The SEO Shifts That Will Define 2026 (replay)

Hello everyone and welcome to today's live webinar where we're going to be talking about SEO shifts that will define 2026. It's already been a little bit crazy with news from Google last week. Multiple big changes that they're already making that are going to be impacting SEO in 2026. This year is looking hot and I think it's only going to get hotter. Um, today I am joined by the fantastic Jack Chow from RankMath where he is head of product education and also works in content creation, manages lots of interesting data that they have that he's going to be sharing today to talk about the SEO shifts that actually define 2026. Hey Jack, how are you doing? Hi, I'm good. How are you doing? I'm really well, thank you. Before we jump into the slide, this is going to be a hefty session. There is so much meat in these slides that we're going to get into. If you have questions, which you absolutely will do, please throw them into the chat. We'll be doing Q&A at the end. We're going to make sure that we've saved a little bit of time to get to uh the biggest, highest priority questions that we see in there. So, feel free to put them in throughout and my colleague Dale is behind the scenes and he'll be tagging those questions to make sure that Jack and I have a good 10 minutes to get to them. Jack, thank you so much for joining. I'm going to hand the mic over to you. Okay, cool. So, hi, my name is Jack and I am the guy you see on RankMath's YouTube channel. I'm really a very shy guy, an introvert and somehow got myself onto this webinar. I'm nervous, but at the same time, I'm excited to share what I have found about the SEO trends. And I would first like to thank you for attending this webinar and thank you for your time and I hope to be able to provide value to you. how this webinar is going to be structured with as Charlie said it's going to be around a 50 minutes uh presentation and then we'll go into Q&A. So with that let me start with the presentation slides. Hi there again my name is Jack. For some of you who don't know me my name is pronounced as Jack Chow. Many of you call it as cow but it's the same surname as the general from the romance of the tree kingdom. So, I'm technically the descendant of the general family, but not that it matters. But anyway, I ran several successful blogs before I turned into a YouTuber and now I'm the head of product education at Rangmth. I produce educational videos about both to teach people how to use RankMath effectively as well as to teach people how to learn traditional SEO and AI search optimization. If you haven't subscribed to our channel yet, do consider doing so. What I will be sharing with you today are six key SEO trends and this information stems from my personal experience research talking to my peers at Rankmth and attending meetings within the group. So I'll be sharing perspectives from the point of view as a consumer as well from the point of view of the corporate. Our goal for this webinar is for you to leverage these trends to grow your business. So without further ado, let me start with key trend number one which is the major shift in search behavior. Now if this webinar were to be done last year, you would have told me that a search behavior is far from changing. But now with Google AI mode together with the familiarity principle where 90% of the people still use Google and it is easy for them to switch to AI mode to search for things. The search behavior is has definitely shifted and now we have to acknowledge that the traffic from traditional 10 blue links is rapidly declining. I'm not saying that it's completely gone but they are quickly diminishing. Now the search traffic from Chachib perplexity and other AI search platforms is not substantial. Currently there's just less than 10% of the total search volume but the volume is accelerating quickly. Google Genmini that powered the AI mode has a search AI search market share of 5% a year ago and that has shifted to 21.9% now and that number will continue to grow and that is attributed to Google pushing their users to use its AI mode. Not sure if you're aware they are exper experimenting with the process of seamlessly asking AI mode a question as soon as you engage with the AI overview. And I think this year and beyond, AI searches are going to dominate the search market and influence buying decisions. So if your SEO strategy is still focusing on ranking for the Tambul links, you are falling behind. Because based on a recent study by Bright Edge and many other independent studies, we can see that almost half of the AI overview citations do not overlap with the top organic search results. Meaning even if your page is ranking at the top of the specific search query, it may not be cited as a source in the AI overviews and if your brand is not prominent prominent on platforms that matter. For example, if you are a local business and your business profile isn't set up properly, you are not actively receiving customer reviews. your name, address, phone number or nav are not consistent everywhere and your competitors are on Apple Maps but you are not and so many other factors your business will not be mentioned on AI searches but that doesn't mean that you we should disregard traditional SEO and actually good fundamentals in SEO are still important the baseline of getting your contents or brands seen on Google AI overviews and AI mode is for your content and website to be indexed on Google. The same is true for chatbt where you need your content to be indexed on Bing. So traditional SEO still matters. But what I mean is that the focus should be adjusted. Instead of focusing