The hundred SEOs I read
Keeping up in search is a reading problem before it is a skills problem. This is the list I actually read — 65 worldwide and 35 from India — with what each person is working on now and where to follow them. Grouped by the play each one is running, because that is the part worth learning from.
- 100 people
- 65 worldwide
- 35 India
- 9 plays
- 0 paid placements
What the hundred have in common
Nine patterns that hold across the list. The directory below is the evidence for each one.
Own a newsletter.
SEOFOMO, Growth Memo, Core Updates, Ranking Factors, SEO Notebook, #SEOForLunch, Detailed, Leadership in SEO, Duane Forrester Decodes. The top tier almost always controls an email list; LinkedIn is the funnel into it, YouTube in Hindi is how the Indian educators reach scale, and X is where update commentary lives.
Publish research, not opinion.
Rand's zero-click data, Cyrus's tests, Kevin Indig's AI-search studies, Glen Allsopp's monopoly reports, Ahrefs' large-sample AEO studies, Chris Long's Search Console prompt mining, Lily Ray's gullibility tests, Metehan's retrieval reverse-engineering. In the India column, Kunjal Chawhan's case studies are the closest equivalent.
Everyone repositioned for AI search in 2025–26.
Aleyda (LearningAISearch), Mike King (Relevance Engineering), Nathan Gotch (Rankability, AEOconsultant), Lily Ray (Algorythmic is 'SEO & AI Search'), Duane Forrester (UnboundAnswers), Chris Long (Nectiv), Boni Satani (SEO + GEO), Jabez Reuben (LLM visibility). Nobody kept 'SEO' alone in the headline.
Name your method.
Topical Authority Maps, Relevance Engineering, Product-Led SEO, the TSP Method, Entity Home, Skyscraper, the CATT funnel, 'traffic is vanity', the 80/20 framework. A named method is what gets quoted, taught and searched for.
Case studies with real numbers are the currency.
Fery Kaszoni's digital PR videos, Lily Ray's winners and losers, Kunjal's 35-to-3,000-clicks study, Infidigit's and PageTraffic's campaign counts. Claims without a number get scrolled past.
Conferences are the on-ramp, BrightonSEO especially.
Nitin Manchanda, Boni Satani, Tuhin Banik and Himani Kankaria all list it first. India now has a circuit of its own: India SEO Conference (Goa, Jan 2026), SaaS SEO Alliance (Delhi, 11–12 Sep 2026), Amaze (Chandigarh, 10–12 Dec 2026), and Chiang Mai SEO (9–13 Nov 2026) a short flight away.
The 'best SEO expert in India' listicle is a tactic.
Many Indian consultants rank their own list page and put themselves at #1 (Bhushan Parikh, Prempal Singh, Pankaj Kumar, Shanta Narang, Rahul Bajaj, Jay Patel, Yashu Duggal). Kasra Dash and James Dooley do the same worldwide. It works for the query, and it is why those search results are so noisy.
In-house heads who publish get treated like consultants.
Harry Clarkson-Bennett (Telegraph), Lidia Infante (SurveyMonkey), Devendra Saini (MPL), Manish Chauhan (Groww) and the Ahrefs bench (Soulo, Stox, Law, Oh) build the brand from inside a company role plus one public channel.
The gap in the India column.
No India-based name here combines technical and international SEO with public case studies and an owned newsletter. The two closest, Nitin Manchanda and Kunjal Chawhan, both sit at Botpresso, and Nitin works from Berlin.
Research & data studies
11 peopleThey publish numbers nobody else has: tests, leak analyses, update post-mortems, survey data. The most-quoted people in SEO are here.
Kevin Indig
Growth advisor; author, Growth Memo
Publishes Growth Memo, a weekly newsletter built on data studies of AI search behaviour and SaaS growth. Advises brands at the scale of Reddit, Dropbox and Meta; previously led SEO at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian.
Lily Ray
VP SEO & AI Search, Amsive; founder, Algorythmic
Rand Fishkin
Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro
Publishes zero-click search studies and audience research from SparkToro data, and broke the 2024 Google API leak. Posts daily on LinkedIn, records 5-Minute Whiteboard videos, and writes with unusual candour about the industry.
