SEO in 2026: What 20 Experts Say You Should Focus On
The search landscape has been shifting fast. AI overviews dominate SERPs. LLM citations replace blue links. Audiences flicker across TikTok, Reddit, ChatGPT, and good old Google. Twenty SEO experts answered the same question: What should SEOs focus on to guide us through this next phase of SEO development? Their answers don't always agree, but they map onto a few clear clusters. I've organized their advice by theme, pulled directly from the Search Engine Journal expert roundup.
Be Mentioned In the Right Places
Kevin Indig, Growth Advisor, says visibility now hinges on three things: the right content, the right channels, and the right places. The right content means hyperlong‑tail articles and landing pages tuned to your unique positioning and data stories. People prompt five times longer than they search on Google, so being the best result for a specific context matters. LLMs also love fresh, unique datapoints, so research‑driven content remains your ace in the hole. The right channels — Google, ChatGPT, Reddit, Quora, review sites, LinkedIn, niche forums — require an engagement strategy, not just SEO tactics. And the right places to be mentioned are authoritative publishers and review sites in your industry; LLMs rely heavily on mentions from relevant sites, so context surrounding your brand reflects your market position.
We Have to Do More Than Just Appease Google
Cindy Krum, CEO & Founder of MobileMoxie, argues that a good website with high‑quality, indexable content is table stakes — the bare minimum, and likely not enough. AI search utilities and LLMs work very differently from Google's classic algorithm. They synthesize across all available information, not just one site. If you rely solely on your website for visibility, you'll get minimal synthesis and no consensus. Your branding message needs to be widely distributed across the web, consistent yet unique, to create discernible presence wherever users search.
Optimize For Systems That Read Like Machines
Duane Forrester, Founder and CEO of UnboundAnswers.com, tells SEOs to treat visibility as something earned through retrieval, not ranking. Focus on how content is chunked, cited, and trusted by AI systems. Audit what surfaces inside chatbots and answer engines, not just in SERPs. Build authority signals machines can verify: structured data, consistent sourcing, and entity clarity. Use embeddings, vector search, and retrieval testing to understand how meaning — not keywords — drives exposure. Replace "optimize for Google" with "optimize for systems that read like machines." Your goal isn't a blue link anymore; it's being the trusted source those systems turn to when humans ask questions. Trust, in 2026, is paramount.
Be Retrieved, Cited, And Trusted Wherever Users Search
Carolyn Shelby, Founder of CSHEL Search Strategies, says every channel describing your brand — your site, feeds, listings, profiles — must tell the same story in the same words, readable by both humans and machines. Clean up fragmented site structures. Remove hidden or toggle‑buried information. Ensure important facts live on the page in visible text. Note: Schema still matters, but it isn't a substitute for visible text. Product specs, pricing, and positioning statements need to be consistent across every surface. The goal isn't just to rank; it's to be retrieved, cited, and trusted wherever users search — Google, Bing, or an LLM. See also: Beyond the map pack for AI-first local search
Visibility Will Depend On Agentic Readiness
Andrea Volpini, Co‑Founder and CEO of WordLift, says 2026 is the year we design for the Reasoning Web, where agents read, decide, and act on our behalf. SEO becomes the discipline of making these systems effective. Agentic readiness means clean structured data, stable identifiers, precise ontologies, and knowledge graphs that let agents resolve entities, compare offers, execute tasks, and learn from results. This is a semantic shift: not merely about being "mentioned" in AI Overviews or ChatGPT, but about exposing products, content, and services as machine‑operable assets through feeds, APIs, and tools that make agents smarter every time they interact with us. The brands that let agents run the show, safely and verifiably, will own the next chapter of search.
Search And Product Are Intimately Connected
Ray Grieselhuber, Founder & CEO of DemandSphere, notes AI search is ubiquitous across three core experiences: SERPs, LLMs, and agentic experiences. SERPs and LLMs share a search index (Google in most cases), but retrieval works differently across them. The top problem everyone faces? Getting good data. Spend time fine‑tuning monitoring and data pipelines. For the agentic experience, think about how your product strategy intersects with feeds and APIs — and new protocols like MCP. Search and product have always been connected; the real players will insist they always have been.
