If you run an online store, you probably spend a lot of time trying to get found in search. We all do. But the game has changed. It is no longer just about getting Google to like you. Now you also have to get answered by AI: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode, and the rest. What if you could spend one day learning exactly how to win in this new world straight from the people who are figuring it out right now?
That's what happens at MozCon NY 2026 on July 14. The most experienced search professionals in the country are coming to The Glasshouse at 660 12th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan to share what actually works. And here's the best part: they're not just eCommerce experts. They're people who've cracked AI search before most of the industry even had a name for it. People who've gotten brands cited inside answer engines while everyone else watched their traffic disappear. If they can do that, imagine what they could teach you about selling products online.
This NYC SEO conference is unique because it's a one-day, single-track event. No competing sessions. No deciding which room to be in. No fluff, no filler. Just the good stuff that will actually help your store grow.
Why MozCon NY 2026 Matters for eCommerce Teams (And How to Make the Most of This Event)
Think about your friend group. If all your friends are exactly like you, you probably all have the same ideas, right? That's what happens at eCommerce-only conferences. Everyone's doing the same thing, using the same tricks, making the same mistakes.
But at MozCon New York, you're learning from people in totally different industries. The person next to you might run SEO for a hospital. The speaker on stage might work with software companies or media brands. At first, you might think, "What can they teach me about selling shoes online?"
Here's the thing: search engines and AI answer engines don't have different rules for different businesses. Good optimisation is good optimisation. When someone from a media brand shows you how they keep getting cited by ChatGPT, you can use that same approach to get your products mentioned when shoppers ask AI what to buy. When a SaaS expert explains how they build trust signals, you learn how to make people trust your store with their credit card.
This is exactly why the 2026 lineup matters so much. The entire industry is wrestling with one question this year: what happens to organic traffic when AI answers the question before anyone clicks? That's the kind of breakthrough conversation you get at this New York digital marketing event that you'd never get at a retail-only conference.
How to translate broad search insights into eCommerce-specific strategies
Here's a fun game to play during every session at The Glasshouse: whenever the speaker is talking about a topic, ask yourself, "How can I use this for my store?"
They're talking about how to win Google's visual real estate? Think about your product images and shopping listings. They're explaining how to get a website ready for AI agents? That's how AI will browse and recommend your store. They're showing how digital PR earns citations inside large language models? Perfect, that's how your brand gets mentioned when someone asks an AI for the best product in your category.
The trick is to listen with your "eCommerce ears" on. Every example, every case study, every strategy has a way to apply it to your store. You just have to connect the dots. And if you can't figure it out? Just ask! Speakers at this one-day SEO event in NYC love it when people ask specific questions about their own situations.
Write down three things during each talk: what they said, how you could use it, and what you need to learn more about. This keeps your brain focused on finding useful stuff instead of just listening passively.
The networking advantage of connecting with search professionals beyond retail
Here's something cool: the best advice often comes from people who know nothing about your industry. Why? Because they see problems differently.
At this Midtown Manhattan SEO event, you might sit next to someone who does SEO for a software company. They've never thought about shopping carts or product reviews. But when you explain your biggest problem, they might say, "Oh, we had something similar. Here's what we did." And suddenly, you have a solution you never would have thought of.
These search professionals in NYC have dealt with problems you haven't even encountered yet. AI Overviews and zero-click results hit publishers and media brands first. Now they're coming for eCommerce. But you'll already know how to handle it because you spoke with the right person at lunch.
Plus, these people aren't your competition. The person doing SEO for a law firm is happy to share all their secrets because you're not fighting for the same customers. It's like having friends in different grades who can warn you about which teachers give pop quizzes.
Tom Capper on Billboard SEO: Winning Google's Visual Real Estate
Tom Capper of Moz opens the day with a talk called "Billboard SEO: How to Win Google's Visual Real Estate." His whole argument is built around something every store owner is starting to feel: ranking first organically no longer means what it once did.
For online stores, this is huge. The search results page is now packed with images, shopping carousels, AI summaries, and rich features that push the old blue links further and further down. Just being "number one" doesn't guarantee anyone sees you, let alone clicks through and buys.
Tom is going to show you at MozCon NY 2026 how to win the parts of the page that actually get attention now. For eCommerce, that often means your product images, your structured data, and the visual features Google pulls into the results. It's less about chasing a single ranking position and more about owning real estate across the whole page.
