The Future of SEO – What’s Changing in 2026?

Originally published March 2025. Updated August 2026 to reflect changes in Google Search, AI search, content strategy, technical SEO, and search measurement.

SEO has always changed. Google changes its algorithms, websites change, consumer behavior changes, and marketers adjust.

What feels different right now is that the actual definition of search is changing.

When I originally wrote this article in 2025, AI-generated search results were still something businesses were trying to understand. Google was expanding AI Overviews, AI Mode was emerging, and marketers were debating whether platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot were really going to change the way people searched.

A year later, I think we have our answer.

They are.

But I don’t think this means SEO is dying. I think SEO is getting bigger.

For years, SEO was largely about getting a webpage to rank in Google. That is still incredibly important, but now we also need to think about whether a brand or piece of content can be discovered, understood, referenced, and cited across a much broader search ecosystem.

The fundamentals haven’t disappeared. In many ways, they matter more than ever.

Google Search Is Becoming an Answer Engine

Traditional search was relatively straightforward. Someone typed a query into Google, Google returned ten blue links, and the SEO battle was largely about getting one of those links as high on the page as possible.

That experience has been changing for years, but AI has accelerated it.

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode can now interpret much more complicated questions, pull information together from multiple sources, and present an answer directly inside the search experience.

That changes the job of SEO.

Ranking number one is still valuable, but now there are additional questions we need to ask.

Can Google understand what your company does?

Does your content provide something useful enough to reference?

Can the information on your website be easily extracted and understood?

Does Google trust the source?

Does your content add anything original, or does it simply repeat what already exists on twenty other websites?

That last question is becoming particularly important.

For a long time, companies could create fairly generic SEO content and still generate traffic. Find a keyword. Write 1,500 words about it. Add the keyword to the title, headers, and body copy. Build a couple of links. Move on to the next article.

I don’t think that strategy is going to age very well.

Stop Writing Content Just Because an SEO Tool Told You To

One thing I would completely change from the original version of this article is the idea that long-form content automatically performs better.

There is no magic word count.

A 700-word article that completely answers the question can be far more useful than a 2,500-word article that takes fifteen paragraphs to say something that could have been explained in five.

That sounds obvious, but the SEO industry spent years training people to think differently.

We created content briefs based on competitor word counts. We looked at how many times keywords appeared. We created articles because SEMrush or Ahrefs told us there was search volume.

Those tools are still incredibly useful. I use them.

But they shouldn't be deciding whether something deserves to exist on your website.

I think one of the biggest SEO questions businesses should ask now is much simpler:

Do we actually have something useful to say?

Your own experience matters. Original examples matter. Case studies matter. Testing matters. Opinions based on actual work matter. Images you've created matter. Video matters. Data you've collected matters.

That is content an AI system can't simply manufacture by summarizing the same ten articles everyone else already wrote.

AI Search Makes Experience More Valuable, Not Less

There was a period when marketers were worried that AI would make professional content almost worthless because anyone could generate hundreds of articles in a few minutes.

Technically, they can.

That doesn't mean they should.

Google doesn't prohibit content simply because AI helped create it. The bigger concern is scaled content that exists primarily to manipulate rankings and provides little or no additional value.

That distinction is important.

I use AI. Most marketers I know use AI. It is becoming part of the workflow for research, outlining, editing, analysis, coding, brainstorming, and dozens of other tasks.

The problem isn't the tool.

The problem is publishing something you don't actually know anything about.

If you're a plumber who has replaced 5,000 water heaters, you have information an AI writer sitting behind a keyboard doesn't have.

If you're an attorney who has spent twenty years handling a specific type of case, you have experience worth explaining.

If you've managed millions of dollars in paid media, migrated large websites, fixed technical SEO problems, built analytics programs, or helped businesses generate thousands of leads, use that experience.

That is where I think strong content is going.

AI makes generic information easier to create. That makes actual experience more valuable.

E-E-A-T Still Matters, But It Isn't a Magic Ranking Score

SEO loves acronyms, and E-E-A-T has become one of the biggest.

Experience.

Expertise.

Authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness.

The concept matters, but I wouldn't tell a business that Google has an “E-E-A-T score” you can optimize.

