The SEO landscape is moving faster than at any point in the last decade.
Here are the trends reshaping search in 2026, and what you should be doing about each of them.
AI in SEO and GEO
AI-driven tools — from Google's Gemini to ChatGPT and Perplexity — have fundamentally changed how users interact with search. Google AI Overviews now appear for a significant proportion of informational queries, providing synthesised answers at the top of the page and in many cases reducing the need to click through to any website.
For SEO professionals, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge: traditional blue-link clicks are declining for informational queries. The opportunity: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — optimising to appear within AI-generated answers as a cited source.
To prepare for AI search:
- Structure content clearly with logical H1/H2/H3 hierarchies and direct answers
- Source your statistics — AI systems cite verifiable, attributed data
- Add FAQ sections using FAQPage schema — these are heavily used for AI Overviews
- Ensure AI crawler access — GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot need to crawl your content
- Update your
llms.txtfile to help AI systems understand your site's purpose and content
Zero-Click Searches
Zero-click searches — where users get their answer directly from the SERP without visiting a website — have grown significantly with the expansion of AI Overviews, featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes. Research suggests a large proportion of desktop and mobile searches now end without a click.
The strategic response is not to avoid these queries, but to evolve your goals around them:
- Target queries that require depth — AI snippets answer simple questions; complex topics still drive clicks
- Conduct thorough keyword research to distinguish between high-click-intent and informational queries
- Build brand awareness — even if users don't click, appearing in AI Overviews builds recognition
First-Party Data and Privacy-First SEO
Google ultimately reversed its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome — but the direction of travel is clear. Privacy regulations, browser restrictions (Safari, Firefox) and growing user awareness are all pushing towards a first-party data model.
For SEO, this means building direct audience relationships: email lists, loyalty programmes, and community spaces where you own the relationship rather than renting it from a platform. First-party data also feeds better personalisation, which supports engagement signals that Google rewards.
Topical Authority
Google increasingly rewards sites that demonstrate deep, consistent expertise on a subject. Spreading thinly across many topics is less effective than establishing genuine authority in a niche. Build pillar pages and cluster content, maintain content freshness, and prioritise publishing depth over volume.
As AI Overviews and other AI search features draw from your entire body of work, topical authority now influences your AI citation probability as much as your traditional rankings.
AI Search Visibility (GEO as a Standalone Practice)
Generative Engine Optimisation has matured from a buzzword into a distinct practice with its own methodologies. Unlike traditional SEO — which optimises pages to rank in a list of blue links — GEO optimises content to be cited, quoted or summarised within AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude.
The key insight is that AI models are probabilistic citation engines. They cite sources that are authoritative, structured, well-sourced and broadly distributed across the web. A GEO programme therefore combines content structuring (clear answers, FAQ schema, cited statistics), digital PR (getting your brand mentioned across high-authority publications), and brand consistency (ensuring your brand name and positioning are unambiguous across all channels). Tracking AI mentions — which ChatGPT queries surface your brand, and in what context — is now a standard reporting metric for marketing teams investing in this area.
Entity-Based SEO
Google's Knowledge Graph underpins how the search engine understands the world — not as a collection of keywords, but as a network of entities and relationships. An entity can be a person, organisation, place, product, concept or event. When Google can confidently identify your brand as a real-world entity with a clear purpose, it ranks and surfaces your content with greater confidence.
For businesses, entity-based SEO means going beyond keyword targeting to establish a clear, consistent identity across the web. This includes claiming and optimising your Google Business Profile, building a Wikipedia or Wikidata presence if appropriate, ensuring consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data across all directories, and using structured data (Organisation schema, BreadcrumbList, SameAs properties) to link your entity across platforms. The more consistently Google encounters your brand associated with the same topics across trusted sources, the more confidently it will recommend your content — in both traditional and AI-generated search results.
Voice Search and Conversational Queries
Voice search has evolved alongside the AI assistant landscape. Beyond traditional Alexa and Google Assistant queries, users now interact with AI voice features through ChatGPT Voice, Gemini Live and the new Siri with AI integration. These conversational interfaces favour content that directly answers questions in plain, natural language rather than content engineered to match typed keyword patterns.
Optimising for voice and conversational queries means prioritising question-based content (Who, What, Where, How, Why), writing in a register that sounds natural when read aloud, and structuring pages so the key answer appears early — ideally in the first paragraph or a clearly labelled FAQ. This overlap between voice search optimisation and GEO is not coincidental: both are fundamentally about being the most credible, citable answer to a user's question.
The path forward is clear: combine strong traditional SEO fundamentals with GEO-readiness, entity authority and voice-first content strategy, and build an audience you can reach directly regardless of algorithm shifts. Need a helping hand? Get in touch.
