2026 SEO Roadmap: 12 Experts on Technical, Content, and Brand for the AI Era

If 2025 was the year we all realised SEO was changing, 2026 will be the year we decide what to do about it. We are moving out of the 'AI hype' phase and into a reality where search is about generating answers, not just recommending links.

To help make sense of this new era, we asked some of the brightest minds in the industry from independent consultants to agency heads to share their vision for the next twelve months. Whether it’s the rise of AI agents, the evolution of 'GEO' back into just 'SEO', or the critical need for genuine human expertise, this roundup provides the strategic clarity needed to thrive in the 2026 search landscape.

Silvia Martin

Independent SEO Consultant and founder of Trebole

When I think about 2026, I see AI as a real opportunity for digital marketing, SEO and online visibility, not something to fear.

The barrier to entry is lower than ever, which means more marketers and businesses are using AI to experiment, build small internal tools, test content formats, and even “vibe code” their own workflows, apps, and tools instead of relying solely on off-the-shelf platforms. Not every experiment will work, but experimentation is no longer optional; it’s how you learn faster and stay competitive.

Search behaviour is also changing, and the decline in clicks and traditional organic traffic we’re already seeing is here to stay, driven by AI Overviews, zero-click results, and LLMs answering queries directly. In this context, SEO is no longer just about rankings and traffic, but about visibility and influence across AI systems and different platforms. However, I believe Google will still retain the largest share of the search market over the next year.

AI agents will continue to grow in the coming year, with more integrations, better tooling, and wider adoption across marketing, operations, and product teams. More people will start using agents to automate tasks, connect systems, and support decision-making, especially as platforms make them easier to deploy and manage. However, security and data privacy remain major concerns. Because of these risks, I think that full adoption will be cautious rather than explosive in 2026.

I believe brands will matter more than ever, both personal brands and company brands. Being consistently visible, cited, and mentioned across trusted sources will shape success as AI plays a bigger role in how people discover, evaluate, and choose, making branding and authority critical assets for 2026 and beyond.

Anthony Barone

Co-founder & Managing Director of StudioHawk UK

SEO will only thrive more, not die, the hard part is dispelling the AI noise, and providing education to brands/c-suite.

I believe that SEO never really died, it’s never been as popular as say, branding and socials, but it’s light dimmed a bit as AI AI AI came to wash over every LinkedIn post, Forbes article, tech bro trying to sell a course or stoke fear to buy said tool.

We have a situation where shiny toy marketers with KPIs to hit in a terrible economy (UK) and Americanised C-suite boomers with zero clue as to how marketing works, wanting to not feel fomo and also wanting instant results jumping on the AI bandwagon and not understanding SEO or not wanting to waste time with a ‘long-term channel’ as ‘everyone uses CGPT’.

The issues are that this causes a distraction for the company, the brand, the team, and internal resource gets pulled left and right, depending on what the founders/c-suite read that morning.

They fail to remember what are the goals are, what is the company is trying to achieve and how SEO or any marketing channel and the tasks required by each channel will help to grow the business.

Making the marketers internally go along with it to keep their jobs, placate the higher-ups and then try to figure out how it all works while letting competitors build equity online, while these people throw budgets, time and resources at AI.

As we’ve had Chat GPT for a few years now and new tools come along from Google and other companies like Claude, etc., it still shows us that while things are changing and the way people search are changing a bit from the Google-dominated quarter century, we are still seeing people are ‘SEARCHING’, no matter the platform.

And what are these platforms looking at to serve you to it’s users?

Your brand, your website, your social media, your content, your authority, your qualifications, your brand reputation - and where is a lot of that information stored? A lot is on your own website.

Therefore, your website is still a key factor for your marketing, it’s still a channel you can control, build, grow and dominate competitors with.

SEO isn’t dying, it’s evolving, these in-house people in most marketing and finance departments and the C-suite will come to realise it soon enough when the numbers aren’t as strong as they wanted (thinking AI is this silver bullet that will propel them to Coca-Cola-like worldwide domination) and then look to catchup[ and grab some of that lost time and equity on online channels.

What should you do?

