Written by Lidia Vijga
For a founder, if customers can’t find you, nothing else matters, and the rules for getting found are being rewritten right now. Not long ago, a useful page and a solid ranking meant traffic showed up on its own. That deal is breaking. AI Overviews are already driving a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page, and it’s not going back.
An AI model now sits between you and your customer, deciding how to describe your company and whether to name you at all. How AI interprets your brand, the sources it leans on and the answers it keeps repeating, is fast becoming a founder’s real edge.
Ahrefs Evolve returns to San Diego on October 12, and the lineup tells you exactly where search is headed. I went through the agenda for both days and pulled the 9 speakers whose sessions will actually change how your startup gets found.
Alina Vandenberghe, Chili Piper
Alina Vandenberghe co-founded and bootstrapped Chili Piper into a category leader, so she’s the rare speaker who’s actually built a company from zero.
The talk: “How We Built 1,000 Agents by Making Failure Promotable”
She’s sharing how Chili Piper built a culture that rewards AI experimentation instead of punishing the misses, plus the org structure behind it. Her mastermind, “How to break through the noise,” gets into building a brand people remember.
For bootstrapped founders, this one is a must. Alina grew a company the lean way, so her playbook actually fits a tight budget.
Rand Fishkin, SparkToro
Rand Fishkin publishes the zero-click research everyone else quotes on X and Linkedin. His latest: 68% of Google searches now end without a single click, according to SparkToro.
The talk: “The New Way the Web Works: Zero Clicks, Declining Traffic, No Attribution, Yet More Influence than Ever”
He’s bringing the charts and data to back a different kind of marketing, one built for how buying actually works now: influence over traffic, measurement over attribution, and giving your audience what they want instead of pouring your budget into Google and Meta ads.
For founders who still feel pressure to chase traffic numbers, that’s exactly the evidence you need.
Tim Soulo, Ahrefs
Tim Soulo is Ahrefs‘ CMO, and the company’s whole business is helping people get found, so he’s speaking from the data behind one of the most-used toolsets in search.
The talk: “How to make your business DISCOVERABLE in the age of AI”
He’s walking through how discovery is changing as AI reshapes search, and he’s teasing new Ahrefs tools built for it. Expect a practical read on how LLMs decide what to surface and what that means for your site.
For founders, the product announcements alone are worth watching, since they tend to signal where the tooling market heads next.
Ethan Smith, Graphite
Ethan Smith is the founder and CEO of Graphite, a premium vertical AI growth agency that runs SEO for a long list of venture-backed startups, so he’s seen what drives growth across tech companies.
The talk: “The 5% Of AEO & SEO: Research Backed High Impact Strategies”
He’s cutting SEO and answer-engine optimization down to the few moves that actually drive results, backed by his own research, and showing which common tactics you can safely ignore.
If you’re doing marketing between standups and sales calls, this is the prioritization you’ve been missing.
Ross Hudgens, Siege Media
Ross Hudgens built Siege Media into a content agency known for earning links and citations at scale, which is exactly the skill set that now decides whether AI answers mention you.
The talk: “PR for Machines: Earning Coverage That LLMs Repeat”
He’s breaking down how to earn the kind of coverage and citations that LLMs pick up and repeat, with placement frameworks and a data strategy you can copy. And his hands-on mastermind, “Content That Gets Cited,” goes deeper into the on-page side.
If AI answers are going to quote someone, this is how you become the one they cite, without an ad budget.
Aleyda Solis, Orainti
Aleyda Solis is the founder of Orainti and one of the most respected independent SEO consultants working today, known for shipping checklists and frameworks rather than theory.
The talk: “Ecommerce in the Age of AI Search: Shifts, Risks, and Strategic Moves”
She’s mapping how AI search changes ecommerce, from agentic shopping to new visibility risks, and what to actually do about it. Her mastermind, “International SEO in an AI Search Era,” covers what’s changed for cross-border growth and what hasn’t.
If you sell products or sell across borders, you’ll walk away with specific steps that you can apply right away.
Ross Simmonds, Foundation AI and Distribution
Ross Simmonds is the founder of Distribution.ai and Foundation, a B2B content marketing agency, and the Amazon bestselling author of Create Once, Distribute Forever. He’s known for turning content distribution into a growth engine, and has worked with organizations around the world, from fast-growing startups to global brands.
The talk: “How To Win In The New Search Era: Reddit, YouTube & Backlinks”
He’s showing how Reddit, YouTube, and backlinks drive visibility in both Google and LLM results, with a distribution playbook built for small teams. His mastermind, “The State Of Reddit In The SERP & LLMs,” zooms in on why Reddit keeps showing up in answers.
For founders without a big content budget, this is channel strategy you can run yourself.
Austin Lau, Anthropic
Austin Lau does growth marketing at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, so he’s running these plays inside a team operating at the AI frontier.
The talk: “AI as a Force Multiplier for Your Marketing Team”
He’s sharing a framework for where AI actually multiplies a marketing team’s output, from automation to custom tooling, and where humans still matter. His workshop, “An Honest Conversation on Why AI Adoption in Marketing Is Hard,” digs into why most teams stall.
If you run marketing with 2 people and a stack of AI agents, you’ll leave knowing how to automate the right work and where a human still does it better.
Harry Dry, Marketing Examples
Harry Dry built Marketing Examples into a widely read marketing newsletter by being relentlessly simple and he teaches copywriting better than almost anyone.
Mastermind: “Copywriting Cardio: Learn to Write by Actually Writing”
It’s a hands-on writing workshop, nine rounds of actually writing, not slides about writing. He’s also giving a day two talk on making your work land: “The Half Hour You Learn How to Write a Story: The Opposite of Storytelling”.
If you write your own landing pages and homepage copy (and at the early stage, you do), make time for both the workshop and the talk.
Why Ahrefs Evolve matters for founders
Search is shifting faster than most playbooks can keep up, and Evolve has gathered the people rewriting them. Across 2 days in San Diego, these speakers will map where AI search is heading and what founders should do about it.
What founders publish now becomes the source AI answers quote and the data future models learn from. That’s a rare opening: the founders who move now get cited before the category gets crowded and become the default answer in their space.