Cyrus Shepard
Founder, Zyppy SEO
Glenn Gabe
Consultant, G-Squared Interactive
Olaf Kopp
Co-founder, Aufgesang
Jes Scholz
Independent consultant
Glen Allsopp
Founder, Detailed.com; product marketer, Ahrefs
Brodie Clark
Independent SEO consultant
Andy Crestodina
Co-founder, Orbit Media
Runs the annual blogger survey and practical AI-in-content research, and posts short data-backed lessons on LinkedIn almost daily.
Joy Hawkins
Owner, Sterling Sky
Publishes Google Business Profile experiments and local ranking tests, and runs LocalU and the Local Search Forum.
AI search (GEO / AEO)
8 peopleThe 2025–26 land grab. Most built a named method for getting cited by ChatGPT, AI Mode and Perplexity, and sell tooling or consulting around it.
Mike King
Founder & CEO, iPullRank
Coined 'Relevance Engineering' and publishes long technical teardowns of how AI Mode and query fan-out work. Wrote The Science of SEO, runs iPullRank webinars and courses, and speaks at most major search conferences.
Dan Petrovic
Managing Director, DEJAN
Jason Barnard
Founder, Kalicube
Ethan Smith
CEO, Graphite
Josh Blyskal
Founding team, Profound
Metehan Yesilyurt
GEO researcher, Peec AI; co-founder, AEO Vision
Mostafa ElBermawy
Founder & CEO, NoGood and Goodie AI
Publishes original research on AI citation factors, teaches an AEO course on Maven, and sells Goodie AI as the tooling layer behind the NoGood agency.
Duane Forrester
Founder, UnboundAnswers
News & newsletters
6 peopleAn owned email list is the asset. Daily or weekly, they are the industry's habit.
Aleyda Solis
Founder, Orainti
Runs the SEOFOMO and MarketingFOMO newsletters, built the free LearningSEO.io and LearningAISearch.com roadmaps, and published an AI Search Optimization Checklist. Consults through Orainti, hosts Crawling Mondays on YouTube, and has spoken at 200+ conferences in 30+ countries.
Marie Haynes
Founder, Marie Haynes Consulting
Barry Schwartz
Founder, Search Engine Roundtable; news editor, Search Engine Land
Has covered search news daily since 2004: algorithm chatter, Google statements, tool changes. Weekly video recap and relentless X posting; also runs the RustyBrick dev shop.
Mark Williams-Cook
Director, Candour; founder, AlsoAsked
Writes the Core Updates newsletter, posts 'Unsolicited SEO tips' on LinkedIn, hosts the Search with Candour podcast and built AlsoAsked. Known for query-intent research and Google leak analysis; a BrightonSEO regular.
Nick LeRoy
Freelance SEO consultant
Sends the weekly #SEOForLunch newsletter (12,000+ subscribers) on updates and industry news, freelances on technical SEO, and runs the SEOJobs.com job board.
Steve Toth
Founder, SEO Notebook
Publishes SEO Notebook, a weekly newsletter of one tactic per issue lifted from real client work (16,000 to 19,000 subscribers); founded SEO That Ranks and GScore.
Technical & international SEO
5 peopleSpecialists whose brand is depth: crawling, rendering, hreflang, schema, migrations.
Jono Alderson
Independent technical SEO strategist
Olga Zarr
Founder, SEOSLY
Sells independent SEO audits and publishes visual audit walkthroughs, an SEO podcast and audit templates from seosly.com.
Lidia Infante
Head of International SEO, SurveyMonkey
Leads international SEO at SurveyMonkey (ex-Sanity.io): hreflang, structured data and the technical architecture that increasingly decides AI visibility. Frequent conference speaker.
Nitin Manchanda
Founder & Chief SEO Consultant, Botpresso
Led SEO at trivago and Omio before founding Botpresso; consults on technical and international SEO (log files, JavaScript, hreflang). Speaks at BrightonSEO and International Search Summit and hosts Semrush and Duda webinars.
Jagdish Prajapat
Founder, Technetizens
YouTube & courses
15 peopleReach first, products second. Free video builds the audience; a course, academy or tool monetises it.
