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SEO in 2026

Author: Majestic.com

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SEO is continuing to change at an alarming pace. And yet, in some sense, the principles of good SEO remain the same.
Hello, and welcome to SEO in 2026 – a significant repository of current thinking from many of the world’s leading SEOs.
We're pleased to be able to welcome you to the fifth book and fifth series in this podcast, now well and truly an annual tradition, brought to you by Majestic.

“How people search has seen a bigger shift in the last 12 months than the last 12 years, and this makes SEOin2026 a must-read for anyone working in the industry. Majestic has brought together 117 of the SEO industry's brightest minds to share their insights into what matters, and what doesn't, to continue to drive growth with organic search during a period of massive uncertainty, and the book should be seen as a valuable reference point to keep your strategy on the right track.”
JAMES BROCKBANK
Managing Director and Founder, Digitaloft

“I highly recommend that every SEO professional set aside a couple of days for SEOin2026. You'll thank me for helping you plan your year effectively. I'm extremely grateful to have the opportunity to work alongside some of the world's leading SEO champions.”
NITIN MANCHANDA
Founder & Chief SEO Consultant, Botpresso

“This collection of wisdom from many of the best minds in SEO today is a great line in the sand of where we as an industry are, what problems we face, and how we tackle them. Anyone in SEO or marketing should be dipping into this on a regular basis.”
SIMON COX
Technical SEO Consultant, Cox and Co. Creative

“This series continues to be the industry’s leading source of the most timely advice a marketer could ever want. The most forward-thinking SEO experts in the world come together once a year to create this invaluable collection of new knowledge that should never be passed up on!”
PAM AUNGST CRONIN
President and Founder, Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics

“2025 has been a sprint for the SEO industry, with AI reshaping how we understand visibility, relevance, and authority. SEOin2026 is not just another trends book; it’s a roadmap for what’s actually coming. I loved being part of it and seeing how experts around the world approach the same challenges from different angles.”
RAMONA JOITA
SEO Consultant and Founder

