SEO in 2026

For Travis Tallent, it all begins with discovering who your audience is before deciding on how to serve them. Travis says: “Audience-first marketing has and will always win, no matter how technology advances. It's not a new concept, but it's more critical than ever. With AI entering the space, we are seeing huge shifts with AI and agentic search. The only way to thrive is to really understand your audience and how the people you are trying to reach search and find brands.”

It’s easy to get dazzled by the next shiny bright thing, but Tin Đudajek is keen to highlight the importance of delivering on ‘proper SEO’. Tin says: “Don't get lost in AEO or GEO, and keep doing proper SEO.” Answer Engine Optimization focuses on answering common questions and long tail queries that can appear in AI, so isn't that good for SEO? “It's good for SEO, but what I'm aiming at is that, currently, nothing exists that proves that optimizing solely for generative AI is different from real, proper SEO. What I'm trying to say is, just keep doing SEO as you have been doing so far, and you will be featured in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and everything else. As far as I've seen, there's nothing different that you have to do in order to rank better in generative AI right now.

Greg Heilers emphasises the importance of not letting newer tactics direct your existing good SEO practices. Greg says: “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t throw out all of your SEO best practices just because we're in the hype cycle of GEO.” How do we know which SEO practices to throw out and which ones to keep? “Right now, we're simply adding on and not throwing out. We are working with the assumption that roughly 90% of GEO best practices are rooted in SEO. We need to tweak a little bit and add in some new best practices, but most of our SOPs are still valid.”

Anthony Barone understands the importance and impact of AI, but tempers that with the essential nature of fundamental SEO principles. Anthony says: “AI/GEO/LLMEO is all the rage, but core fundamental SEO principles still apply.” What's distracting SEOs at the moment, that isn't worth spending time on? “A lot of SEOs are just jumping on the bandwagon, which I get. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Manus, and all of these are coming in, and yes, some behaviours are changing. We've got AI Mode coming in. We'll have Web Guide coming in. I get it. However, from an SEO perspective, but also from a business perspective, core SEO fundamentals still apply. You want to be able to crawl before you can sprint. With shiny toy syndrome, and everyone wanting to be the latest and greatest and wanting to jump on the trends, they're forgetting that those SEO principles still apply.

CJ Emson shares that brand is back and it’s bigger than before. If your branded search footprint isn’t strong, you’re going to lose out in AIO and as we see continually seeing and hearing - traditional organic search traffic is down, zero click search is up. The remedy to this is branded search. From there you can determine if your Demand gen engine is really only a demand capture engine…and remedy how brand building in search can fuel demand gen and pipe. Talking points include: What does successful brand SEO look like in 2026? What does success look like? How does brand SEO fuel demand? How has brand SEO changed? How will it continue to change? How do you future-proof brand SEO?

Nitin Manchanda agrees with Simon Cox, encouraging SEOs to concentrate on timeless activities. Nitin says: “Don't get lost in buzzwords and stay focussed on the fundamentals.” What buzzwords do people get lost in? “A lot of them. People talk about AI-first indexing, zero-click optimization, voice search dominance, entity-first strategies, and much more. Now, they're also talking about AEO, GEO, and a lot of other different names. Essentially, though, it’s SEO.”

Simon Cox sides with Bill Hartzer, sharing that there are plenty of activities that SEOs could be doing without focussing on AI. Simon says: “The web was a revolution. Everything since has been evolution, and it's been fast-paced. The smartest strategy is to focus on what hasn't changed.” What hasn't changed? “There are a lot of things that haven't changed. What I'm really talking about are the core fundamentals of what we do. Stay still. There's a huge amount of noise going on at the moment. It's been increasing this year, and it will be more so in 2026. There is a lot going on, so it's very difficult to focus on what we should be doing.

Bill Hartzer is a strong advocate for traditional SEO best practices as the bedrock to your future SEO success, no matter the technology or platform.

Bill says: “My number one tip has really not changed for the past few years: follow classic, traditional SEO best practices for creating content and optimizing pages and websites.

With some search engines, you can get away with 150 words of content and potentially rank on a page, but when it comes to AI, it's more about structuring a page, using the right title tags, meta description tags, headings, H1/H2/H3 tags, bulleted lists, ordered lists, numbered lists, bold, italics, etc.

Focus on the traditional SEO tactics, which haven't changed in the 20 years that I've been doing this.”

According to Gordon Meagher, the foundations of AI ranking success lie in traditional marketing activities. Gordon says: “It's time to put your old school digital marketing hat on, as we move forward in this new age.” What does that mean in practice? “We know that search behaviour is changing. ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, have basically given birth to a new way of searching that we never knew before. We were always 10 blue links on a page. LLMs have changed that. With how people want their answers now, I don't think you can put it back in the box. I think the biggest thing is the uncertainty around where Google search itself is going. Will Google search even be a thing once AI Mode comes in and the adoption rates increase for LLMs and these types of answers? I think it's going to go back to how we used to market years ago. For me, once Google released AI Mode, it was the end of SEO – and I don't say that lightly. They also broke an unwritten rule with publishers, which was always: we create the content, we live by your rules, you send us traffic. That paradigm has now shifted.

Daphne Monro shares the importance of prioritising video-led, verifiable content in 2026. Talking points include: What do you mean by video-led content? Why publish video-led content? Why priorise video-led content? What video content works best? What do you mean by verifiable content? How do you verify content? How do you measure success?