There are SEO conferences, and then there are SEO conferences where a Google engineer sits two tables away from you at dinner.

Croatia SEO Summit is the latter. The third edition takes place June 11–13, 2026 at Amadria Park in Šibenik, Croatia, and if you work in digital marketing — whether that’s SEO, content strategy, e-commerce, growth, or anything that lives or dies by search visibility — it’s worth understanding what this event actually is before you write it off as another industry gathering.

Stive is a media partner of Croatia SEO Summit 2026. That means our readers get first-hand coverage, updates, and insights from the event as it happens.

Why Šibenik, and Why It Works

The venue choice is deliberate. Amadria Park is a resort complex on the Adriatic coast where the conference halls, accommodation, and the sea are all within walking distance of each other. That sounds like a nice detail until you realize what it actually means in practice: no hour-long commutes between the hotel and the venue, no splitting the attendee group across three different parts of a city, and no reason to leave before the conversations you actually came for.

Šibenik’s old town is UNESCO-listed, the weather in June is reliable, and the conference party on the evening of June 12 ends with Lily Ray behind the DJ booth. These things matter for a three-day event where the networking is as much a part of the programme as the talks.

The Speaker Lineup Is the Argument

Most conference lineups follow a pattern: a handful of recognizable names surrounded by a long tail of people you’ve never heard of. Croatia SEO Summit doesn’t entirely break that pattern, but the top of the list is unusually strong.

Martin Splitt works in Developer Relations at Google. He is one of the few people inside the company who communicates directly and plainly about how Google works — not in press releases or vague blog posts, but in actual conversations with the developer and SEO community. Getting an hour with someone like that is genuinely rare.

Fili Wiese is a former Google software engineer who now works on the other side, helping webmasters navigate technical search. The combination of Splitt and Wiese at the same event gives attendees something that almost no other conference offers: two different perspectives from people who have been inside Google’s systems.

Lily Ray (Amsive) has built her reputation on rigorous, data-driven analysis of Google algorithm updates and E-E-A-T. Her work is cited constantly in the SEO community, and her sessions tend to be dense with usable insight rather than broad frameworks.

Bastian Grimm (Peak Ace AG) runs one of Europe’s leading performance SEO agencies and has spent serious time thinking about what enterprise SEO looks like in the age of generative AI — which is the question the entire industry is trying to answer right now.

Fernando Angulo (Semrush) brings the data layer. Semrush sees search trends at a scale very few tools match, and Angulo has a long track record of translating that data into something actionable for practitioners.

Harry Clarkson-Bennett is SEO Director at The Telegraph, one of the UK’s largest media outlets. His session on Google Discover and how SEO operates inside a major newsroom is the kind of perspective that simply does not show up at most marketing conferences.

Alex Moss (Yoast) works at the intersection of technical SEO and the WordPress ecosystem — tens of millions of sites use Yoast, which gives him a uniquely broad view of how technical decisions play out in practice.

Gus Pelogia is a Senior SEO Product Manager at Indeed, one of the world’s largest job platforms. The product-driven SEO perspective at that kind of scale tends to surface problems and solutions that agency practitioners haven’t encountered yet.

Three Days, Three Very Different Experiences

The format is worth understanding because each day operates differently.

1️⃣ June 11 is Workshop Day. Five parallel tracks run simultaneously, covering technical audits, content at scale, Claude Code workflows for SEO, and Google Discover optimisation, among other topics. The mastermind sessions are deliberately small — groups of five to six people working through real problems together. If you’re the kind of person who gets more value from a focused working session than from a talk, this is the day to prioritise.

2️⃣ June 12 is Lecture Day. Two parallel tracks, 40-minute sessions, fast-paced. The topics span AI visibility, link building, content strategy, and SEO for smaller European markets. The evening closes at Natura wine bar in Šibenik.

3️⃣ June 13 is Networking Day. This is where Croatia SEO Summit does something most conferences don’t bother with: it keeps everyone together for a full day after the content programme ends. A morning run, a walk through Šibenik’s old town, afternoon activities by the sea. No slides, no agenda. Just the right people in the right place with nowhere to be.

For anyone who has ever rushed to catch a flight on the last day of a conference before the best conversations happened, this format is a direct response to that problem.

Who Should Actually Go

The obvious answer is SEO specialists and agencies. But the conference has consistently attracted in-house marketing teams, e-commerce managers, content strategists, and business owners who need to understand how search, AI, and web visibility connect to revenue. If your business depends on organic traffic in any meaningful way, the topics on the agenda — AI-generated search results, E-E-A-T, Google Discover, technical performance at scale — are not theoretical concerns.

For teams attending together, there’s a group discount worth knowing: buy 2 tickets, get the third free; buy 3, get 2 more free. Conference attendees also get a special rate on accommodation at Amadria Park.

The full programme and tickets are at croatiaseosummit.com.