Fusion Vine announced that founder Brian Kato will present at SEO Rockstars 2026, a search marketing and artificial intelligence conference scheduled for October 1 through 4 in New Orleans. The addition appears on the speaker lineup published by the conference organizers.
The event is held at the Embassy Suites by Hilton New Orleans on Julia Street. According to the conference website, the schedule opens with a VIP day on October 1, followed by three days of sessions running October 2 through 4, with attendance capped at 100 participants. Sessions are recorded and transcribed for attendees.
Organizers describe the program as structured around documented testing and state that its sessions draw on more than 700 validated experiments. The published agenda covers artificial intelligence applied to search, link acquisition, technical optimization, local search at scale, algorithm updates, automation workflows, experience and authority signals, content strategy, and client acquisition. According to the organizers, the format excludes vendor booths and sales presentations, and speakers are selected on the basis of methods currently in use.
Kato's session, titled Build the Graph Before You Build the Page: Advanced Retrieval Engineering for SEO, addresses the case for treating interconnected entity relationships as the starting point of a search program rather than the individual page. His current work concentrates on entity relationships, structured data, graph engineering, and the machine-readable signals that determine how search engines and language models interpret information about a brand.
"The measurable part of search keeps moving further away from the results page," said Brian Kato, owner of Fusion Vine. "What gets tested now is whether a system can resolve who a business is and what it does, and that is a very different engineering problem than ranking a page."
The session material covers how organizations describe themselves in machine-readable formats, including structured data markup and the consistency of business information across public sources, and how those descriptions are used by systems that retrieve and summarize information in response to a query. The subject sits alongside agenda items on ranking, link acquisition, and technical work, reflecting an agenda that organizers have divided between established search practice and retrieval systems that generate answers directly.
The conference website lists a single-stage format with 25 speakers, one of them unannounced, meaning attendees see every session rather than choosing between concurrent tracks. Others on the roster include Ryan Stewart, Craig Campbell, Michael Merlino, presenting on brand and artificial intelligence strategy, Brian Winum, presenting on experience and authority signals in news publishing, Clint Butler, and Terry Samuels.
Kato has presented at previous editions of the conference, including the January 2026 event in Dallas and the 2024 event in Las Vegas. He founded Fusion Vine in 2019 after working in digital marketing, data, and web development since 2010, moving from agency employment into independent consulting focused on small and mid-sized businesses competing in search.
The New Orleans event is the conference's second edition of 2026 and its first in Louisiana. Ticket tiers listed by the organizers include general admission, VIP access covering the October 1 program and a private evening event, and a higher tier that adds a searchable archive of recorded sessions, slide decks, and documented processes from prior events. Registration and the full agenda are available through the SEO Rockstars conference website.
Fusion Vine provides website audits, keyword research, on-page optimization, link acquisition, content development, local search management, and reporting for clients in Northern Colorado and other regions. The agency was founded in 2019 and operates from Loveland, Colorado. It holds Better Business Bureau accreditation and was included in a 2021 listing of Colorado search marketing firms compiled by DesignRush, a business-to-business marketplace that reviews agency websites, portfolios, and public reputation before listing them.
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For more information about Fusion Vine, contact the company here:
Fusion Vine
Brian Kato
720-515-6188
bkato@fusionvine.com
805 E 58th St
Loveland, CO 80538
