About
An atlas, not a listicle
The search industry has plenty of opinion and very little shared reference. This is an attempt at the reference: a complete, neutral, openly published map of the events, institutions, publications, people, software and documentation that make up the field.
Why this exists
If you want to know which conferences are running in your region next year, which trade body covers your country, which publication in your language is worth following, or what a term actually means, you currently have to assemble the answer from a dozen partial sources — most of them written to sell something. The information exists; it is simply scattered, stale and usually monetised.
The Atlas puts it in one place, keeps it structured, and gives it away. 2,155 records across every dataset: 311 events in 58 countries, 241 organizations, 335 media outlets, 191 people, 288 tools, 75 startups, 188 references, 331 defined terms and 195 documented algorithm updates.
What makes it different
- Nothing is for sale. No sponsored listings, no affiliate links, no paid placement, no "featured" tier. A vendor cannot buy a position and cannot buy removal of a competitor.
- Nothing is ranked. There is no "best SEO tool" here, because that question has no general answer. Categories are descriptive; ordering is alphabetical or chronological.
- Sources are attached. Records carry the page they were verified against, and records that rest on weaker evidence say so rather than hiding behind confident prose.
- Gaps are admitted. Where coverage is thin — and it is, in several regions — the site says so instead of implying completeness.
- It is genuinely international. Search is not an Anglophone discipline. The datasets deliberately cover events, publications and practitioners well outside the US and UK.
- The data is yours. Every dataset is downloadable as JSON under a permissive licence.
Who it is for
Practitioners planning a conference year or a speaking year. In-house teams evaluating software without wading through affiliate reviews. Consultants who need to know which body certifies what in a given market. Journalists and analysts mapping the industry. Newcomers who want a vocabulary that is precise rather than folkloric. And anyone building something that needs structured data about search — take the JSON.
What it is not
It is not a news site, an agency directory, a review platform or a lead-generation funnel. It does not rate anyone. It does not publish opinion pieces about whether SEO is dead. It holds facts about the industry and links out to the people who do the analysis.
Honest limitations
Directory data decays. Conference dates move, prices change, people switch jobs, startups get acquired and tools shut down. This compilation is current as of 2026-08-09; by the time you read it, some of it will be wrong. Always confirm dates and prices on the organiser's own site before booking anything.
Coverage is also uneven. Some regions and languages are far better represented than others, funding figures reflect only what was publicly disclosed, and the GEO category in particular is young enough that much of it cannot be verified to the standard applied elsewhere. Where that is true, the relevant pages say so.
The fix for both problems is the same: tell us what is wrong. Corrections are free, fast and genuinely welcome.