on traditional keyword research and ranking on Google, businesses in 2026 will focus more on various touch points of a customer that eventually lead to a sale. For example, imagine a design student who is looking to buy a new laptop. He knows that he'll be working with tools like After Effects, Blender or Cinema 4D. So, there is a need for a strong processor and GPU, but he hasn't decided haven't decided on a specific brand or model yet. And there is a budget of $2,500. So, his journey might look like something like this. He starts with a chatbity search on queries like how much RAM do I need for emotion graphics then some top of the funn top of top of the funnel queries like can I use after effects on Mac then later when the need becomes more urgent he starts with a Google search such as best laptops for motion graphics students found a few options but still unsure he follows up with a query on AI mode such as is a is an M series Mac better than an RTX laptop for rendering. This helps him narrows down the search to a few realistic option but still pondering. Later that night when while scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram, the algorithm serves up a short video of a design student showing their motion graphics workflow and casually mentioning the the laptop they use. Curious, he clicks through to the creator's YouTube channel where he watches longer videos on topics such as real world rendering test, fan noise comparison, export times in After Effects, etc. By the end of the content loop, he's no longer asking which laptop to buy. He's deciding where to buy it and whether or not to wait for a student discount. So this is the kind of buying journey businesses will try to figure out in 2026 and they will put more focus on getting their brand visible in those touch points. In other words, something that you may have already heard of and will continue to hear more and more which is search and everywhere optimization. Meaning you want your brand to appear wherever your customers are. If the majority of your customers are on Tik Tok, you want do your brand to have a presence there. If they are on YouTube, Instagram or whatever, you want to be creating content over there. If you are more cautious conscious about your search habit, you will relate to this concept. Your buying decision will not be based on based solely on one single platform. It will be based in parts from different platforms. But the key is that in 2026 and beyond, businesses will be fighting to get their brand mentioned on chat searches like CHBT, Grow Air, overviews, etc. And having your brand on multiple channels, not only on Google, will enhance your chances of your brand being mentioned on these AI search platforms. Plus, some of these platforms are search engines by the by itself, such as YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. You're getting exposure on multiple fronts. So, let me hone into the differences between traditional SEO and AI search optimization. You might have already known the difference, but I'll just go through for the sake of everyone who is not familiar. In traditional SEO, our goal is to rank our pages on a search engines results page. The SER, the higher your page rank, the more traffic you get. And the more traffic you get, the more it usually translates to a sale. And this leads to the entire game of SEOs trying to game the system or algorithm. But in AI search optimization, your goal is not to rank on the search engines, but to get your brand or business mentioned when people are trying to solve a problem or are searching for a product or service related to yours. In a while, I'll walk you through my personal experience with a high ticket purchase. Anyway, in traditional SEO, we are trying to optimize for keywords, mana, data. In AI search optimization, we are looking at entity association. In traditional SEO, we optimize for brand authority through backlinks. But in AI search optimization, we are looking at public trust through multiple platforms. Page level optimization or onpage SEO for traditional SEO versus paragraph level entity based comprehension through paragraphs and bullet points. Finally, click-through rates and traffic are the main KPIs for traditional SEO, but AI visibility, citation, and brand mentions are important considerations. Now, now the reason why I said that a change in search behavior is one of the most prominent SEO trends stems from my personal experience when searching for products or services. And I believe many people will rely more and more on answers from the AI. For example, I was looking for a confidence building course for my kids and I actually purchased a package as a result of the business being mentioned by the AI mode. And let me walk you through my conversation with the Google's AI mode. And note this is a high ticket purchase. I didn't go straight into asking something like what are the public speaking causes for an 8-year-old. Instead, I started with an idea because I didn't know what to expect. This is the top of the funnel question. I consumed the information and for some reason I stopped here for the day because I had something else to do. It was late that day but it has implanted in me that 8-year-old is a good age to start public speaking and my kid has shown interest in becoming a leader. So the next day I started I I asked this question are there any programs in Singapore that trains 8-year-old to become a great leader? And it provided me with what I should be looking for. And I asked a further question after this. Give me a pipeline and all the necessary programs to develop a leader. And it has provided me with the stages, the