Questions to ask during his session to get eCommerce-relevant insights
Don't be shy during Q&A at this NYC SEO conference. Here are some questions that will get you answers you can actually use:
"Which visual features matter most for product pages versus category pages?" Because what wins for a single product is different from what wins for a whole collection.
"How much does product image optimisation actually move the needle now?" Most stores still upload whatever the manufacturer sent. Is that costing you visibility?
"What structured data do we need to show up in shopping and visual results?" The right schema can be the difference between appearing in a rich result and getting buried.
Tom loves specific examples, so bring real screenshots from your store. "Here's my category page, here's what the results look like, what visual real estate am I missing?" That kind of question gets you personalised advice worth way more than generic tips.
Crystal Carter on Getting Your Website Ready for AI Agents
Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, closes the formal programme with "How to get your website ready for AI Agents." This might be the most forward-looking session of the whole day, and for eCommerce it could be the most important.
Here's what's coming: AI agents are starting to browse the web on behalf of real shoppers. Someone tells an assistant "find me a waterproof jacket under $150 with good reviews," and the agent goes out, reads sites, compares options, and comes back with an answer. If your store isn't readable by that agent, you don't even make the shortlist.
At MozCon New York, Crystal will show you how to make sure your site is one an AI agent can actually understand and trust. That means clean structure, clear product information, machine-readable data, and content that answers the questions agents are asking on a shopper's behalf. Think of it as SEO for a customer who isn't human, but who decides what the human ever sees.
How agent-readiness changes product discovery and sales
The stores that win the next few years won't just be the ones that rank. They'll be the ones AI agents can confidently recommend. That's a different bar. An agent needs to know your price, your availability, your shipping, your returns policy, and why you're a trustworthy place to buy, all in a format it can parse without guessing.
Crystal will likely walk through concrete things you can fix: structured product data, clear and consistent information across your pages, and content that resolves a shopper's question instead of just describing a feature. When an agent can pull all of that cleanly, your products get surfaced. When it can't, you're invisible no matter how good your prices are.
This one-day SEO event in NYC will show you exactly how to get ahead of this shift before your competitors do.
Eric Siu on AI Workflows That Generate Real Revenue
Eric Siu's session is for anyone who's tired of hearing about AI in the abstract and wants to know how it actually makes money. He covers AI workflows that generate measurable revenue, which is exactly the conversation an eCommerce team needs.
There's a lot of noise about AI tools right now. Most of it doesn't translate into sales. Eric focuses on the workflows that do: the repeatable processes that take AI from a fun experiment to a line on your revenue report.
For online stores, this is gold. Think about everything that eats your time: writing product descriptions, building buyer's guides, answering the same customer questions, creating content for every category. Eric's approach is about building systems where AI does the heavy lifting and you keep the quality high, so you can produce more of what actually drives traffic and conversions.
Applying his workflows to your store
The trap most stores fall into is using AI to churn out generic content that nobody, human or algorithm, finds useful. Eric's whole point is the opposite: build workflows that produce content good enough to earn rankings, citations, and sales.
At The Glasshouse, expect him to share actual processes, not theory. The kind of thing you can take back to your team on Monday and start building. Pay close attention to where he draws the line between what AI should handle and where a human needs to stay in the loop. For eCommerce, getting that balance right is the difference between scaling your content and flooding your site with stuff that quietly hurts you.
Debbie Chew on Digital PR and LLM Citations
Debbie Chew's session, "2 Truths and a Lie About Digital PR," tackles something most store owners completely overlook: off-site signals are now where large language models often draw from when they answer commercial questions. When someone asks an AI "what's the best brand for X," the model isn't just reading your site. It's pulling from everywhere your brand is mentioned across the web.
For eCommerce, this changes the game. You can have a perfect product page and still get left out of AI answers if the wider web has nothing to say about you. Digital PR, getting your brand mentioned, reviewed, and talked about on other reputable sites, is becoming a direct input into whether AI engines recommend you.
Debbie will separate what actually works from what people just assume works. That's valuable because digital PR is full of myths, and chasing the wrong ones wastes time and budget.
Why this matters for your store's AI visibility
Think about it like this: an AI engine deciding whether to recommend your store is a bit like a shopper asking around before they buy. If lots of trusted sources mention you positively, you get recommended. If you're a ghost outside your own website, you don't.
At this NYC SEO conference, Debbie will help you understand which off-site efforts feed into LLM citations and which are just vanity. For an eCommerce brand, that means knowing where to spend your PR and outreach energy so your products start showing up in the answers AI gives to buying questions.
