Google this month published a community interest form asking SEO professionals, site owners, and web developers to help decide where the first Search Central Live Deep Dive event in Europe will be held - with a shortlist of six cities, a submission window that closes on July 1, and official dates to be announced on July 6, 2026.

The announcement, posted on June 18, 2026 to the Google Search Central Blog by Cherry Prommawin and Gary Illyes of the Search Relations team, marks the first time the Search Central Live Deep Dive format - a multi-day, technically intensive variant of the standard Search Central Live conference series - is being brought to the EMEA region. According to Google, the six candidate cities are Barcelona (Spain), Budapest (Hungary), Berlin (Germany), Frankfurt (Germany), Lisbon (Portugal), and Prague (Czech Republic). The event is provisionally scheduled for a window between mid-September and early October 2026.

What the Deep Dive format actually involves

The standard Search Central Live event is a single-day conference. The Deep Dive format is architecturally different. According to Google, it was developed in direct response to community feedback requesting longer events, multi-day experiences, more technical sessions, hands-on workshops, and real-world case studies. The Asia Pacific edition of the Deep Dive, announced in March 2025, ran from July 23 to 25 at the Carlton Hotel Bangkok Sukhumvit - three full days, in contrast to the half-day or single-day structure of earlier regional events.

The European edition will follow the same expanded architecture. According to the blog post, the Deep Dive format allocates extended time for in-depth technical discussions that go through the mechanics of crawling, indexing, ranking, and AI integration within Google Search. Hands-on workshops focus specifically on Google Search Console and Google Trends - two tools that site owners interact with directly but rarely have the chance to explore under expert guidance. Real-world case studies form a third pillar, with attendees able to bring their own optimization experiences to the sessions. The fourth component is community engagement: lightning talks, poster sessions, and structured networking exchanges designed to connect participants from across Europe.

According to Prommawin and Illyes, the SCL Deep Dive is "tailored to site owners, web developers, and SEO professionals who want to move beyond basic concepts and fully master advanced search mechanics." That framing places it at the more expert end of the Search Central Live spectrum.

How the location decision will work

Google's process here is more consultative than its usual event format. Rather than announcing a fixed city and opening registration, the team is soliciting structured input before committing to a location. The interest form collects two types of data: a location preference among the six shortlisted cities, and a timing preference covering both the days of the week and the total number of event days. According to the announcement, the team wants to "maximize attendance and ensure the schedule works best for your professional calendar."

The six cities reflect a mix of geographic distribution and practical logistics. Barcelona and Lisbon sit at the western end of the continent; Frankfurt and Berlin anchor the German-speaking core of Europe; Budapest and Prague represent Central European cities with substantial tech communities and improving accessibility by rail and air. The list is notably absent of any city in the Nordics, the Netherlands, or Italy - though the LinkedIn post announcing the event drew immediate comments from community members suggesting alternatives, including Wroclaw (Poland), Rome, Madrid, Valencia, and Stockholm or Malmö.

The interest form deadline of July 1 gives the team roughly ten days from today to gather feedback. Official dates and the confirmed location will be announced on July 6, 2026. From that point, participants who expressed interest will be the first to be notified when formal registration opens. Importantly, submitting the interest form does not constitute registration for the event - attendees will need to complete a separate registration process when it opens, though according to Google, information provided in the interest form will be migrated automatically to the registration profile.

Lightning talk submissions open early

One practical element of today's announcement that practitioners may miss if they focus only on the city vote: lightning talk submissions are now open. Google is accepting early proposals through the same interest form. The intention is to let the team begin reviewing pitches immediately, even though final decisions will not be made until the formal application window opens after July 6.

According to the blog post, lightning talk proposals can cover advanced tool tips, deep-dive case studies, or optimization journeys. The team will follow up with submitters about outcomes once official applications open. Google also notes that there are no strings attached - submitting a proposal now does not commit the submitter to applying later.

Lightning talks have been a consistent feature of the Search Central Live series. At the Zurich event in December 2025, the format allocated 10-minute slots to community presenters. The Deep Dive format is likely to expand that window given the multi-day structure, though the blog post does not specify session lengths for the European edition.

The event is conducted in English

Google makes the language policy explicit in today's announcement: the event will be conducted entirely in English. That is a deliberate choice for a pan-European audience with no single dominant language. It contrasts with the approach taken at some regional events elsewhere in the series - the Hong Kong edition in October 2025 was conducted primarily in Traditional Chinese, and the Shanghai edition in May 2026 required Mandarin fluency as a hard prerequisite. Europe's linguistic diversity means English serves as the practical common ground.

The blog post also addresses non-European attendees directly, noting that those based outside Europe are welcome to fill out the form if interested in travelling. However, Google is clear that "this event will be primarily catered to a Europe-based audience, meaning the content, examples, and style of activities and hospitality will be focused on the European markets." No assistance with accommodation, visas, or transportation will be provided.