age range, the um core focus, program examples, and the answer was really detailed. You see, these are the information that could have taken an individual an entire day to piece together. And now we get all these information in seconds. So it is a huge benefit to daily users and that's why people will be searching this way sooner or later. Then I further asked this question what are the character and value workshops available in Singapore for 8year-old. And this time around it didn't really understand what I want. I want service recommendation not further information. So I become direct. I asked I I need real businesses that teaches and instill this. And the amazing thing is that Google AI mode will use the chat history as context to understand what this mean. And now it provided me with a list of programs that fit my criteria. As you can see now, of course, I didn't just base my decision on the AI conversation alone. I visited websites of those recommended businesses and compared prices. I look at business reviews and I had another conversation with the AI mode on comparing suitability and prices before I decided to visit the office, have a trial run and eventually sign up for a package. And this is the entire customer journey from being unaware to the purchase. It happened very quickly in a matter of days. And in traditional search, it would have taken weeks or months. Sure, you can say that this is just one person's way of searching for things, but I think in 2026, more and more people will start conversing with the AI mode as a way of searching for stuff because it brings value to them. People no longer need to spend extra time visiting web pages to find information and ideas. And the AI is quick will quickly lead customers towards the final stages of the customer journey. And then they will visit web pages, watch videos on different platforms to make a decision. And that's where your website experience and brand exposure comes into play. I will share with you another trend about this web experience in a while which is also based on my personal experience. And for businesses that have a chance to meet with your prospective clients before they spend money on your product or service, here's an idea for you. [snorts] Before your client signs a deal with you, offer them a discount in exchange for their conversation with the AI that led the customer to your brand, which gives you great insights into what exactly your customers are looking for. Your customers can easily share their conversation with you. So in 2026, more and more people will be start will start conversing with the AI to get things done quicker. And with such changes from the 10 blue links to brand mentions on AI conversations, how should we as marketers shift content our content creation strategy? And that's where key trend number two, the content funnel flip will happen in 2026. If you're tired out of same old SEO advice, good because we are not talking about minor tweaks. We are talking about fundamental irreversible about how content drives businesses. The old content marketing funnel or model is dead. It was built on the flaw premise that would that we could game the system by creating mountains of generic informationational content designed to capture the click. We are now in the era era of AI search and zero click. This era demands a new strategy. It demands that we stop focusing on the top of the funnel and start focusing on what actually drives revenue and builds unshakable authority. I'll be sharing with you exactly which parts of the content strategy are now obsolete, where the new better ground is and why case studies and use cases are the most valuable content asset you can create right now. So for years the SEO playbook was simple. Target high volumeformational keywords. What is SEO? How to start a blog? best way to best ways to lose weight. This is a top of the funnel. It's where users are unaware or just beginning their research. And guess what? The AI has taken it over. Specifically, the AI overview from Google. I'm pretty sure you already know, but let's look at the data. Informationational content is being cannibalized at an alarming rate. It will continue to do so. Why? Because AI is exceptionally good at it. It doesn't need to be taught what is generative search optimization. The knowledge is already in the model. If you are still spending like thousands of dollars a month creating 2,000word blog posts on generic topics, you are essentially paying to train the AI that is effectively stealing your traffic. That's not a strategy. That's a donation. The entire game of traditional SEO was to capture the initial click. But when the AI provides the answer directly, that click is gone. yourformational content is now a liability, a drain on resources that yields diminishing returns. So we need to shift our focus to areas where AI cannot provide a complete answer. And even if they do, we want our content or brand to be cited or mentioned. The content funnel hasn't disappeared. It has just flipped. The new battleground is the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. This is where the users move from what is it to which one should I choose and finally where do I buy it? The good news based on our internal grip discussions and analysis we can say that conversion focused content and landing pages are still performing well. Even when AI is summarizing answers, people do not fully trust the AI answers when it comes to making a purchase decision just like I did. We still visit landing pages, pricing pages, comparisons and all. And this is where you step in. The AI is now as an accelerator. It moves the user quickly through