It doesn't work that way.

What Google is trying to do is identify content that appears helpful, reliable, and trustworthy. The stronger the experience behind the information, the easier it becomes to demonstrate those qualities.

That means authorship matters.

About pages matter.

Real examples matter.

Source attribution matters.

Accurate company information matters.

Customer reviews matter.

Your reputation outside your own website matters.

And if you're publishing content about subjects that can affect someone's health, money, safety, or major life decisions, trust becomes even more important.

SEO has always had a technical side, but increasingly the question isn't simply whether Google can crawl your page.

It's whether Google has a reason to trust it.

Technical SEO Is Still the Foundation

With all the attention being paid to AI search, I think there is a risk of people getting distracted by the shiny new thing.

You can optimize for AI all day long, but if search engines can't efficiently crawl and understand your website, you have a much more basic problem.

Technical SEO still matters.

Your pages need to be crawlable. Important pages need to be indexed. Canonicals need to make sense. Redirects need to work. Internal links need to point search engines toward your most important content. Duplicate pages need to be managed. Sitemaps need to be accurate. Structured data should correctly describe what is actually on the page.

Site architecture matters too.

If you offer ten services but Google has to click through four menus and seven links to discover the service pages, that's probably not a great site structure.

The same is true for AI systems.

Before an AI platform can reference information from your website, that information has to be discoverable, understandable, and current.

This is why I don't think traditional SEO and AI search optimization are two completely separate disciplines.

The foundation is largely the same.

Core Web Vitals Matter, But Don't Chase a Perfect Score

Website performance is another area where SEO advice gets oversimplified.

Core Web Vitals matter. Google currently looks at loading performance, responsiveness, and visual stability through metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

You should care about them.

A slow website is frustrating. A page that jumps around while you're trying to click something is frustrating. A site that doesn't respond quickly when someone interacts with it is frustrating.

But I would not spend $20,000 chasing a perfect PageSpeed score simply because somebody told you it would make you rank number one.

It won't.

Website performance is one piece of a much larger SEO picture.

If your content is bad, fixing your LCP isn't going to magically make it useful.

If your website has major indexation problems, shaving 200 milliseconds off a JavaScript file probably isn't your biggest issue.

SEO is about prioritization.

Fix the things that are actually holding the site back.

Mobile Isn't an SEO Strategy Anymore. It's Just the Internet.

The original version of this article had an entire section about mobile optimization.

In 2026, I almost don't think that deserves to be its own SEO strategy anymore.

Your website needs to work on a phone.

Period.

The majority of businesses should be designing and testing pages with mobile users in mind from the beginning. Navigation needs to work. Forms need to be usable. Text needs to be readable. Buttons need to be easy to tap. Images need to load properly.

This is not an advanced SEO tactic.

It is basic website development.

If your website is difficult to use on a mobile device in 2026, you don't have a mobile SEO problem.

You have a website problem.

Search Is Becoming More Fragmented

This may be the biggest change marketers need to understand.

Google is still incredibly important, but Google is no longer the only place people search for information.

Someone shopping for a product may start with a Google search, watch several YouTube reviews, check Reddit, ask ChatGPT to compare three options, search the brand on TikTok, visit Amazon, and then come back to Google before purchasing.

A B2B buyer may ask Copilot a question at work, visit a vendor website, read several industry articles, download a PDF, and then search the company's name weeks later.

The customer journey is getting harder to see.

This is why I think businesses need to stop defining SEO exclusively as “Google rankings.”

Search visibility now includes traditional organic results, local search, video, images, shopping results, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and whatever comes next.

You don't need a completely separate strategy for every one of these platforms.

You need a strong digital foundation that gives all of them something useful to work with.

AI Search Optimization Is Becoming Part of SEO

There are already plenty of new acronyms floating around.

AEO.

GEO.

LLMO.

AI SEO.

I'm not convinced we need another acronym every six months.

Google's own guidance has been pretty straightforward: the traditional SEO fundamentals still apply to its generative AI search experiences.

I agree with that.

Good AI search optimization looks a lot like good SEO.

Make the website crawlable.

Clearly explain who you are.

Clearly explain what you do.

Create useful content.

Organize information logically.

Use descriptive headings.

