SEO in 2026

Jean-Marc Courtiade talks about the importance of going back to roots analysis thanks to consent-free analytics tools.Talking points include:What is a consent-free analytics tool?When is consent required?What data can we obtain on a consent-free basis?What countries is this relevant to? How do you blend all the data together to produce a complete picture?Is there still a place for asking for consent for certain data or is it not worth it?

Sara Warneryd shares the importance of shifting from Google clicks to multi-platform discovery. Talking points include:*Understanding Search as Discovery: Why user journeys are shifting from a single Google search to multi-platform exploration, and what this means for your brand.* Creating content for the platforms, not the click: How to format your knowledge so it delivers full value directly on Reddit, TikTok, or YouTube, keeping users engaged where they are.* Mapping High-Impact Sources: How to identify and prioritize the influential channels where your audience actually seeks advice

Brett Farmiloe discusses why journalist request platforms are so important for SEO with David Bain. Talking points include: What is Help a Reporter Out? You’re founder of Featured.com - what does that offer? How do these platforms actually work? Who uses them? What can you actually gain from using these platforms? What are some Best practices for cold pitching podcasts and journalists? How do you measure success? What are some bad or ineffective practices?

In 2026, the most effective SEO strategy is to create truly unique, non-replicable content, which means avoiding the use of AI to mass-produce generic pages at scale. What do you think?Discussion points include:Why is mass-producing content a fragile strategy?How do you differentiate content?What are examples of types of content that nobody else can produce?How do you know if your target audience is likely to want to know about your personal perspective?What are the downsides of this strategy?Where should AI be used?

Will Rice discusses the importance of creating useful tools to convert more of your existing traffic. Talking points include: How to understand what is going to get your traffic to convert more. How do you know what traffic is likely to convert? How do you put a financial value on traffic from different sources? How to rapidly build tools to provide genuine value to your customers. Which tools are best? Why is this better than other forms of traffic? What else to do with the data you get from the tools you build?

Stefan Lozo shares the importance of not neglecting traditional SEO int eh age of AI. Talking points include: What activities would you describe as traditional SEO? How should an SEO define their services in 2026? How should this be communicated with clients? What happens if clients push back and are looking for other services or ways of doing things? How do you set realistic expectations for clients? Is it a good idea to do white label SEO for other agencies? How do you see the traditional agency SEO offering continuing to evolve?

Reena Bowden agrees with Jade Pruett about the ability to stay agile as we move through 2026.Reena says: “Make sure that you are discoverable, and be agile with optimizing your business for AI-driven search and answer engines. We're also talking about GEO and AIO, not just for traditional search.To be discoverable and agile, you need to be proactive and not just reactive to market changes because things are moving fast.”How would you summarise the key elements of making your brand discoverable in the age of AI, and how has that changed in the last few years?“Not only have things changed in the last two years, but things have changed more than they have in the last 10 years.Just when you think that SEO is going to become boring, it becomes less boring once again. Gone are the days of just building pages for SEO: looking at your keywords, publishing content, and then waiting a few months for the results. Things have changed so much recently, but things are changing again very fast.The question is, how do you remain discoverable and remain visible in this world? You have to work on your assets and materials (whether that’s information or insights – including those that are owned, earned, and paid) to continue being visible in that new AI world, but it's also important to be mentioned in citations.To remain top-of-mind and visible, there are a number of things that you can do to make sure that you continue being SEO-friendly, but you are also AI-friendly. However, it's important to be recognised by the outside world as well. Off-page SEO and, increasingly, digital PR are gaining importance. All of these high authority, trusted sources are becoming very important, as are citations.It's important to understand what AI is looking at when it's looking for information about you. That is where I see the game changing.”

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.”