Search / SEO is now a holistic game, not just 100% Google. It’s more platforms to be visible on and optimise for, and a lot of it still starts with your website and optimising it for users, promoting your brand, showcasing your expertise and remember why would someone buy from you, what makes you special and what marketing channels and related tasks need to be done to achieve the goals, build the brand and grow the business.

Iva Jovanovic

SEO & Content Specialist + Conference Organizer

Search is no longer just links and rankings. It is answers, summaries, feeds, and recommendations shaped by AI systems long before a user ever reaches a website. With that in mind, I believe SEO in 2026 will look less like a checklist and more like a system that connects different aspects: technical foundations, content intent, and real business outcomes. And more than that. SEO will connect with other branches of digital marketing, forcing SEOs to explore, learn, and experiment even more.

The biggest challenge will not be “AI replacing SEO,” but businesses misreading where value is created and overinvesting in unstable shortcuts while neglecting durable brand and technical foundations.

Contrary to the leading narrative of SEO being dead and GEO being the new thing, it’s not. GEO is SEO, and the only difference we have in 2025 and will continue in 2026 is having another medium/channel where results will be displayed. And this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t monitor LLM activity or focus solely on LLM answers. It means including the new medium in our strategies, but ultimately focusing on delivering good websites with good content and a good technical foundation.

SEOs should be doing more work that strengthens trust, authority, and clarity at a system level. That means building websites that clearly represent who you are, what you do, and why you are credible.

What SEOs should be doing less is chasing shortcuts, overproducing generic AI content, and obsessing over single keywords in isolation. Tactics designed to game temporary features, exploit brief algorithm gaps, or “optimize for AI” without understanding stability usually collapse as soon as interfaces or weighting change.

There also needs to be less mass production of generic AI content. Scaling pages that rephrase what already exists adds noise, not value. Content that lacks perspective, authorship, and proof of expertise is increasingly filtered out, whether by algorithms or by users.

What we ultimately need is more learning, experimenting, and diving into other marketing fields. We need to explore the backstage, see how things get developed, and broaden our knowledge and skills. Collaboration has never been needed more, with other departments, other SEOs, other areas.

Gerry White

SEO Consultant, Nerd and GEO Specialist

2025 was probably the year we collectively went, "Oh crikey, SEO is changing." just with more colourful language and I'll start with a rant: the 'contract' between content producers and Google is truly smashed. No longer do we produce great content, get listed in the ten blue links, and get rewarded with traffic. Google is pushing harder into AI overviews and pushing people into AI Mode, users are increasingly bypassing search engines entirely for ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, and others. Meta and TikTok can’t be ruled out, Reddit as well has just introduced an answer engine.

This means we need to evolve, re-skill, and fundamentally rethink what this new world means for us, but this isn't a different discipline, it's just a wider umbrella.

Lately, I've seen a lot of chatter suggesting that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and LLM optimization are entirely different beasts, something "traditional" SEOs aren't equipped to handle. Historically, our industry has always evolved by absorbing specialized subsets. International SEO brought us hreflang and localization. Local SEO introduced proximity signals and entity optimization. ASO taught us app store dynamics. Google Merchant Center forced us to master feed management. None of these are ‘just’ SEO, yet they all live under the same umbrella because the core principles—authority, relevance, data-driven analysis, and technical excellence—remain constant.

The "old school" SEOs I know haven't been sitting on the sidelines. Since the day ChatGPT went live, they've been reverse-engineering LLM citations, building analysis tools, and studying how these engines consume and surface data. GEO isn't a replacement for SEO; it's a specialist subset of it, just like all the others before it.

Understanding the New Landscape

The key is understanding exactly how these new results are built and presented, and more importantly, how to populate them. Results are increasingly assembled from disparate data sources, structured data, content snippets, citations, entity relationships, that feed into what users actually see, whether that's an AI overview, a ChatGPT response, or a knowledge panel.

This is also challenging because the data available to us is being rapidly reduced. More and more, we're going to have to accept not knowing our precise visibility, our 'rankings,' and watching attribution slip away into the black box. SEO needs to be broader now. Don't focus exclusively on the classic blue links. Start looking at the broader customer journey as it spans multiple platforms—social, AI assistants, forums, review sites. Measurement will be increasingly challenging, and we need to accept that understanding a journey can span multiple browsers, devices, and platforms where we simply won't have the data we once took for granted.