“David is good at drawing out the substance of a conversation. He will explore the topic and challenge assumptions, steer the conversation into an unexpected direction, and build on your ideas – making you think a bit deeper and sharper. Our recent conversation flew by as always, and as always – I’ve come out energised about the topic with more to think about.”
SUKHJINDER SINGH
Freelance SEO Consultant
527 Episodes
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Charlie Clark shares that as we move towards an AI search-first world, brands should move beyond "links for links’ sake" and focus on semantically relevant brand mentions that align with key topics and entities, helping AI engines better understand, associate, and prioritise them in results.Talking points include:What’s an example of links for links’ sake?How do we focus on semantically relevant brand mentions?How do we measure the success of semantically relevant brand mentions?How do we ensure that semantically relevant brand mentions align with key topics and entities?Why does this help AI?How do we measure success?
Following on from Aleyda’s advice to optimize for citation-worthiness, Sukhjinder Singh shares that brand recognition is key.Sukhjinder says: “Say goodbye to rankings and hello to recognition. It's time to appear everywhere.”Why is it time to say goodbye to rankings?“It's not a complete goodbye, but it’s changing your mindset. We're still comfortable with tracking ranking positions as one of our main metrics, and it should be one of our metrics, but we need to become more comfortable with appearing in different ways and broadening our idea of what it means to be discoverable.We should be focussing on things like brand mentions, entity strength, visual content, and all the different ways that you're surfaced in the SERPs and the more conversational interactions across platforms.It's broadening that idea and getting out of the comfort zone of tracking the top 10 ranking positions. Even now, that has been made more difficult with Google's change to pagination and how tools are picking up information from beyond position 10.It’s not a complete goodbye, but it’s time to open your mind to other ways of tracking brand recognition instead.”
We all know that one of the most effective forms of SEO is to create a resource that garners natural links. A big part of brand SEO is to build a brand that people want to talk about. Aleyda says: “Optimize for citation-worthiness.This is easier said than done. It's about establishing yourself as an authority in your field, but in order to do that, you have to make it very clear what your unique selling proposition is and create and optimize your assets and web presence accordingly – both within your own website and externally as well.We have heard so much regarding how LLMs are getting citations from social media, and all of these features are giving visibility to Reddit, YouTube, etc., so we need to put some content out there. However, a lot of those conversations aren’t thinking about the alignment with your product, your brand, your USP, and what actually matters business-wise.Time and time again, we have seen how Google updates have negatively affected the rankings and the traffic of topics that are too shallow, too broad, and are not aligned with the subject matter expertise and uniqueness of the brand. We have also seen a lot of comments saying, ‘Because of the Crocodile Effect, it's no longer worth targeting broader informational queries,’ which I also think is too simplistic an approach. The truth lies in the middle. What actually matters is the angles, topics, or specific areas that you can cover as a brand. The topics that make sense business-wise won't be fulfilled by generic concepts, and will incentivise the potential customer to learn more about your brand.It's still worth targeting, not only because it will maximise the chances of a click, but even if it doesn't end up generating a click, it will be worth it just to be visible, because that will help the user make their decision later on in the process.”
However, not all SEOs understand the key elements of brand marketing – and if you’re fortunate enough to have specialist brand marketers in your organisation, take advantage of that!Joshua says: “Brand marketers should be SEOs’ best friends.”Why is that?“Brand marketing reaches where SEO can't. It drives demand, and it drives search interest.SEO has always been an inbound channel, but lately, inbound is getting harder. With things like zero-click searches and AI overviews, the opportunities for getting the click are increasingly challenging, but brand search has always been very high intent and very high click-through rate, and it's also a ranking signal.Working with our friends over in the brand channel, we should be devising strategies to drive more branded search, and SEO should be doing more to help the brand teams deliver on all of their work and communicate those results.”
One element of SEO that’s more important than ever is Brand SEO. Brand SEO, according to Ashley Liddell, should be the essence of what SEO is nowadays.Ashley says: “Treat SEO as more of a brand-building activity.Look beyond the traditional KPIs of visibility and towards making your brand the preferred choice in any conversation that's relevant to you.That will make you front of mind and grow your brand awareness and brand presence.”
James McLoughlin shares that crawling and indexing management needs to be a corner stone of your SEO strategy in 2026, ensuring crawlers (both traditional search engine crawlers and LLM crawlers) can quickly and easily discover, understand and index any content you want surfaced in search engines and LLMs.Talking points include:What does crawling and indexing management mean in practice in 2026?How do you ensure that crawlers (both traditional search engine crawlers and LLM crawlers) can quickly and easily discover, understand and index any content you want surfaced?What is the difference between crawling and indexing management for traditional search engines versus LLMs?How do you determine the content you want to be surfaced?What do you do with the content you don’t want to be surfaced?How does this feed into your content marketing strategy?
With so many changes in the space, new acronyms have appeared in an attempt to describe the newer activities involved in SEO job roles. However, that’s a distraction, says Charlie Whitworth.Charlie says: “Forget the acronyms, particularly with AI search and SEO.Let's stop focusing on what it's called and focus on what we need to do.”Do acronyms not assist with articulating how SEO has changed?“I don’t think that SEO has ever been a good description of what we do. It's always been a fairly inaccurate acronym, given that we don't actually optimize search engines; we optimize websites.The term SEO has never been particularly accurate, but never more so than now. A lot of time, money, and effort have been spent debating whether or not we're still SEOs, whether SEO is dead, whether we should be called GEOs, LLMEOs, etc. It's a big waste of time.It worries me how much time we're spending talking about these acronyms and not talking about what we should be doing. Who cares what the acronym is? The key is the work.This constant obsession with SEO being dead or being called the right thing always comes back, whether it was after the death of link building or after Penguin and Panda. Obviously, the emergence of AI has exacerbated that. I don't think many other marketing industries are constantly talking about whether or not their acronym is accurate.What we need to be doing is focusing on what's going to drive growth for clients.”