Answer common questions directly.

Use structured data when appropriate.

Keep information accurate.

Use images and video where they improve the experience.

Build authority around the subjects your business actually understands.

There are some differences in how we think about content for AI systems, particularly around citations, entities, structured information, and how easily individual passages can be understood outside the context of the full page.

But I don't think businesses need to throw away SEO and start over.

They need to expand it.

SEO Measurement Has to Change Too

This is one of the areas I think will change the most over the next few years.

SEO reporting has traditionally focused on rankings, impressions, clicks, sessions, and conversions.

We still need all of those.

But what happens when someone discovers your brand in an AI-generated answer and never clicks the citation?

What happens when ChatGPT recommends your business and the user searches your company name two days later?

What happens when an AI Overview answers the user's original question but introduces your company as one of the potential solutions?

The influence is real, but attribution gets messy.

Search platforms are beginning to give marketers more visibility into this. Microsoft introduced AI Performance reporting inside Bing Webmaster Tools to show when website content is cited across Microsoft AI experiences. Google has also started rolling out reporting that provides greater visibility into performance within generative AI search features.

This is still early.

For now, I would continue watching Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, GA4, branded search, referral traffic, conversions, and overall organic visibility.

Don't abandon traditional SEO metrics.

Just understand that they no longer tell the entire story.

Local SEO May Actually Become More Important

For local businesses, none of this eliminates the need for traditional local SEO.

If someone needs a plumber tonight, they probably don't want a 3,000-word thought leadership article about the future of plumbing.

They want a plumber.

Google Business Profile information, reviews, location pages, services, business categories, hours, photos, accurate contact information, and a strong local website presence still matter.

AI search actually makes accurate business information even more important because these systems need reliable information when recommending local businesses.

For small businesses, this is good news.

You don't need to become an AI expert.

You need to make it incredibly obvious who you are, what you do, where you do it, and why someone should trust you.

That is good local SEO.

It is also good AI search optimization.

Backlinks Still Matter, But Relevance Matters More Than the Game

Links are not going away.

Search engines still use links and other signals to understand relationships, reputation, and authority across the web.

But I think the old game of “we need 100 backlinks this month” becomes less useful every year.

A relevant link from a respected source in your industry is worth far more to me than hundreds of junk links from websites created specifically to sell links.

I also care about the overall digital footprint of the brand.

Are respected websites talking about you?

Are industry organizations referencing you?

Are customers reviewing you?

Are people searching for your company?

Are your executives or subject-matter experts publishing useful information?

Are you part of the conversation around the topic you're trying to rank for?

Authority is much harder to fake when search engines and AI systems can evaluate information from across the web.

That's probably a good thing.

What I Would Focus on in 2026

If I were building an SEO strategy today, I wouldn't start by asking how many blog posts we need.

I would start with the website.

Can search engines crawl it?

Are the right pages indexed?

Does the site structure make sense?

Do we have strong pages for the products and services we actually want to sell?

Then I would look at the content.

What questions are customers asking?

Where do we have real expertise?

What can we explain better than our competitors?

What information do we have that isn't already available everywhere else?

Then I would look at the brand.

Does Google understand who this company is?

Does the website clearly identify its people, products, services, locations, and areas of expertise?

Are there independent signals supporting those claims?

Finally, I would look at measurement.

Are we actually generating qualified traffic, leads, revenue, visibility, and brand demand?

Because ranking number one for a keyword that never generates business isn't much of a victory.

SEO Isn't Dying. Search Is Expanding.

Every few years somebody announces that SEO is dead.

Social media was going to kill it.

Voice search was going to kill it.

Zero-click searches were going to kill it.

AI is now going to kill it.

I don't buy it.

People are still looking for information, products, services, businesses, and answers.

As long as people are searching, companies are going to want to be visible when that search happens.

The platforms will change.

The interfaces will change.

The algorithms will change.

The way we measure success will change.

SEO will change with them.

The businesses that do well won't necessarily be the ones that discover the newest SEO trick first.

They'll be the businesses that build technically sound websites, publish useful information based on real experience, develop recognizable brands, make their content easy to understand, and adapt as consumer behavior changes.

That's not really a new SEO strategy.

It's just a better one.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Future of SEO