Have a Relentless Focus on Being the Best
Barry Adams of Polemic Digital warns against losing your mind to AI hype and radically reinventing SEO. Yes, growing traffic from search will be tougher; many SEOs have been coasting on Google's own growth. Now that clicks have stagnated, you need to be smarter about your SEO. Spend less time on "busywork" — minor things that don't bring measurable improvement. Do the stuff that actually works. Don't compromise on quality. Have a relentless focus on being the best, capitalize on your site's strengths, and eradicate its weaknesses. Sites significantly suboptimal technically or editorially will simply not succeed. You have to be all‑in on search, without cutting corners. Anything less and you'll end up on the wrong side of Google's zero‑sum game.
Focus on Quality and Conversion Over the Quantity of Content
Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy & Research at Amsive, has answered this question for years with "focus on E‑E‑A‑T," and she believes it still applies in 2026 with the rise of AI search. Being mentioned in AI search is all about reputability, experience, and trust. The more your brand is well‑known and well‑respected in your industry, the more likely LLMs will cite you as a trusted recommended brand. This requires earning mentions and positive reviews in all the places that matter. Having a well‑known, well‑respected team of individuals who contribute authentic, expert insights also matters. As homogenous, AI‑generated content floods the internet, users will continue to want real human creators engaged in honest, authentic conversations. Focus on quality and conversion potential of content over quantity, as the latter can cause major SEO headaches over time. See also: Google confirms standard SEO practices remain sufficient for AI search
Maintain a Strong Focus on Retrieval Systems and Search Overall
Pedro Dias, Technical SEO/AI Discoverability Consultant at Visively, believes it's more important than ever to maintain objectivity and pragmatism amid disruptive change. Professionals need to understand the depth of changes, both technical and behavioral. An insane amount of tools claim to "give you insights into AI answers" and promise directional data — or even bold outcomes — but we haven't started to understand if any optimization can be performed on AI, or even if inference can be influenced in a controlled way. So far, everyone is mostly just poking around, guessing, and hoping. In 2026, SEOs should maintain a strong focus on retrieval systems and search overall. Make sure your strategy didn't get stuck in 2005; consider all areas contributing to consistency in visibility: content, branding, technical, the works. Above all, make sure your share‑of‑voice strategy is omnichannel and not siloed. Keep curiosity sharp and critical thinking aimed at questioning inconsistencies. Be cautious with a dive‑head‑first approach. Watch out for overpromising claims, outdated methodologies on baseless assumptions, and vanity metrics.
Remain Focused on What Drives Impact
Montserrat Cano, International SEO & Digital Strategy consultant, says SEOs and digital marketers need a deep understanding of how AI platforms work alongside a strong knowledge of their user base across every market. As search becomes more personalized, AI‑driven, and fragmented, visibility may also depend on understanding local search behaviors, expectations, cultural nuances, and how audiences interact with SERP features and LLMs along the purchase path — often in different ways. The real value comes from embedding this research into ongoing internal processes: content planning, prioritization, and testing. This ensures teams remain focused on what drives impact — the queries and content formats that matter, and the AI experiences users actually engage with. Grounding strategies in first‑party data, current market insights, and continuous learning may protect visibility and help build sustainable growth.
Focus on Evaluating the Revenue Impact of Your Strategies
Helen Pollitt, Head of SEO at Getty Images, says SEOs should focus on evaluating the revenue impact of their strategies. Too often, SEOs fall into the trap of optimizing for traffic or chasing the newest advice or fancy tactic. The most effective SEO strategies are those constantly driving toward revenue or other commercial goals. Keeping this premise front and center ensures you don't get sidetracked by the latest SEO fad rather than working a plan that drives genuine value to your business. Set out priorities based on their likelihood of success and revenue‑generating potential. This simple calculation can help you identify which projects or activities are worth focusing on in 2026 — and whether the latest "reverse‑meta‑optimization‑deindexing" fad is really worth your budget and resources.
Treat the Website Like an Enterprise System
Bill Hunt, Global Strategist with Bisan Digital, says SEOs must stop optimizing solely for pages and singular phrases and start optimizing for topical understanding. AI‑driven search systems are no longer ranking documents but evaluating entities, synthesizing answers, and choosing which brands they trust enough to cite. Visibility now depends on three things: clean, authoritative data; deep topical coverage; and systems that make your content easy to retrieve, understand, and reuse. If your site architecture, structured data, and feeds aren't aligned to these eligibility gates, you're invisible before the ranking discussion even begins. SEOs who will win in 2026 treat the website like an enterprise system, not a collection of pages. That means building durable information architecture, improving data reliability, collaborating with product and engineering teams, and creating content designed for synthesis across formats — not just the blue link. If you're not strengthening your site's underlying information integrity and cross‑functional alignment, you're not competing in the new search en...
