SEO in 2026

Petra Kis-Herczegh encourages you to be more critical in your thinking – and not to initially accept everything at face value.Petra says: “Embrace healthy scepticism.In a time where the SEO industry is drowning in new AI metrics, from AIO attribution to vector index presence, we need to understand that we don't have robust, standardised methods to validate these just yet.When tools show you things like AI visibility, you should be asking: What's the sample size behind this? What's that number or percentage based on? How are these metrics defined? Is the tool actually using LLM training data, or are they reverse-engineering the attribution models?Embracing healthy scepticism and using critical thinking isn't a new thing. It's not a new process; we’ve had to use it before, but this situation makes it crucial. Previously, when featured snippets appeared, we had to completely rethink how we evaluated our existing Google Search Console data, because it now meant something different because of the change, and it was in a new context. We’ve had to ask these questions, and not just chase new metrics, but evaluate the data that we are basing decisions on.Part of the problem now is that people are trying to look at these shiny new metrics as something that they can base decisions on, when they actually might change in a month or two. Everyone's still collecting data, looking at that attribution model, and trying to learn how these LLMs understand your websites, do vector embeddings, understand context, and serve answers – and the models change all the time as well, so that plays a part.Before you bet your credibility on a shiny new dashboard, you need to ask yourself: What would you actually do differently with this data? Do you have any other way to validate this from something that you already trust and know to be proven?If you can't answer those questions, you are just chasing the hype instead of thinking critically.”

Manu Madeddu highlights that the ever-changing world of SEO means that flexibility and being able to continually adapt will be integral parts of future success.Manu says: “Be flexible and be ready to face the unknown.Essentially, be prepared to adapt to all the new and broader challenges we have as marketers, and also flexible enough and ready to absorb knowledge, data, and information about things you might not know, but need to explore.”How do you incorporate flexibility into an SEO strategy?“Long story short, try to anticipate trends. Be flexible by being able to detect trends and adjust your strategy on the go. Don't be stiff and only stick to what was planned 6 or 12 months before, because trends can change swiftly nowadays.Also, you might find that users are changing their behaviour. They may be using a feature or a platform now, but then switch because of recent changes and technological advancements. That’s the kind of flexibility you need in terms of technology and strategy.You also need to be able to discuss and have a more holistic approach. Don't just focus on what you do as a marketer. SEOs tend to work in their silo and just focus on Excel spreadsheets and optimizations. Now, you need to be flexible. Discuss with other teams and other channels to find the best way to achieve the business targets – not only for your channel but overall.”

Our final chapter begins with Helen Pollitt taking a look at the skills you need to personally build, to remain as relevant as possible in the SEO workforce for many years to come.Helen says: “Keep your SEO career on track.When it comes to your skillset, you need to stop thinking of ‘SEO versus GEO’. Instead, you need to understand how to apply your organic discoverability skills to each and every channel that you may need to – and how you can use AI to enhance those skills.”How much of your SEO time should you focus on developing those skills?“SEO is a career that is constantly changing, and not just in the sense that what works in SEO is changing. The tools and educational platforms that are available are changing as well.As a result of that, we really need to be investing a lot in our own careers and in our skill sets. I like to spend at least a little bit of time every day dipping into articles, watching webinars, or just making sure that there's no breaking news within the SEO industry that I'm missing.Treat it like an investment. Make sure that you are spending a significant portion of your time investing in those skills and keeping current with what's going on, without succumbing to the hype and fear-mongering that also seems to go around the space at the moment.”

Nickolass Jensen shares that most sites have high search visibility but zero AI citations, and the gap is diagnosable, measurable, and fixable with a structured three-layer audit. Talking points include... The three-layer diagnostic: Why sites fail AI visibility at the human layer (UX/trust), the search layer (authority/structure), or the AI layer (machine-readable proof) - and why fixing the wrong layer first wastes months. AI crawler visibility: Server log analysis reveals real-time and historical crawl patterns from GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot - most site owners have no idea which AI bots visit them, how often, or what they fetch. The gap between what AI crawlers index and what gets cited is where the work happens. GEO in 2026 is still mostly theoretical. The only practical path forward is tools that enforce structured execution. Rankings remain infrastructure, but the real competitive moat is whether an LLM cites you when a buyer asks. Read the full transcript of Nickolass's interview at https://majestic.com/seo-in-2026/additional-insights/nickolass-jensen