Mike King on Preparing for the Death of the Open Web
Mike King, founder of iPullRank, has the most honest session title on the whole calendar: "Preparing for the Death of the Open Web." It lands in the afternoon, and every eCommerce owner in the room should be paying full attention.
Here's the backdrop, and it's sobering. Zero-click searches now account for a majority of all Google queries, and organic traffic from search to websites has dropped sharply, with some publishers reporting they've lost most of their search-driven visits. Google rebuilt its search product in 2026 around AI-powered answers instead of ranked links. The old model, where you rank, people click, people buy, is under real pressure.
Mike isn't there to scare you. He's there to help you build for what comes next. For online stores, that means thinking beyond "how do I rank" and toward "how do I stay discoverable and trusted when the click might never happen." This is the strategic frame for the whole day.
Building a store that survives the shift
The stores that make it through this transition will be the ones that diversify how they get found and don't depend entirely on organic clicks from a Google results page. That means showing up inside AI answers, building direct relationships with customers, owning your email and community, and making sure that when a click does happen, it converts.
At MozCon NY 2026, Mike will give you the bigger picture that ties together everything else you hear that day. Tom's visual real estate, Crystal's AI agents, Debbie's citations, Eric's workflows: they're all pieces of the same answer to the question Mike is asking out loud. Don't leave this session without a clear sense of where your own store is exposed and what you'd do if organic clicks dropped by half next year.
Dominating Answer Engines: The Panel You Can't Skip
One of the day's sessions is a panel discussion on "Top Strategies to Dominate Answer Engines," and it names the players directly: AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. For eCommerce, this is the most practical, hands-on conversation of the day.
These are the engines your future customers are increasingly asking before they ever reach your site. "What's the best budget espresso machine?" "Which running shoes are good for flat feet?" The answer they get shapes what they buy. If your products aren't part of that answer, the sale happens somewhere else.
A panel format means you'll hear several different approaches at once, which is exactly what you want for a problem this new. Nobody has the single right answer yet, so hearing multiple practitioners compare notes is more useful than one polished theory.
Turning panel insights into store strategy
Listen for the concrete differences between the engines. Optimising for ChatGPT isn't identical to optimising for Perplexity or Google's AI Mode. Each pulls from different sources and rewards different signals. For your store, that might mean the same product needs to be presented and supported in slightly different ways depending on where you want to show up.
Take notes on which tools and tactics the panelists actually use, not just the strategy talk. This is the session most likely to hand you something you can test on your store next week.
The Strategic Networking Play: Connecting with NYC's Search Elite
The people at MozCon NY 2026 aren't your typical marketing crowd. You've got serious tech people who speak Google's language. Content creators who get cited by AI engines. Agency owners who've seen inside hundreds of different businesses, all of them wrestling with the same once-in-a-generation shift at the same time.
Why should you care? Because these search professionals NYC trusts with big projects have solved problems you don't even know exist yet. That quiet person taking notes next to you? They might have just figured out how to get a brand consistently cited in AI answers. The chatty group at lunch? One of them probably knows exactly why your product pages aren't getting picked up by shopping features.
The diversity is what makes this Midtown Manhattan SEO event special. At eCommerce conferences, everyone uses the same platforms and fights over the same keywords. Here, you're learning from people in completely different worlds who hit the AI traffic cliff before you did. Learn how they responded, and your store will be ready before the wave fully reaches retail.
How to identify potential agency partners, consultants, and collaborators
Don't try to meet everyone at this NYC SEO conference. That's impossible and exhausting. Instead, look for a few people who could really help your business grow.
Before you go, check out who's speaking and what companies are attending. Make a short list of people you'd love to talk to. Not 20 people, maybe five. Look for people who've solved problems similar to yours, even if they're in different industries.
During the conference, pay attention to who asks smart questions. The person who stumps a panelist with a sharp question probably knows their stuff. The one who shares a helpful tip during a break is someone you want to know. These are the people who actually do the work, not just talk about it.
And here's a secret: the best connections often happen by accident. You're both reaching for the last coffee. You're sitting in the same spot after lunch. You're both processing the same unsettling point from Mike King's talk. These random meetings at The Glasshouse often turn into the best professional relationships.
Post-event relationship building that leads to business opportunities
The conference ends, you go home, and then, don't let those connections die! This is where most people mess up. They had great conversations but never follow up.