Who is behind this announcement

Cherry Prommawin and Gary Illyes, both listed as Search Relations team members at Google, signed the June 18 blog post. The same pairing has been responsible for several key Search Central Live announcements and events over the past two years. They authored the Asia Pacific Deep Dive announcement in March 2025 and were speakers at the Bangkok Deep Dive in July 2025, where Illyes addressed directly how AI-powered search tools relate to traditional SEO work. PPC Land reported that Illyes at that event explained AI search systems share crawling and indexing mechanisms with conventional search, a point relevant to the technical discussion topics proposed for the European edition.

Illyes is also known for detailed technical explainers. In March 2026, he co-hosted a Search Off the Record podcast episode explaining that Googlebot is not a standalone program but one client of a central internal crawling platform - the kind of infrastructure-level content that the Deep Dive format is designed to surface at live events.

How the European edition fits the broader SCL expansion

The Search Central Live series has accelerated its geographic expansion significantly since 2024. PPC Land has tracked the series extensively, documenting each stop from Bangkok's return after a five-year hiatus in 2024 through to the first-ever event in Canada in April 2026 and the first mainland China event in May 2026. Within Europe specifically, the Zurich edition in December 2025 was the most recent Search Central Live stop - a single-day event at the Google Europaallee office targeting largely the DACH region.

The European Deep Dive represents something structurally distinct from that. A single-day Zurich event draws primarily from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A multi-day event in, say, Barcelona or Prague - held between mid-September and early October - would reasonably pull professionals from across the continent. Google is clearly calibrating scale: it acknowledged in today's announcement that it had narrowed the candidate list "after much consideration" based on logistics, accessibility, and cost. The six cities on the final list each have major international airports, established conference infrastructure, and reasonable hotel capacity.

The fact that two German cities appear on the list - Berlin and Frankfurt - is worth noting. Google's EMEA commercial operations are headquartered in Dublin, but Frankfurt is the financial hub of continental Europe and Berlin has one of the region's most active tech and startup communities. Both cities hosted marketing or developer events from Google and other platforms in 2025. The Google Marketing Live EMEA event in Dublin in May 2026 drew significant attendance from across the continent - a parallel data point for what a major Google event targeted at European professionals looks like.

The timing window and what it means for attendees

Mid-September to early October is a crowded slot on the European digital marketing events calendar. Dmexco takes place in Cologne in September; several national Search and SEO conferences cluster around the same period. Google is explicitly asking the community to help choose days of the week and the total number of days - a level of flexibility unusual for a large-scale corporate event.

The interest form closes July 1. The July 6 announcement of confirmed dates and location gives prospective attendees only a short lead time before the event's September start window. That is a tighter planning horizon than some previous Search Central Live editions, where interest and registration windows extended several months before the event. For practitioners who need to arrange travel, accommodation, and internal approval for conference attendance, the compressed timeline between the July 6 announcement and a mid-September event - potentially as few as ten weeks - may require early planning decisions before the location is even known.

Why this matters for the search and marketing community

The expanded Deep Dive format addresses a gap that single-day events structurally cannot fill. A standard Search Central Live event can cover crawling in a 45-minute session. A multi-day Deep Dive can spend half a day on crawling alone - working through case studies, live Search Console analysis, and Q&A with the engineering team. For practitioners working on technically complex sites - large e-commerce platforms, international publishers, JavaScript-heavy SPAs - that level of depth has tangible value that a slide deck does not replicate.

The format also creates a different networking dynamic. Single-day events produce brief corridor conversations. A multi-day event with poster sessions and structured community talks gives practitioners time to work through problems together and to establish connections with Google team members that go beyond a handshake at a conference booth.

Google's decision to solicit community input on location and timing signals something about how the team is approaching European market development. It is an unusual degree of transparency. Standard event logistics are handled internally and announced with fixed parameters. Asking the community to vote - and opening lightning talk submissions before the location is even confirmed - suggests the team is treating the European Deep Dive as a community co-production rather than a corporate broadcast.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Google Search Central team, specifically Cherry Prommawin and Gary Illyes from Search Relations, are organizing the event. The intended audience is site owners, web developers, and SEO professionals based in Europe, with the event conducted in English.

What: Google has opened a community interest form to determine the location and timing of Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026. The Deep Dive is a multi-day, technically intensive conference format featuring extended sessions on crawling, indexing, ranking, and AI in Google Search; hands-on workshops with Search Console and Google Trends; real-world case studies; and structured community networking. Early lightning talk proposals are being accepted through the same form.

When: The interest form is open until July 1, 2026. The confirmed location and dates will be announced on July 6, 2026. The event itself is planned for a window between mid-September and early October 2026. The blog post was published on June 18, 2026.

Where: Six European cities are under consideration: Barcelona (Spain), Budapest (Hungary), Berlin (Germany), Frankfurt (Germany), Lisbon (Portugal), and Prague (Czech Republic). The final location will be determined partly by community input.

Why: Google is bringing the Deep Dive format - first piloted in Asia Pacific in July 2025 - to the EMEA region. The format was developed in response to community feedback requesting longer, more technically substantive events than the standard single-day Search Central Live structure allows. The European edition is intended to serve the continent's diverse community of search practitioners with content, examples, and activities specifically calibrated to European markets.