the top of the funnel phase and delivers them to the middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel stages. The user is no longer asking what is it. They're asking questions like which product solves my specific problem. What is the best solution for an a small e-commerce business with a $500 monthly budget? Show me a case study of a company like mine that achieve X results. This is the new ROI. It's not measured by the volume of clicks from generic keyword. is measured by AI visibility and citation. How frequently your content is cited as a source by the AI. It is also measured by brand mention. How often your brand is recommended in the AI final answer. And to win this new ROI, you must create content that directly addresses the users's decision making process. You need to create content that is uniquely yours and verifiable. This brings us to the most powerful content asset in the AI era, case study and its close cousin specific use case. Because AI chat bots and agentic AI are designed to match situations and scenarios, when a user asks a highly specific complex question, which is the new normal, the AI will search its knowledge base for the closest matching scenario. So for example, if the in the case of exposure ninja, if your content is generic such as top tips to boost brand mentions in the AI in AI search, this is good for AI citations, but your content may be synthesized into an AI answer which is top of the funnel. However, if your content is how Exposure Ninja helped a new B2B business with an annual marketing budget of 20 20K appear on AI searches and increase leads by 40% in 90 days and the user chatting with the AI is a new B2B business with similar budget looking for lead generation, your content is a perfect match. The AI will mention your brand as a recommended solution given that Oh, sorry. What happened? Okay, sorry. Given that your brand is supported by good reviews and has authority in the space, while case studies are less often cited as a source for AI searches, they are used to train AI models so that they know which businesses suit which particular needs or wants. You need to put out as many use cases for your brand as possible. Include all variables. Include all variables such as your customer's budget, what are the issues you they are facing, and how your product or service helps solve their problems. Other than a case study, in 2026, businesses will focus more on specific types of content to grow their brand authority. One way is to leverage other people's effort to grow your brand, and the other is based on your own efforts. For digital PR, your goal is not to create content that will rank on search engines, but to create content specifically for journalists to catch on and reference it. This type of content are mostly going to be industry studies or content that includes original research statistics that journalists or newsrooms will be interested in. For example, if Exposure Ninja were to survey their clients and get insightful through details about the percentages of businesses that benefited from AI mode versus those who didn't, or you have studied thousands of AI conversations and found something really insightful. I'm pretty sure some publishers like search engine journal or search engine land will be interested in writing a piece about the news and site your content as reference. So, you've got to study the journalist that you're targeting and see what they would be interested in and have to have a successful campaign. If you're a small business and you do not have the time or resources to study journalist needs and create content that aligns with them, you could hire agencies like Exposure Ninja to help you out. If they provide that service, go check out go check out with them. But of course, if you have resources, by all means, work on digital PR on your own. Other than that you could have strategic partnership with complimentary brands. For example, recently we have partnered with WP Rockets and we got to survey our clients, our customers and created a combined report about AI usage, how AI use is used in businesses and we use our resources to promote a common cause or like reboot and go collaborated and created the viral strut space jump. If you haven't heard of it, Google uh go you find go to YouTube and find it. It's called Strato Space Jump. Other than that, have your CEO, CMO or people with authority appear on other people's podcasts or webinars and associate the individual with the brand and then sponsorships and affiliates will help shape the brand sentiment as well. On the other hand, brands will also be working on their own content. They will be creating glossery or terminology pages to target the top of the funnel. The thing is although AI summarizes your content, you want to be cited as a source and these glossery pages are created specifically for that and they are easy to create because the more the AI cites your content, the more your brand appears as authoritative in the eyes of the AI. Brands will also be creating buyers guides, FAQ pages and commercial intent pages such as uh comparison pages, reviews and best of pages to foster brand mentions. So these are the pages these are the pages that are cited most by the AI as well and these are all the written content that brands will focus on. Other than that, many brands will also be working on short videos to be posted on platforms like Tik Tok, reals, YouTube shots, etc. Because these are the platforms that will help brands gain exposure fast. They will also create long- form videos to demonstrate how their product works and compare their products with others. More and more brands will