The ACM Web Conference 2026

The ACM Web Conference 2026 — long known as WWW, the International World Wide Web Conference — is the premier annual forum for research, standards and applications shaping the Web. Its 2026 edition runs 29 June – 3 July 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, marking one of the first times this flagship has been hosted in the Middle East. Since its inception in 1989, the conference has tracked — and often defined — how the Web evolves, from search and hypertext to social platforms, recommendation, knowledge graphs and, now, the Web as the substrate on which AI systems are trained and deployed.

On the programme

The 2026 programme follows the conference's characteristically broad, high-bar structure: peer-reviewed research sessions across the main tracks, short papers, posters and demonstrations, a PhD symposium for junior scholars, an extensive workshops and tutorials programme, and a dedicated industry track for practitioners. Thought-provoking keynotes and panels anchor the week, alongside special tracks — including Web4Good, which foregrounds work where Web and AI research serves social benefit — and the co-located Web4All conference on web accessibility. Accepted main-track, industry, short and Web4Good papers appear in the ACM Digital Library, giving the work lasting citation weight.

Where it fits in today's AI

It is easy to forget that most large language models are, in the first instance, models of the Web: their capabilities and their pathologies both originate in web-scale text, links and behaviour. That makes the Web Conference unusually central to where AI is heading. The questions this community has worked on for decades — how to rank and retrieve information, how to model trust and misinformation, how to represent knowledge in graphs, how recommendation shapes behaviour — are exactly the questions now reframed by generative AI and autonomous agents. As "ten blue links" give way to generated answers, and as AI agents begin to read, transact and act across websites, WWW is where the research foundations of that shift are debated: retrieval-augmented generation, the economics and integrity of an AI-mediated web, grounding and hallucination, and the accessibility and governance of an increasingly automated Web. Hosting the 2026 edition in Dubai also signals the Gulf's deliberate push to position itself as a hub for AI and digital research, and gives researchers from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia far easier access to a top-tier venue than the conference's usual North American and European rotation allows. For academics, web engineers, search and recommender specialists, and technical leaders trying to understand the Web's next era, it is one of the most consequential gatherings of the year. Early-bird registration ran through April; standard registration is handled through the official conference site.

WWW is also one of computing's more competitive venues, with main-track acceptance rates that have historically sat in the low double digits, and it rotates deliberately around the world (recent hosts include Singapore, Austin, Lyon and Sydney) under the stewardship of the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee in partnership with ACM. The 2026 Dubai edition continues that global rotation while extending the conference's reach into a region investing heavily in AI and digital infrastructure — a meaningful signal for researchers across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia who rarely get a flagship of this calibre on their doorstep.