Koray Tuğberk Gübür
Founder, Holistic SEO & Digital
Built the Topical Authority Map / semantic SEO framework and sells a course around it. Publishes marathon case-study videos on the Topical Authority YouTube channel and a newsletter.
Britney Muller
Founder, Data Sci 101
Sam Oh
VP Marketing, Ahrefs
Fronts the Ahrefs YouTube channel and free SEO course, the most-watched SEO tutorials in English.
Kristina Azarenko
Founder, MarketingSyrup SEO Academy
Teaches technical SEO through the TSP Method course (30,000+ students), SEO Challenge cohorts and LinkedIn Learning; international speaker.
Neil Patel
Co-founder, NP Digital and Ubersuggest
Nathan Gotch
CEO, Rankability
Repositioned from Gotch SEO Academy (now 'Search OS') to Rankability, an AI search optimisation platform, plus AEOconsultant.ai for tiered AEO consulting. AI SEO For Dummies is due from Wiley in September 2026.
Matt Diggity
Founder, Diggity Marketing and The Search Initiative
Runs The Affiliate Lab course, The Search Initiative agency and a YouTube channel built on test-driven SEO; hosts the Chiang Mai SEO Conference (9 to 13 November 2026).
Craig Campbell
SEO consultant and trainer
One of the largest SEO YouTube audiences, with courses and a community behind it. Talks on 'Personal Brand in an AI World'; headlined India SEO Conference 2025 and is announced for Amaze 2026 in Chandigarh.
Sanjay Shenoy
Partner, Boring Marketing; SEO trainer
Runs the SEO Career Kickstarter program and hands-on workshops for people entering SEO; 16+ years; now teaching AI-assisted workflows.
Deepak Kanakaraju
Founder, Digital Deepak and PixelTrack
Built one of India's largest marketing email lists and the Learn Today platform; the CATT funnel and the Digital Deepak internship program are his signature products.
Sorav Jain
Founder, echoVME Digital and Digital Scholar
Pradeep Chopra
Co-founder & CEO, Digital Vidya
Has run Digital Vidya's digital marketing training since 2009; the company blog publishes ranking lists of Indian bloggers and marketers that themselves rank.
Amit Tiwari
Founder, ClickLocal; YouTube educator
Amit Mishra
Founder, Tryootech, Bizgromedia and Paidboom
Runs the Tryootech YouTube channel on blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing and AI tools in Hindi.
Umar Tazkeer
Founder, UT Digital Media
Consultancy & agency brands
23 peopleThe founder is the marketing. Case studies, LinkedIn and speaking feed the pipeline.
Eli Schwartz
Author, Product-Led SEO; growth advisor
Wrote Product-Led SEO and advises SaaS and marketplace companies on programmatic and product-led search. Newsletter plus contrarian LinkedIn posts on SEO's ROI.
Andrew Holland
Director of SEO, JBH; founder, Growth Through Content
Wil Reynolds
Founder, Seer Interactive
Chris Long
Co-founder, Nectiv
James Dooley
Founder, PromoSEO and FatRank
Fery Kaszoni
CEO, Search Intelligence
Ross Hudgens
Founder & CEO, Siege Media
Scales data-journalism content and content-led link acquisition; publishes agency case studies and its own SEO podcast and YouTube channel.
Ross Simmonds
Founder, Foundation Marketing
Distribution-first content marketing ('Create Once, Distribute Forever'); newsletter, LinkedIn and a growing focus on AI in content.
Ann Smarty
Co-founder, Smarty Marketing
Works on brand signals and Reddit reputation as inputs to AI answers; long-time community builder (MyBlogGuest, Viral Content Bee) with a LinkedIn digest.
Boni Satani
Founder, Growffic
Runs Growffic (SEO and GEO agency, earlier Zestard), delivers link-building masterclasses, and speaks at BrightonSEO and India SEO Conference on D2C growth. Ranked in Favikon's India top 20.
Tuhin Banik
Founder, ThatWare
Positions ThatWare around AI, NLP and 'semantic engineering' for SEO; TEDx and BrightonSEO speaker; author of AI-Powered SEO Secrets.
Navneet Kaushal
Founder & CEO, PageTraffic
Started PageTraffic in 2002 and grew it to 120 people across Delhi, Mumbai, Chicago and London with 10,000+ campaigns. Keynoted India SEO Conference 2025, keynotes Amaze 2026, and blogs on AI-driven SEO.
