)

Pavel used his own story to demonstrate why AI ranks him among the top SEO consultants: twenty years of consistent content, community engagement, and public speaking. AI builds a brand image from independent mentions across the internet, and it essentially boils down to E-E-A-T. Recommendation for businesses: Dedicate roughly 30% of your time or budget solely to building your brand and credibility.

Watch Out for GEO Scammers (Michal Binka)

With the advent of GEO, there has been an increase in offers that promise the impossible. Warning signs: guaranteed rankings or “spots in AI,” secret know-how, references without specific numbers, automated audits of a single URL, and unsolicited calls. The fundamentals remain the same: technical review, keyword analysis, information architecture, and content that matches the searcher’s intent.

Google Ads Data: A Gold Mine for SEO (Krzysztof Marzec)

The top-rated presentation from Poland showed how to gain SEO insights from PPC. Search terms reveal high-performing long-tail queries, negative keywords highlight topics to avoid, and responsive ads allow you to test headlines before you implement them in your title tags. A low Quality Score, on the other hand, can explain why a page isn’t ranking. SEO and PPC should simply work together.

Link Prospecting in the Age of AI Agents (Zdeněk Dvořák)

When responding, AI breaks down a query into dozens of sub-queries (query fan-out), and that’s the new starting point for link building. Zdeněk demonstrated AI agents that, within minutes, categorize hundreds of queries by intent, find relevant websites, verify whether the brand is already mentioned, and locate contacts. Work that used to take dozens of hours is now reduced to minutes, allowing specialists to focus on strategy and personalized outreach.

Feed the Machine with Mentions (Katarina Dahlin)

Whether AI mentions you isn't determined by your website, but by other websites. Katarina presented a five-step process: find prompts, conduct an audit, correct existing mentions, place new ones, and measure results. Brand mentions, brand anchors, and brand search volume correlate most strongly with AI visibility.

What We Take Away from SEO Restart to Apply in Our Work for Clients

The conference confirmed in many ways the direction we’re taking at Keypers, but it also helped us move forward in several areas. These are the things we’ll also be focusing on with our clients:

• Accessibility Audit for AI Bots: Checking the robots.txt file isn't enough. We'll also review CDN settings and security layers (typically Cloudflare), server response time, and content dependency on JavaScript.
• Product feeds as part of SEO: For e-commerce sites, we’ll place greater emphasis on unique descriptions and detailed parameters in XML feeds, since AI draws directly from them.
• Systematic measurement of AI visibility: A one-time “ask ChatGPT” doesn’t tell us anything. Visibility needs to be measured repeatedly, using larger sets of prompts and through the actual interfaces of AI tools, not just via APIs.
• Off-page as the Main GEO Lever: The sources cited by AI serve as a direct guide for link building and PR, ranging from industry magazines to comparison articles and reviews.
• Content written in a “scannable” style: The answer to the main question right at the beginning, and arguments organized into coherent sections so that the layout model doesn’t break them up when dividing the page into sections.
• Linking SEO and PPC data: We want to make greater use of search terms, Quality Score, and headline tests from Google Ads when planning content.

You can find out more about our approach to this topic on our GEO service page.

SEO isn't ending—it's just expanding

This year’s SEO Restart confirmed that AI optimization isn’t a replacement for SEO, but rather another layer of it. A technically well-executed website, high-quality content, and a strong brand with organic mentions across the internet are what matter most on both Google and ChatGPT. Thanks to the Taste agency for the great organization and to all the speakers for sharing their data and expertise. See you again next year.

Are you wondering how to stand out not only in search results but also in AI-generated answers? Get in touch with us—we’d be happy to take a look at where your website and brand stand today and discuss what to do about it. And if you want to stay up to date on industry trends, follow our monthly SEO updates on our blog.