What Happened in 2025:

Predictions for 2026:

1. We'll Stop Calling It GEO and Just Call It SEO By mid-2026, the industry will quietly drop the "GEO vs SEO" debate and accept that optimising for LLMs, AI overviews, and traditional search is all just... SEO. Just like we don't call it "voice SEO" or "featured snippet SEO" anymore, it's all part of the job and hopefully we will settle on a single acronym rather than the 50+ that don’t work.

2. Brand Building Becomes the New Link Building Brand mentions, citations in AI training data, and presence across platforms will matter more than traditional backlinks ever did. If your brand isn't being talked about on Reddit, industry discussions, and relevant publications, won't perform in AI-generated results.

3. Structured Data Becomes Mission-Critical (Again) Remember when we all got excited about schema markup,  Well, it's back with a vengeance. LLMs and AI systems rely heavily on structured data to understand and cite content. Expect schema.org to become more important than it's been in a decade.

4. Traditional Keyword Research will Change AI systems understand intent and context better than ‘keywords’. We'll shift to topic authority mapping, entity-based optimisation, and understanding semantic relationships instead.

5. Technical SEO Gets Critical With Google and other platforms scraping content to train AI and populate overviews, we'll need new strategies around structured data, content licensing, and potentially even AI-specific protocols. We will be opening up content that previously we might have hidden, content needs to perform better without JavaScript and internal linking needs to be even cleaner.

6. Attribution Will Become Directional at Best Accept it now: multi-touch attribution across platforms, browsers, and AI assistants won't be solved in 2026. We'll move toward modeled attribution and directional insights rather than pretending we can track everything accurately. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can focus on meaningful proxy metrics.

7. Content Quality Will Mean Actual Expertise The days of hiring cheap writers to churn out 2,000-word articles optimized for keywords are over. In 2026, content will need to be genuinely valuable, demonstrably expert, and ideally authored by real humans with actual credentials and experience, however using AI to ‘optimise’ the content flow will be the norm.   Low quality AI-generated slop will be filtered out systematically by both Google and LLMs.

What Should We Actually Do?

The same things we've always done, but evolved:

If you've been doing SEO properly for the last decade, building authority, creating valuable content, mastering technical implementation, and adapting to each platform's unique requirements, this shift won’t kill, but clicks will be dropping for everyone, impressions and clicks will only be half the metrics.

2026 will separate those who adapt from those who keep optimizing for a world that no longer exists. The SEO skillset  got wider, keep learning.

Aleyda

SEO Consultant, Creator of SEOFOMO & Crawling Mondays

Bengü Sarıca Dinçer

SEO Manager at Designmodo

As we move into 2026, I don’t think Google stops being the main search interface. That said, search is still anchored in Google for most users, yet it’s increasingly influenced by AI assistants, social platforms, and online communities that shape what people trust and what they search for in the first place.

In 2026, we're going to see more AI-powered results, summaries, and conversational layers and they will continue to change how information is consumed. Users are getting answers faster, often without clicking, and they’re moving between platforms more fluidly. As a result, being visible now requires being recognizable when your brand or expertise appears in an AI overview, a social recommendation, or a cited source.

One of the biggest challenges in 2026 will be the growing gap between performance and perception. Traditional SEO metrics still matter, but they won’t fully reflect business impact. Brands that are consistently mentioned, searched for by name, and recognised across multiple platforms will outperform those that rely solely on non-branded discovery. So I anticipate that brand recognition is quietly becoming one of the strongest SEO advantages.

I also expect trust to become more consolidated. Signals like entity clarity, topical consistency, real authorship, and off-site validation are becoming harder to fake. Sites that look interchangeable, even if technically sound, will struggle to stand out in environments designed to reduce redundancy.

In response, I think SEO people should be doing more work that strengthens brand presence across platforms. That means aligning SEO with social, PR, community, and product storytelling and understanding how content travels, gets referenced, and reinforces brand memory. Structuring content clearly, connecting it through internal and external signals, and investing in recognisable voices will matter more than publishing at scale.

At the same time, SEOs should be doing less keyword-first planning in isolation. Keyword demand still has value, for sure, but without brand relevance and contextual authority, it’s increasingly fragile. I also think we need to be more selective with AI-driven content production. AI works better as a research tool, not as a replacement for original thinking.