Kaushal Thakkar
Founder & MD, Infidigit
Prashant Puri
Co-founder & CEO, AdLift
Himani Kankaria
Founder, Missive Digital
Runs a content-driven SEO agency for B2B SaaS and IT companies; BrightonSEO speaker; India SEO Conference session on winning the content game.
Jabez Reuben
Founder, The Blueprints
Grew The Blueprints from a link-building shop into a full-stack SEO partner that now sells AI/LLM visibility work; built LinkValidator and Link File Editor, runs the Link Building Mastery conference, and speaks at SaaS SEO Alliance in Delhi (11 to 12 September 2026).
Navneet Prashar
CEO, Digilligence
Tops Favikon's India SEO list; LinkedIn-native positioning around '7B+ Google impressions' and mentoring 1,000+ marketers.
Twinkle Chatterjee
Founder, ThriveCraft
Semantic and technical SEO for B2B brands, built almost entirely through LinkedIn content.
Rahul Bajaj
Founder, Grow Digital Career
B2B and SaaS SEO consulting with an '80/20 framework for early organic results'; publishes a 'Best SEO consultants in India' list that includes himself.
Mandeep Singh Chahal
Founder, SEO Discovery
Runs a 350+ person agency with 22 years in market and a Forbes Agency Council seat; brands himself 'The SEO King' and publishes influencer lists from the agency blog.
Bhavik Sarkhedi
Founder, Write Right and OhhMyBrand
Deepak Shukla
Founder & CEO, Pearl Lemon Group
Built Pearl Lemon into a multi-division group (SEO, PR, leads, AI) on the back of relentless LinkedIn and video output under the 'deepakseoexpert' handle.
Gaurav Sharma
Founder & CEO, Attrock
Tool & platform voices
17 peopleBorrowed reach: the face of Google, Ahrefs, Wix, Semrush or their own SaaS. Distribution comes with the job.
Andrea Volpini
Co-founder & CEO, WordLift
Bartosz Góralewicz
Founder, Onely; CEO, ZipTie.ai
Bernard Huang
Co-founder, Clearscope
Runs Clearscope and hosts its webinar series; writes about content strategy for AI retrieval and agents, drawing on Clearscope's data.
Crystal Carter
Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix
The public face of Wix's SEO and AI search work: Searchlight SEO newsletter, structured-data and schema content, conference keynotes; runs crystalcarter.ai on the side.
Mordy Oberstein
Head of Brand, SE Ranking and Planable
Ryan Law
Director of Content Marketing, Ahrefs
Writes Ahrefs' research-driven posts on AI search and AEO, plus the Content Concepts newsletter. Ex-VP Content at Animalz; outspoken against AI-generated filler.
Tim Soulo
CMO, Ahrefs
Publishes large-sample studies from Ahrefs data on AI citations and traffic, interviews marketers on the Ahrefs podcast, and posts frank product comparisons.
Patrick Stox
Product Advisor & brand ambassador, Ahrefs
Joost de Valk
Founder, Yoast (exited); partner, Emilia Capital
John Mueller
Search Advocate, Google
Google's long-running voice to SEOs: office hours, the Search Off the Record podcast, and dry reality checks on AEO hype on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Danny Sullivan
Google Search Liaison
Gary Illyes
Analyst, Google Search Relations
Co-hosts Search Off the Record and posts crawling and indexing guidance; his LinkedIn threads regularly become industry news.
Martin Splitt
Developer Advocate, Google Search Relations
Brian Dean
Founder, Backlinko and Exploding Topics
Sold Backlinko to Semrush (2022) and Exploding Topics to Semrush (2024), which finished integrating into the Semrush App Center this year. 2026 output: 'How I'd launch Backlinko in 2026', AI SEO predictions, and a Tim Ferriss episode (April 2026) on selling two companies.
Kyle Roof
Co-founder, PageOptimizer Pro; founder, High Voltage SEO
Runs single-variable ranking experiments and turns them into PageOptimizer Pro and the IMG community; gave the opening keynote at India SEO Conference 2025.