Something else that’s arguably changed a great deal in the past few years is keyword research. Andy Mollison advises on tracking more than basic keywords.Andy says: “In a world of generative AI, keyword tracking as we know it is no longer good enough.”Why is keyword tracking no longer good enough?“The way we track performance in SEO has historically been through organic sessions, organic revenue, organic lead generation, and that kind of thing. Obviously, that is still very relevant, but it's also been about keyword position tracking as well – tracking your individual single keywords, or long tail keywords, or whatever it is you're tracking.To an extent, that's still fine. However, you can’t ignore what’s going on. If you're not tracking outside of that, you're not tracking your performance as a whole. With AI overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT, people are searching in so many different ways now. Tracking keywords is not everything anymore.”

There’s one tool that Priya Verma finds particularly useful at combining data from various sources and conducting analysis – BigQuery.Priya says: “Gear up your SEO analysis through Google BigQuery.”Why BigQuery in particular?“SEO analysis in BigQuery is powerful because it lets you move beyond the existing tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, etc., and their limitations. It allows you to see the full picture at scale.By analysing millions of queries alongside other data, you uncover deeper patterns, user behaviour insights, and real opportunities to grow your traffic. We are focussing on BigQuery because of a subtle limitation of the most widely used tool for SEO, Search Console: you can only look at the top 1,000 keywords.For big businesses, that doesn't give a full picture. That's where tools like BigQuery come in. There are alternatives like Google Sheets plugins, where you can import 25,000 rows. However, if you are in an industry with thousands of keywords, that is still a huge limitation.That's where bulk export comes in. By connecting your Search Console to BigQuery, through the BigQuery API and the BigQuery Storage API, you can capture and store all your data at scale, without hitting those raw limits.This is where it really gets interesting, because the retention policy in Google Search Console is 16 months. After 16 months, the data is lost. In BigQuery, you can keep it for as long as you want.Then, when you take those insights and combine them with your analytics data – in GA4, for example – suddenly you're not just looking at what people are searching for, but how they behave when they land on your site. You can connect the dots between search demands, journeys, and conversions, and it makes the game more interesting.Not enough SEOs are aware of this. They just think of BigQuery as a database where you kind of store your data, which is true, but when you talk about the analysis of your historical data set, that's where it all changes.When you go to legal, they will ask you questions about retention and what you are storing. You need to spread that knowledge around to say that this is something that could be changed in BigQuery, and not just for SEO, but for things like analytics as well.”

Krzysztof Marzec emphasises the alignment between organic search and paid search – and the useful additional data that one can provide the other.Krzysztof says: “Use your data from Google Ads to improve SEO, and use data from SEO to improve your Google Ads campaigns.Also, mix it and blend it with AI, because now we have AI to improve it all.”If you're not actively using Google Ads, is it worthwhile having a small campaign up and running simply to use as data to power your SEO?“Yes. If you are not using Google Ads, you are losing a lot of data, and you are also losing clients. When you are generating organic traffic to your website, you should fight for a conversion rate. Using remarketing in Google or Meta Ads can improve your conversion rate because you simply have more attention from your users after they leave your website.We also see that, in long-term projects, when you are fighting for keywords in organic, you are losing the potential of getting new clients when you could use Google Ads to run for the same keywords and the same targets, and then gather some data.When you run a Google Ad campaign, you can check the Quality Score, the CTR, and whether it's a good ad, and you can check your landing page. You can learn whether your SEO campaign might fail, or it might be much harder to gain traction, visibility, and a high position in SERPs because there's something off with one of these parameters.With Google Ads, you can test your ideas. In SEO, you only have one landing page. It's extremely hard to do A/B testing on the same website because you want to use everything for the user base, and you don't want to risk anything. In Google Ads, it's very simple.