Overall, SEO in 2026 feels less like a race for rankings and more like a long-term exercise in recognition and trust. Google may still be the primary interface, but the brands that win will be the ones users already recognize, no matter where the discovery starts.

Jonathan Moore

Technical SEO and Analytics Consultant

As we move out of 2025, search is no longer primarily about recommending sources. It is about generating answers.

Search engines synthesise responses directly, rather than acting as gateways to websites. This shift is being accelerated by an ongoing arms race, with Google rapidly closing the gap and aiming to overtake OpenAI and other LLM providers. The result is sustained disruption across search, most visibly through AI Overviews sitting above traditional results. Authority-heavy core updates will continue to push visibility towards established brands. Combined, these changes hollow out organic traffic for most sites. The likely introduction of ads into AI surfaces represents a further erosion of traffic.

Alongside this acceleration, we should expect further instability driven by rushed adoption. The rapid deployment of LLM features and widespread vibe coding is already introducing security, data leakage, brand safety risks, and poorly synthesised outputs. Over the next year, trust will become a differentiator, not just visibility, as platforms are forced to address the consequences of moving faster than their underlying safeguards allow.

During the last 12 months we have seen dramatic changes to user behaviour. Decision-making now happens in the messy middle, where people consult multiple surfaces before deciding.

Discovery now occurs across AI answers, feeds, and social platforms, not just on search results pages. Journeys are increasingly non-linear and shaped by micro-moments rather than single queries.

Journeys increasingly start outside traditional search. Social feeds, AI answers, apps, and assistants often form the first touchpoint. AI systems aggregate evidence and form conclusions long before links to sources appear. Traditional results sit below AI summaries, citations, and extracted answers, rather than acting as the primary interface. Decisions are made across fragmented surfaces rather than on a single results page.

To remain visible, brands need to consider optimising multiple surfaces, rather than relying on Google. This includes AI Overviews within search, traditional results such as rankings and snippets, LLMs that reference or retrieve content directly, and other discovery platforms where journeys begin, including social, communities, and partners.

AI search results will also become more personal and contextual. What users see will increasingly differ based on their history, preferences, and situation. AI assistants are remembering prior interactions and tailoring responses accordingly. In 2026, search will feel less like a sequence of isolated queries and more like an ongoing conversation.

AI assistants will also move beyond providing answers to taking action on our behalf. Feeds will play an increasingly important role in facilitating product discovery, and hands-free interactions will become more common as voice, camera, and wearable devices are adopted. Tools such as Google Lens and Meta AI glasses point to a future where typing is no longer the default.

The web itself is on the verge of becoming agentic. Browsers are evolving into AI-powered tools that can read, click, and act like a human user. Protocols such as the Model Context Protocol and Agent-to-Agent communication will allow AI systems to share data and context. These standards will connect websites, apps, and agents into a shared network of actions.

To stay ahead of the curve, brands should continue to help users find what they want by being visible in the surfaces where they are active.

Collect first-party data wherever possible, because understanding your audience directly matters more than ever. Structure content so it can be easily extracted as evidence across AI and search surfaces. Double down on lower funnel content to cover the full intent spaces of synthetic sub-queries. Brands should strengthen their authority signals by demonstrating clear expertise, facts, and sourcing. Where appropriate, continue to create content in multiple formats, including short-form video, to match how different platforms surface and prioritise information.

Vanda Pókecz

SEO Product Lead at Atolls

My prediction for 2026 is that SEO will move into a paradoxical but powerful position: practitioners will become both more independent and more interdependent at the same time.

On the one hand, SEOs will gain unprecedented independence. With AI tools, low-code and no-code solutions, and vibe coding, they will no longer be limited by access to engineering or data teams for every idea. Instead, SEOs will increasingly build their own internal tools, set up monitoring and automation, visualise complex datasets, and prototype solutions themselves. This shift will not just speed up execution; it will also fundamentally change how ideas are pitched. Higher-quality mock-ups, dashboards, and MVPs will make SEO proposals clearer, more tangible, and easier for stakeholders to buy into.