encourage their team members to share their professional expertise and behind the scenes work on LinkedIn. Because when employees become influencers, they humanize the brand far more effectively than a corporate image. Just think about how many Google employees are sharing their knowledge on platforms like LinkedIn or X. Maybe you can copy them. So these are the types of content that brands will focus on in 2026. But that begs the question, if you have a small group of team members, how can you focus on so many different platforms? Now, it's easier said than done, but you can include a robust repurposing content distribution plan. For example, you can have you have interviewed your happy client. You can take that case study and turn it into, for example, a long interview video that can be posted on YouTube and as a podcast, a short form video series for Tik Tok and Instagram reels, a detailed thread for X or LinkedIn. This is not just about reach, it's about brand presence. The more often you appear across different channels, the higher the chance you have of being recommended by AI tools, which often cross reference information from various sources. But the most critical part of this trend is the own audience. While you are diversifying on social platforms, you must use them to drive traffic to the one place you truly control. either your email list, your Discord server, your Substack or Telegram. These own communities are your insurance policies again against any algorithm or platform changes. They are your direct line to your customers. When you control the data, the relationship and the distribution, you are protected. The businesses that survive and thrive in 2026 will be the ones that have successfully converted their social media followers into their own community members. This is the final piece of the content funnel flip. Highv value content plus multiplatform distribution equals a highly qualified own audience. All right, that's for key trend number two. Let's go to key trend number three. The right the rise [clears throat] of review and reputation management. We have just dissected the trend that forces us to abandon generic topfunnel content. But that leaves a critical question. What does the AI use to make its final binding recommendation? The answer is simple. But it is the hardest thing for businesses to earn. Trust and verifiability. Forget backlinks. Forget keyword density. The new currency of SEO is the brand sentiment. In the AI era, your reputation is not just a marketing asset. It's a technical ranking factor. If the AI cannot verify that your brand is trustworthy, helpful, and reputable, it will not site you. It will not recommend you. Period. The AI is a sophisticated system. It doesn't just read your website. It reads about your website. It reads what your customers are saying, what the industry experts are saying, and what the community consensus is. This is what I call a web of influence. And the AI synthesizes all that into one single powerful trust signal. Just let's look at the data that proves that this shift is happening. Now according to a study by demand sage 93% of the customer read online reviews before making a purchase and 93% of the consumers say that online reviews influence their purchase decision as well. But here's the critical shift. AI is amplifying this human trust signal. When a user asks an AI agent or a AI chatbot for recommendations, say what is the best web hosting for a small business in Singapore, the AI is not just looking at the features page of the hosting platform. It is cross referencing the platform's claim with thousands of data points from trusted review and community sites. If the AI sees a consistent positive signal, it is confident in making a recommendation. If it sees conflicting or negative signals, it will hatch or worse recommend your competitor instead. This is why if you run a local business or you have a business your you have your business on sites like Trust Pilot, you need to focus on getting more authentic reviews, managing them and replying to them. And it is important that the reply doesn't seem automated or generated by AI. They have to be vetted by someone who understands the customers. Authenticity is the only way to build trust and that the AI is looking for. The second major component of this trend is the death of single platform reliance. In this in the past, many businesses focus solely on Google reviews because they were the most visible in the SERs. But that is no longer enough. Businesses can no longer rely on just one review platform. You need to be on other listing sites like Apple Maps, Bing Maps and other listing sites relevant to your industry or niche because the AI is omnivorous. It is pulling data from a vast array of sources to build a comprehensive profile of your brand. So if you if your review on for example Google business profile says that you are good but on another review site like Yelp says otherwise it will impact your AI visibility. Your brand sentiment consistency is the key to being mentioned in AI searches. The AI is looking for consensus. It's looking for a signal that is so strong, so consistent across the web that it can confidently stick its own reputation on recommending you. This means that there will be a rise in reputation managers or tools that will help you analyze the overall brand reputation on the web. The goal is not to appear everywhere but in places where customers care about and have consistent positive brand sentiment at those places. It's about quality and consistency over sure volume and that leads us to the changing role of community manager. I thought of this idea that the role