Darren Shaw
Founder, Whitespark
Runs the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey and builds Whitespark's local SEO tools.
Vaibhav Kakkar
Founder, Digital Web Solutions and RankWatch
Owns both an outreach and link-building agency (DWS) and a SaaS rank tracker (RankWatch); speaks on AI and SEO at India SEO Conference.
Community, events & in-house
8 peopleConferences, communities and heads of SEO who publish from inside a company.
Tom Critchlow
Independent consultant; founder, SEO MBA
Harry Clarkson-Bennett
SEO Director, The Telegraph
Runs SEO at The Telegraph and writes the Leadership in SEO Substack on publisher SEO, LLM visibility and managing teams. A model of the in-house head who publishes.
Areej AbuAli
Founder, Women in Tech SEO; founder, Crawlina
Built Women in Tech SEO into a global community with its own conference, newsletter and mentorship, and runs Crawlina for technical SEO on complex sites.
Kasra Dash
Founder, The Masterminders and mySEO App
Runs The Masterminders conference and 'The New Search' community on Skool, and publishes 'best SEO experts' lists that place himself near the top.
Vivek Bhargava
Co-founder, consumr.ai
Founded Communicate2 in 1997, grew it into one of India's largest performance agencies and sold it to Dentsu's iProspect in 2012, then ran Dentsu's performance group. Now co-founder of consumr.ai; keynotes on selling million-dollar SEO deals.
Ravi Sharma
Co-founder, Webomaze; co-host, Amaze Conference
Co-hosts Amaze Conference, billed as India's biggest SEO and AI conference (10 to 12 December 2026, Hyatt Regency Chandigarh), with Craig Campbell and Navneet Kaushal on the bill.
Devendra Saini
Head of SEO & ASO, MPL
Leads a 40+ person SEO and ASO team at MPL while building a LinkedIn presence (15,000+ followers, 1M+ yearly impressions) and a personal site pitched as 'AI-powered SEO consultant'.
Manish Chauhan
SEO Head, Groww
In-house SEO leader at Groww with 17+ years; ranked #3 in Favikon's India SEO authority list on the strength of LinkedIn posting.
Blogs & case studies
7 peopleThe Indian blogging generation, plus practitioners who publish their own experiments.
Kunjal Chawhan
SEO Manager, Botpresso; founder, Decode Digital Market
Tests tactics on his own blog and publishes the results as case studies (a study-abroad site taken from 35 to 3,000 clicks a month); YouTube channel; cited by Search Engine Roundtable.
Harsh Agrawal
Founder, ShoutMeLoud
Started ShoutMeLoud in 2008 as a beginner blogging and SEO guide; later added CoinSutra (crypto) and AI-blogging content.
Anil Agarwal
Founder, BloggersPassion
Runs BloggersPassion (200,000+ monthly visits) on SEO and affiliate marketing; 20 years in.
Ankit Singla
Founder, Master Blogging
Repositioned Master Blogging from blogging tutorials to 'content for business growth' after 15 years; YouTube and LinkedIn.
Kulwant Nagi
Founder, Blogging Cage and AffiliateBooster
Turned affiliate SEO know-how into products (AffiliateBooster) and courses alongside the Blogging Cage blog.
Jitendra Vaswani
Founder, BloggersIdeas and DigiExe
Runs the BloggersIdeas blog and the DigiExe agency; affiliate marketing and a steady stream of 'top SEO expert' listicles.
Sandeep Mallya
Founder, 99signals and Startup Cafe Digital
Nobody matches that. Clear the search or widen the filters.
How this list is put together
It is not a ranking, and I am not on it. There is no order of merit inside a section and nobody paid or asked to be here. Every name was cross-referenced from published expert lists and then checked against that person’s own site or profile, because most “top SEO expert” pages are written by someone who put themselves at number one.
Roles and links were checked on 7 September 2026. Where sources disagreed about someone’s current job, their own announcement won. I have left out follower counts: they age badly and they are not why any of these people are worth reading.
The list is refreshed quarterly. If I have your role wrong, missed someone who belongs here, or you would rather not be listed, email [email protected] and I will fix it in the next pass.
Compiled by Utkarsh Gour · Published 16 September 2026 · Next review December 2026
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