At the same time, SEOs will need to become more interdependent, more actively connected, than ever before. This is driven not only by AI-powered search, but by the broader fragmentation of user behaviour. People no longer ‘just Google’. They discover information across AI answer engines, social platforms, marketplaces, and large e-commerce ecosystems. No single team owns this entire journey, which makes cross-functional collaboration essential.

SEOs are uniquely well positioned to act as connectors across disciplines, from Product and Engineering to Brand, Content, CRO, Social, and even Customer Support. Yet SEO has often been practised in relative isolation, fighting for prioritisation rather than embedding itself into shared initiatives. In 2026, that mindset will continue to shift. The most effective SEOs will actively seek overlap, build horizontal knowledge, and align their goals with those of other teams. Many successful projects already solve problems for multiple disciplines; recognising and leveraging that overlap will become a core SEO skill.

Finally, SEOs will learn to play the game better. That means resisting the instinct to either fight every change or jump head-first into every hype cycle. Instead, successful SEOs will focus on navigation: understanding trade-offs, communicating strategy clearly, and framing SEO work in formats that resonate with decision-makers. Strong storytelling, clearer strategy articulation, and better stakeholder communication will matter just as much as technical expertise.

2026 will reward SEOs who combine executional independence with deep collaboration, those who can build on their own, but win together.

Emina Demiri-Watson

Head of Digital Marketing at Vixen Digital

By the end of 2026, effective SEO teams will have moved on from AI hype. They will use LLMs where they genuinely add value and build full-stack marketing skills that demonstrate impact at a business level. For some, this will feel familiar. For others, it will mean relearning fundamentals that were temporarily sidelined.

We are past the peak of AI hype

SEO is now firmly in the AI disillusionment phase. The early excitement has faded and the limitations are clear.

Many tools claiming to measure “AI rankings”, citations, or LLM visibility are breaking down because what they attempt to measure is not stable, repeatable, or actionable. Teams that invested heavily in shiny tooling and automation are starting to see that much of this work delivers little real impact. As AI continues to underdeliver against inflated expectations.

Google is in the lead, but the product is unstable

Google has established itself as the dominant force in AI search, but its rollout remains inconsistent.

Features such as AI Mode in main search and agent-style experiences have been launched, revised, and in some cases withdrawn entirely. Security concerns, hallucinations, and trust issues continue to push Google into public experimentation followed by retreat.

Meanwhile, many SEO teams have scrambled to optimise for unstable features, only to realise that progress now requires a return to core marketing fundamentals.

The skills that will matter in 2026

The era of extreme specialisation is ending. The skills that matter are broader, not narrower.

A full-stack SEO mindset - SEO extends far beyond rankings. Strong teams start with real audience understanding, map brand presence across owned, earned, and paid channels, and ensure that pre-click messaging aligns with post-click experience. SEO influences the entire journey, from first exposure to conversion and retention.

Analytics literacy beyond SEO tools - Rankings are no longer a credible measure of success. In 2026, effective SEOs will define KPIs tied to commercial outcomes, communicate attribution limitations clearly, and focus on behavioural signals such as engagement depth, repeat visits, assisted conversions, and cross-channel movement. Reporting will demonstrate understanding, not activity.

Practical LLM literacy - LLMs cannot be reverse engineered, AI detection remains unreliable, and tracking “AI rankings” is fundamentally flawed. Value comes from using these systems appropriately for audience research, intent classification, content gap analysis, and pattern recognition at scale. The SEOs who succeed will understand both the strengths and limits of probabilistic systems and avoid treating them as deterministic tools.

Will Kennard - SEO & Web Consultant

Technical

Tech is moving at an alarming rate, and I don’t think people are talking enough about how much importance technical SEO will have as more and more apps and websites go live filled with errors from AI coding tools.

A lot of the hype around SEO ‘dying’ is mostly aimed at content because it’s easy to create content with ChatGPT etc, whereas technical still requires a large base of context and experience to properly diagnose issues, and I believe this will only grow in importance whilst LLM token limits remain roughly the same despite many new models.

Technical opportunity

This isn’t to say that AI coding tools are ‘bad’ - they are a huge time saver and can accelerate ideas quickly. This is an opportunity for SEOs to use these tools to gain a deeper understanding of development processes and technologies and build their own solutions to complex problems. In 2026 the best SEOs will be those who see AI not as a threat but as an opportunity to learn and grow. Build your own apps, build sites, and solve problems - that’s what technical has always been about, now it’s just moving faster.