Nikolas Monti-Potsolakis shares that you can take learnings from SEO changes in highly regulated industries like iGaming and apply them to other sectors.Nikolas says: “In regulated sectors, like the iGaming space, companies need to keep SEO relevant and part of their strategy.The iGaming industry is growing across all continents, and SEO shouldn't just be part of your campaign; it should be part of your infrastructure as a company.It will still remain the number one growth factor. Despite all the LLMs, AI, applications, and all these things, SEO is still relevant and should still be relevant if you want to grow your company and succeed in 2026, especially in a very regulated market like iGaming.”
It’s not only SEOs in larger organisations that now have a greater requirement to understand and relate to business leaders. This is becoming increasingly important for independent SEO consultants, too. Adrijana says: “Acquiring high-paying SEO clients requires a different approach that a lot of SEOs are not talking about.”Why does it require a different approach, and what does that approach look like?“When you want to move from full-time SEO to freelancing SEO, or get your own clients on the side, most SEOs are not thinking about the fact that it’s a completely new skill. You already have SEO experience and knowledge, but when you want to get a client, that is a business skill, which you probably haven't developed yet.
In addition to SEOs facing their own traffic challenges, many alsofind themselves tasked with guiding their business leaders through themassive change driven by AI agents.Ben says: “Guide your C-suite into the great agentic unknown, because if youdon't, then nobody else is going to.”What is the great agentic unknown?“I'm talking about the nature of AI agents using websites in the same way that human customers conventionally would. They are researching a topic on behalf of a user based on a prompt, and can go from researching all the way to getting quotes or even adding things to a shopping cart.
Martina Kölsch shares that the Panda Update in 2011 was one of the first major changes by Google that she encountered. SEO is continually evolving, yet one thing remains constant: prioritising a solid SEO foundation, a clear structure, and excellent content. Many tend to overlook these essentials whenever a new trend emerges.Discussion points include:What are the key SEO essentials that many SEOs tend to overlook?Why do SEOs overlook these fundamentals?What benefit do these fundamentals provide in 2026?How do you measure the impact of the fundamentals?When a new trend emerges, how do you know if it is worth spending your time on?How do you continue to ensure that you are focusing on the most impactful activities?
One continuing trend within SEO in 2026 is the ever-increasing degree of difficulty when it comes to driving traffic from organic search. Jack Chambers-Ward advises that this should motivate you to reevaluate your overarching content publishing model.Jack says: “Create and monetise content to survive the upcoming zero-click era of search.”Will we be in an all-encompassing zero-click non-traffic era at some point in the future?“It certainly feels like we're heading that way. With a lot of what Google has been talking about recently – particularly with AI Mode, this is the looming topic in SEO right now.
Increasingly, it seems as though SEO needs to be a complete organisational approach rather than a marketing channel, and this way of thinking is backed by Keith Goode.Keith says: “The SEO who secures buy-in isn't selling rankings, they're selling resilience.”What kind of resilience are you selling?“More specifically, it's organisational resilience.One of the challenges that you will face as an in-house SEO, and oftentimes as a consultant for companies, is getting buy-in for the things that you're recommending for sites – and this problem evolves just like our industry evolves.
Sharon Gwati-Mudzudzu shares the importance of combining SEO tactics with data insights to personalise the user journey to drive smarter decisions.Talking points include:Why do we need to Combine SEO tactics with data insights?How do you Combine SEO tactics with data insights?How does this help to personalise the user journey?What are examples of how a user journey can be personalised?How does this deliver measurable SEO success?How does this help to drive smarter decisions?How should this be implemented on an ongoing basis - how does this fit into a strategy?
Jean Dejsuvan shares that you shouldn't be panicking because SEO isn't dead (again)!Talking points include:Why do people think that SEO is dead?Is SEO changing significantly?What does this mean for new SEOs entering the industry?What are the foundations?How does an SEO ensure that their skills stay relevant?Where do you learn the latest SEO techniques?SEO in moving fast - what should we do ?
Jonathon Roberts shares the importance of building bespoke web apps that automate SEO workflows - like site audits, schema generation and for in-house reporting - by integrating search-engine APIs and real-time dashboards to drastically speed up your optimisation process.Talking points include:What are bespoke web apps that automate SEO workflows?Why can’t we rely on standardised SEO platforms?What are we looking to achieve by doing this?What tasks should we be looking to run through these workflows?How do we build them?Where do we get the data from?How much work do we need to put in to keep everything running smoothly and best-in-class?Why can’t we rely on standardised SEO platforms?Why is building your own tools better?What types of businesses should be doing this?
Ulduz Ismayilova shares that with AI disrupting top-funnel visibility, SEO strategies must evolve to capture bottom-funnel, conversion-ready traffic.Talking points include:How is AI disrupting top-funnel visibility?Why is it so key to focus on capturing bottom-funnel, conversion-ready traffic?How do you identify bottom of funnel, conversion-ready traffic?What happens to top and middle of funnel?What does this look like as a strategy?How will this continue to evolve?
Katie Thompson shares the importance of getting expertise straight from the source - EEAT is still important and the most valuable content will come from those who have interviewed real-life, human experts.Talking points include:What do you mean by get expertise straight from the source?Why is EEAT still important?How does the importance of EEAT manifest itself?You say that the most valuable content will come from those who have interviewed real-life, human experts. What does this mean in practice?How do you put together an expert-driven content marketing strategy?What do you have to include in your content to maximise the opportunity?
Ryan White shares that mastering the basics now has never been important, but those basics have changed, where understanding data is now a key soft skill.Talking points include:What are the SEO basics now?Why have they changed?Why is understanding data now a key soft skill?What does this mean?How does this impact SEO on an ongoing basis?How does this impact the way that SEO works with other marketing channels?How does this impact SEO strategy?
Callum Lockwood shares that optimising for Google Organic product grids is more important than ever.Talking points include:What are Google Organic product grids?What is “top tier product schema?”How do you implement it?How do you measure its success?What are typical blockers to visibility?How do you fix them?
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