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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

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Check latest episodes from SEO in 2026 podcast

Follow traditional SEO best practices – with Bill Hartzer

2026/02/06

Bill Hartzer is a strong advocate for traditional SEO best practices as the bedrock to your future SEO success, no matter the technology or platform. Bill says: “My number one tip has really not changed for the past few years: follow classic, traditional SEO best practices for creating content and optimizing pages and websites. With some search engines, you can get away with 150 words of content and potentially rank on a page, but when it comes to AI, it's more about structuring a page, using the right title tags, meta description tags, headings, H1/H2/H3 tags, bulleted lists, ordered lists, numbered lists, bold, italics, etc. Focus on the traditional SEO tactics, which haven't changed in the 20 years that I've been doing this.”

Take it back to the old school – with Gordon Meagher

2026/02/05

According to Gordon Meagher, the foundations of AI ranking success lie in traditional marketing activities. Gordon says: “It's time to put your old school digital marketing hat on, as we move forward in this new age.” What does that mean in practice? “We know that search behaviour is changing. ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, have basically given birth to a new way of searching that we never knew before. We were always 10 blue links on a page. LLMs have changed that. With how people want their answers now, I don't think you can put it back in the box. I think the biggest thing is the uncertainty around where Google search itself is going. Will Google search even be a thing once AI Mode comes in and the adoption rates increase for LLMs and these types of answers? I think it's going to go back to how we used to market years ago. For me, once Google released AI Mode, it was the end of SEO – and I don't say that lightly. They also broke an unwritten rule with publishers, which was always: we create the content, we live by your rules, you send us traffic. That paradigm has now shifted.

Prioritise video-led, verifiable content in 2026 - Daphne Monro

2026/02/04

Daphne Monro shares the importance of prioritising video-led, verifiable content in 2026. Talking points include: What do you mean by video-led content? Why publish video-led content? Why priorise video-led content? What video content works best? What do you mean by verifiable content? How do you verify content? How do you measure success?

Succeed in AI SEO with SEO fundamentals – with Olga Zarr

2026/02/03

Olga Zarr says that AI SEO success isn’t achieved by focussing on what AI is doing. Instead, good, traditional SEO can deliver in an AI-driven era. Olga says: “AI SEO still runs on SEO. Although SEO has practically turned into AI SEO, and no one thinks about SEO without thinking about AI these days, AI SEO is still based on good SEO.” Does existing best practice SEO assist with AI SEO? “Yes, generally speaking. I have analysed exactly what you can do to dominate in AI SEO and rank in AI chatbots. All of the things you should do map directly to the things you need to do in SEO in order to rank, be indexed, and be crawled. I was able to map it around four main areas, which you always have to take care of in SEO: technical SEO, content strategy/creation/structure, user experience, and authority. All of them ideally map out to AI SEO, to ranking in chatbots, and all of that.”

The VISIBLE Framework for LLM and AIO Visibility - Nikki Halliwell

2026/02/02

Nikki Halliwell shares the VISIBLE Framework to improve LLM and AIO Visibility. Talking points include: What led to the creation of the framework What are the principles of the framework What is the framework? How can SEOs use it?

Customise AI to automate your processes – with Victoria Olsina

2026/01/30

Victoria Olsina shares that AI can and should be used to automate your processes, ensuring that key tasks are delivered as efficiently as possible. Victoria says: “Define an SEO process and then automate it with custom GPTs or no-code tools like Make.com.” How do you determine the processes to focus on? “Every person who does SEO and has done on-page optimization or an SEO audit 50, 100, or 500 times has found ways to approach this problem. We have checklists, we have protocols, and we have templates for these tasks. Once you have the process, the checklist, and the protocol, it's very easy to give those instructions to AI in the form of custom GPTs or automations. If you define those steps manually, it's very easy to then have AI assist you, or automate the process.”

Turn AI from a problem to a partner – with Giulia Panozzo

2026/01/29

For Giulia Panozzo, SEOs don’t have to compete with AI – rather, AI should be an effective working partner. Giulia says: “Turn AI into your partner, not your problem.” How do you do that? “The industry as a whole has been panicking a little, ever since the AI revolution started taking over. There's been quite a lot of conversation about AI taking over our jobs and replacing us. I don't think we're there yet. I don't know if we'll ever get there either, because I think we have some aces up our sleeves. The way that you turn AI into your partner is by knowing exactly where to use it versus where not to use it.”