Content

I think we’re going to see content continue to grow through AI too, whether we like it or not. A simple framework for content I’m using in 2026 is taken from classic marketing strategy: points of parity vs points of difference. Use AI to create content that ensures you have content parity vs the competition - this tends to be more on the factual side - and use your own creative experience, expertise and opinion to create the unique content that becomes your points of difference.

Find more about Will at willkennard.com

Natalia Witczyk

International SEO Consultant / CEO @ Mosquita Digital

2026 will be the year of monopolies. On one hand, many SEO tools will continue getting acquired and merged, generating a more homogenous tool scene. On the other hand, many small AI Visibility / GEO startups will be wiped out, giving way to a few larger solutions that have an already established brand.

And lastly, Google will further assert its dominance in the digital landscape. This is only a natural turn of events following a very failed DOJ trial that found Google to be a monopoly but haven’t followed with any tangible legal consequence that would change the current dominance. This means there’s nothing that could stop Google now. And the latest AI developments make it clear that Gemini caught up with the AI race, if not started winning with ChatGPT altogether. My prediction is that Gemini will keep improving even further and will leave ChatGPT more behind. By the end of 2026, Gemini will be the one LLM everyone’s talking about.

Tom Bourlet

Head of Marketing for Modern World Business Solutions

Google Ads has continuously pushed you towards the AI options over the last few years, with P-Max improving drastically, as well as the launch of AI Max, while manual search campaigns have seen the cost per click rise rapidly each year and it’s only going to go up further as they squeeze you off manual bidding. We could however see ads enter the AI Overview in the not too distant future, as this must have had an impact on their ad revenue.

Meta Ads has changed drastically in 2025 with the Andromeda engine rolled out globally in October. What used to work just 6 months ago has changed, meaning everyone has to adapt and re-learn, as well as doing plenty of testing. The early signs show that the best method is to create between 10-50 ads per ad set, rather than having a huge number of ad sets. You also need to create completely different concepts for each image or video, rather than making minor alterations.

Sadly, I do see Meta Ad costs rising, just like Google Ads, maybe Bing Ads will remain the only low cost option, albeit offering low traffic volumes.

The launch of the ChatGPT Atlas browser was anti-climatic, to say the least, just being launched on macOS, but it highlights the drastic ways in which browsers are changing and so will our purchasing patterns. In 2025 we gained the ability to purchase directly on ChatGPT with Stripe, however this hasn’t yet shifted people over to buying on the platform, but will this change in 2026? AI Agents will continuously improve and also become more heavily adopted by the general public, which in-turn will increase the purchases through these methods.

Find more about Tom on TakeItOffline

Yagmur Simsek

Independent SEO Consultant & Founder of “Search ‘n Stuff” Networking Project

If 2025 was the year SEO lost its innocence, 2026 will be the year it earns its discipline. We are moving out of AI fascination and into an answer-first reality where search engines no longer simply rank pages, they recall sources they trust. That shift exposes a hard truth: thin content, keyword-first thinking, and traffic-only success metrics don’t survive when users increasingly get answers without clicking. In 2026, visibility is less about being found and more about being chosen, repeatedly, across fragmented discovery journeys.

This is why “GEO” won’t remain a separate concept for long. Optimising for generative engines is not a new channel; it’s SEO done properly. Topical authority, clean technical foundations, structured data, and consistent entity signals become non-negotiable if you want to be understood by AI systems. But technical excellence alone isn’t enough. The brands that continue to perform across industries and markets are those that pair authority with identity, clear positioning, recognisable experts, and a coherent narrative that search engines and humans can both understand.

The biggest shift in 2026 is that brand and community signals become SEO assets. Mentions, citations, expert participation, community engagement, meaningful partnerships and social proof increasingly act as trust shortcuts for AI systems deciding what to surface. SEO can no longer live in isolation from PR, brand, UX, or community building. The teams that win will be the ones who use AI to remove busywork, not thinking, and invest human effort into credibility, relationships, and genuine expertise. In an answer-driven search landscape, authority isn’t built by publishing more. It’s built by being real, consistent, and worth remembering.