Within two days, send a quick message to everyone with whom you really connected. Not a boring "nice to meet you" email. Reference something specific you talked about. "Hey, that approach you mentioned for getting cited in Perplexity? I tried it and my brand started showing up. Thanks for the tip."
Then keep the relationship warm. When you see an article they'd like, send it over. When you solve a problem they mentioned, share your solution. When they post something interesting on LinkedIn, leave a thoughtful comment. You're not asking for anything, you're just being helpful and staying connected.
After a few months of this, amazing things happen. They refer clients to you. They invite you to collaborate on projects. They share insider information about how the AI engines are changing. The relationships you build at this New York digital marketing event can change your business, but only if you put in the effort to maintain them.
Maximizing Your Investment: Pre-Event Prep and Post-Event Implementation
Attending MozCon NY 2026 without preparation is like taking a test without studying. You'll get something out of it, but not nearly as much as you could.
Two weeks before, look at your website with fresh eyes. What's broken? What's not working? Where are you losing to competitors? And this year, add a new question: are you showing up when people ask AI about products like yours? Try a few searches in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode for what you sell, and see if your brand appears. Write down your three biggest problems. These become your focus for the conference.
Research the speakers, but don't just read their bios. Look at their recent work. Watch their talks. Read their posts. When you understand what they care about, you can ask better questions and share examples from your store that relate to their expertise. You get personalised advice instead of generic tips.
Bring real examples from your site to this one-day SEO event in NYC. Screenshots of problems. Analytics showing traffic drops. Screenshots of AI answers that recommend your competitors but not you. Speakers and other attendees love real problems because they're more interesting than theory. "Why is ChatGPT recommending them and not me?" beats "How do I improve SEO?" every time.
Note-taking strategies for the intensive one-day format
A full day of non-stop learning will melt your brain if you're not careful. You need a system for taking notes that actually helps you remember and use what you learn.
Don't try to write everything down. You'll miss the important stuff while scribbling details you'll never use. Instead, focus on three things per session: one big idea that changes how you think, one specific thing you can do right away, and one question you need to explore more.
Use your phone smartly. Take photos of slides with a lot of detail. But don't spend the whole time looking at your screen. The best insights often come from side comments or Q&A, not from the prepared slides. And remember, this is in-person only this year, with no livestream, so what you capture in the room is what you take home.
At the end of each session at The Glasshouse, before you run to get coffee, write one sentence: "The most important thing I learned was." This forces your brain to process and remember. Without this, everything blends together, and you leave confused instead of inspired.
Creating an implementation plan that delivers ROI within 90 days
Here's the truth: most people never put into practice what they learn at conferences. They go back to work, get busy, and forget everything. Don't be like most people.
The day after this Midtown Manhattan SEO event, schedule time to review your notes. Pick three things you can do right away, stuff that doesn't need anyone's approval or any budget. Maybe it's improving your product structured data so AI agents can read it, as Crystal suggested. Maybe it's running the answer-engine searches the panel covered and noting where you're missing.
In week two, tackle something bigger. Build out the structured product data and clean information architecture Crystal talked about. Set up one of Eric's AI content workflows for your product descriptions or buyer's guides. Start a small digital PR push based on Debbie's framework so your brand starts earning the off-site mentions that feed AI citations.
By month three, you should be working on one big change inspired by the conference. Maybe you're rebuilding your category structure around how shoppers actually ask questions now. Maybe you're diversifying away from pure organic-click dependence the way Mike King warned you'd need to. Document everything: what you changed, when you changed it, what happened next.
When your store starts showing up in AI answers and your revenue holds steady even as organic clicks shift, you'll know exactly why. And you'll be ready to sign up for next year before tickets sell out.
Look, there are lots of SEO conferences out there. Most of them are pretty much the same. MozCon NY 2026 is different. It's where the people who really understand where search is heading come to share what's actually working right now, in the middle of the biggest shift the industry has seen in two decades.
This isn't about theory or best practices that worked five years ago. This is about real strategies that real people are using to stay visible as search turns into something new. And because it's just one day at The Glasshouse, you get all the good stuff without the filler.
If you're serious about growing your online store through organic search and AI discovery, this NYC SEO conference is where you need to be. The search professionals NYC trusts most will all be in one room, sharing their secrets. Miss it, and you'll spend the next year trying to figure out what everyone else already knows.
Check out all the MozCon details here to see the full speaker lineup. While planning your conference calendar, consider our guide to the best eCommerce events in 2026 and explore additional upcoming events.
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