How to have fun with content formats in 2026 - Carla Dobson Elliott

2026/01/28

Carla Dobson Elliott shares how to have fun with content formats in 2026. Talking points include: - How to write different content formats - How to produce various content formats - Why and how we should profile audiences by curiosity and not demographic - What to include in content - How to measure the success of content

Learn, test, and increase productivity with AI – with Rana Abu Quba Chamsi

2026/01/27

With all of your competitors using AI in some form, how do you stand out from the crowd? For Rana Abu Quba Chamsi, increasing productivity is key. Rana says: “Increase productivity using AI – not only in SEO, but beyond.” How do you decide what you should and shouldn’t use AI for? “You should look at AI like it’s a real assistant. AI should handle preparing the data, summarising the data, and finding all the information that you need. However, for the creative part, like brainstorming, you can rely on AI a little bit, but it shouldn’t handle all of your creative tasks. Also, for the overall view of everything, the strategy should, of course, stay human-centric. The main focus of AI in SEO is not to give everything away. If you create a piece of content with AI, don’t just copy and paste it and publish it right away. You should read it. You should add your touch to it and add the brand voice.”

Learn how to learn – with Sante Achille

2026/01/26

With the advancement of AI, it’s essential to stay up-to-date with new developments – and for that, Sante Achille believes that it’s essential to revisit learning to learn. Sante says: “Learn how to learn, and use AI to enhance your ability to learn.” Has the way that we learn how to learn changed in the era of AI? “Not yet, but it is going to. The winners are going to be the people who can master the art of learning. If you go back and look at the education system and how we have been educated, it's all been a sort of sausage-making machine. Meat goes in one end, it goes through the grinder, it comes out the other end, and we're a sausage. It’s like factories in the Victorian era, and we are still very much in that era, from an educational point of view, because there is a curriculum and it's very well defined. AI has broken that. The internet disrupted it, but AI is the final blow to a system of predefining what we learn. Now, we have somebody there 24 hours a day who can answer just about any question that we throw at them. This PA is there, and it can be a blessing or a curse. At the moment, a lot of people have embraced the path of least resistance by hogging all kinds of information, harvesting it, and using it without too much thought. There are a lot of people saying, ‘I don't know how to do this. I'm going to ask AI, and AI is going to tell me how to do it.’ That's not what we need. The people who are going to be successful are the ones who say, ‘I need to reach an objective. I need to define something. I need to do something. What do I need to know? What is the threshold that I need to reach so that I can tell AI what to do and get the most out of it?’”

Optimize your AI shadow – with Rose Tero

2026/01/23

Just because you’ve tidied up the content on your website to cater for the needs of AI, that doesn’t mean that your job is done! Rose says: “Your website casts an AI shadow: a distilled version of your content that AI search systems present to users. It's often this shadow, not your site, that people now meet first. It might look like a two-sentence summary, a list of bullet points, or an AI-curated comparison. It could be on ChatGPT, Perplexity, SGE, or any of the other LLMs or chatbots. Increasingly, though, this is a user's first engagement with your brand, before they ever reach your pages. Sometimes it's the only interaction they have with your brand. This matters because it changes the unit of competition. For years, SEOs have thought in terms of positions and ranks, but in an AI-driven world, the real battleground is representation. How is your brand represented when an AI introduces you to the user? Is it accurate? Is it authoritative? Or (and this is happening more and more), are you simply fueling the answer while a competitor gets the credit? SEO is evolving from being about rankings to being about representation signals. It's not enough to publish content and hope it ranks. You need to actively manage how your content is summarised, how your expertise is attributed, and how your brand shows up in that new AI shadow layer.”

Tidy up your online presence for the eyes of AI – with Dani Leitner

2026/01/22

In the past, it didn’t matter so much if old, less relevant content existed on your website and elsewhere. Dani Leitner shares that this isn’t the case anymore. Dani says: “My tip is a really easy one: Clean up your online presence because AI sees everything.”

Translating SEO into a language of tangible business impact - Kristina Bergwall

2026/01/21

Kristina Bergwall discusses the importance of translating SEO into a language of tangible business impact in the future AI search landscape, and using that narrative to align all teams such as social, PR, and brand to work together, is what's going to make you win at SEO in 2026. Talking points include: How do you identify the areas of SEO that are likely to result in tangible business impact? What are examples of areas of SEO that don’t tend to deliver tangible business impact? How do you ensure that you don’t shut off SEO activities that take longer to have an impact? How does the future AI search landscape change for different businesses? How do you align different marketing teams to work more effectively together in this changing landscape?

Re-order your content for search dominance – with Damien Robert

2026/01/20

Damien Robert explains the need to move beyond traditional web content, achieved by making content modular, leading with irrefutable evidence. In addition, he recommends managing all assets from a single source of truth to please both humans and AI consumption. Damien says: “Re-order your content to future-proof your search dominance.”

Identify searches that need grounding to focus your AI strategy – with Mark Williams-Cook

2026/01/19

Mark Williams-Cook explains that you also need to consider the type of search that you’re attempting to optimize for, and the way that AI engines deal with different types of searches. Mark says: “Everyone should be determining whether their AI searches need grounding or not.”