Marco Giordano highlights that the most successful SEOs will take data from multiple sources – not just traditional SEO platforms.Marco says: “Use multiple data sources, not just SEO data, to make decisions.”What's the difference between the alternative data sources and the typical data sources for SEO?“Most of the time, people use Search Console, which is our default option for several reasons. For one, it's the only first-party tool that contains Google queries, which is the dominant search engine. People also rely on crawl data from tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb, or they scrape websites themselves. There are other third-party tools as well, like Majestic, Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. That’s the traditional suite.Some people have a decent knowledge of GA4, which is used for other data and tracking conversions, events, and what happens inside the website – which is not strictly SEO, of course.However, there are data sources other than GA4 that are also super important and can help you. For example, in your CMS (Content Management System), you can get metadata about your articles and pages that can be useful. For example, the classification of a page or even the tags or categories you assign to a given page.Also, your CRM. If you're doing B2B, you can’t exactly connect your SEO data, like queries, but it gives you the opportunity to better understand how your website contributes to your leads, because there are connections with Salesforce and HubSpot, if you're using GA4.”

Sophie Brannon shares the importance of not focusing solely on the new shiny thing and that the fundamentals will always matter most. Talking points include: How do you know what should be fundamental? How often should you revisit this? What is holistic marketing? Why is this key to SEO? How do you measure success? How would you summarise the fundamentals of SEO in 2026? How often should you review what the fundamentals are?

Julia-Carolin Zeng shares some of the key areas that you should be continually monitoring in order to know what to adjust.Julia says: “Monitoring, testing, and adjusting.The search landscape will keep on changing. What we've seen so far in 2025 is nothing yet.”How is the search landscape continuing to change?“Right now, the buzzword in SEO is the ‘great decoupling’, where we see impressions going up and clicks going down. I see it more as a democratisation of the search landscape, with new players in the field now.Google is suddenly getting a lot of competition because people don’t just perform their searches on Google or Bing anymore, as they did historically. There are now all these LLMs out there like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. Google has expanded the AI overviews. They've rolled out AI Mode. I've also suddenly seen quite a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo for some of my clients. We don't yet know where that's coming from. Then there's still DuckDuckGo and Ecosia out there.However, ChatGPT seems to have become the big competitor to Google, even though the actions and searches that are performed in those places aren't exactly equivalent. We've seen a democratisation there, because Google is not the default for everything related to search anymore.”

One of the keys to continually enhancing your SEO performance is to keep on testing, shares Andrew Cock-Starkey.Andrew says: “Test, test, test.Test a lot. Test lots of different things. Do some testing.How do you know what to test?“You don't want to test everything. What I normally advise is testing what your customers use, or what your target customers use.I used to work with a company where the boss would come and say, ‘This doesn't work, the website looks awful on my computer,’ but we couldn't work out what was going on. We were testing all these things, checking in different browsers, and checking on different devices. Eventually, I went into their office, and they were using an extremely old version of Internet Explorer (not even Edge), and they had the magnification set to 150%.

One of the non-traditional platforms for SEO is app stores, and this is an opportunity that Filipa Serra Gaspar wishes to highlight.Filipa says: “This year, you should be considering App Store Optimization.Now, in the AI era, it is really important to be in a good position everywhere on the web – not only on traditional search engines. I'm talking about ASO because app stores should not be left behind.You should be doing ASO as part of your activities. Of course, it only applies if the website that you are working on also has an app. If you have an app, this is 100% something that you should be looking at.”Should you create an app just for the additional opportunity to drive traffic into your ecosystem?“It really depends on the area your website is in.I've mainly been working with e-commerce, and I would say the benefits of having an app are quite significant, but it really depends on where you are operating. You shouldn't create an app just for the sake of it, obviously – only if it really makes sense for the business.”

Mathilde Høj adds her voice to the call to diversification, highlighting that search and search behaviour have entirely changed.Mathilde says: “Search is no longer a channel, it's a behaviour.You need to adapt your entire marketing strategy to it, and have a more integrated approach.”What do you mean when you say that search is a behaviour?“It means that we see a lot of different things coming into play in how users are interacting with platforms.Usually, when users want to find something, they will go to Google and search, then go to a web page, and then maybe convert or go to a physical store. Now, though, they are doing much more than that. They are searching across multiple platforms and visiting multiple sites before making a decision on whether or not to buy.There are two factors coming into play here, and affecting the way users are behaving. First of all, we have generative AI and machine learning changing the way traditional engines work. We have AI overviews and AI Mode, but also this behaviour is taking place in new environments, and the platforms in those environments are adapting to it as well.For example, TikTok is doing a lot to make themselves more like a search engine, which means that users are turning to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or Reddit to search for stuff.”