of community manager will evolve into reputation managers and I did further research and guess what someone else had the same idea as well. The idea came from a study by Samrush showing that Reddit and other social platforms are the top cited domains across AI search tools and most businesses are lacking an an expert in the field and what do they have community managers and that's where the idea came from. You see this is an image this is an image from no good.io IO it say it shows that there are many social channels below the iceberg that is influencing AI search and that's why this trend is fundamentally changing the job description of a community manager. They are no longer just managing a Facebook group or responding to DMs. They are now the front lines of SEO strategy. The modern community manager is becoming a reputational specialist and a trust signal engineer. Why? Because the AI is not just reading former review sites. It is scraping forums, subreddits, Q&A platforms like Kora and even specialized industry communities to gauge genuine user sentiment. This means that your community managers may now be tasked to become a Reddit or Kora expert or an expert in the niche forums where your customers genuinely discuss about your product. Their job will be to monitor and track brand mentions across these dark social channels, engage and respond to questions, correct misinformation, turn negative sentiment into positive case studies, encourage positive discussions, and guide satisfied customers to leave reviews on platforms that matter most for AI citation. This is a mass massive shift. We are moving from a world where the SEO was about optimizing code to a world where SEO is about optimizing conversations. The community manager response to a single negative comment on subreddit can now have a greater impact on your AI visibility than a thousand generic blog posts. So we have established three things so far. The way people search will change. AI has killed top of the funnel informational content and the new currency of SEO is trust and verifiability and this leads us to the next trend which is the resurgence of conversion focused affilate marketing and sponsorships. Now let's address the elephant in the room. The old spammy afflate model is dead. The rise of AI has been brutal for many with AI synthesized answers drastically reduced traffic to generic review sites and causing a sharp drop in income for those who rely on high volume lowquality clicks. In 2026, the market is consolidating, forcing affiliates to evolve from traffic brokers to genuine brand partners. The affilate marketing is the affilate marketing industry is not shrinking. It is exploding. is estimated to reach about 27.778 billion by 2027 with over 90% of e-commerce businesses expected to leverage it by 2026. Does it seem like a dying channel to you? I don't think so. Those affiliates who survive are those who adapt. The reason for this resurgence is simple. Affiliate marketing is inherently conversion focused. It provides the third party validation and a clear path to purchase which the AI is hesitant to provide itself. The first major component of this trend is the great content migration. Affiliates are moving away from written content into video content, podcast and whatnot. Because written content is easily scraped, summarized and cannibalized by AI. A 2,000word blog post is an input for the AI. As we have said, a 20inut high production video review on YouTube or a detailed personal comparison on a niche podcast is much harder for the AI to replicate and summarize effectively and it provides a personal connection with the audience. Video and auto audio content builds trust at speed and depth that the text cannot match. Seeing a creator physically use a product, hearing the genuine tone in their voice leads a powerful human trust signal. The trend is clear. Afflates are becoming media creators. They are shifting their focus on platforms where human connection and authenticity are the primary drivers of conversion. And this content migration has fundamentally changed the relationship between brands and affiliates. Brands will see it as a long-term partnership to consistently sponsor these channels to get their brand seen while the affiliate builds their authority in niches and while paying the affiliate commission when a sale is made. But personally, I really hope that brands I really hope to see brands pay sponsorships based on CPM or number of views rather than a one-time sponsorship amount per content or at least the affiliate can choose. I can't say for others, but as an affiliate marketer for years myself, I love the idea of recurring income. That used to come from clicks to recurring affiliate programs, but the clicks are gone. It has been taken away. So, the recurring income has dropped as well. So I really hope that someday brands and affiliates will come to a middle middle ground so that affiliates can make a living of maybe recurring sponsorships. But nonetheless, why is affiliate and sponsorship model the future for brands? Is because it provides consistent brand signal. The AI is looking for omniresence and with consistency and then authority transfer. By sponsoring a creator who is building genuine authority in the niche, the brand is effectively buying a share of that trust. The AI sees the creator's authority and associates with it with the brand and it is also a zeroclick insurance. The sponsorship ensures that the brand is seen and mentioned even if the user never clicks a link. This is critical for AI visibility and citation. The affiliates content becomes a verifiable third-party endorsement and the AI can use it as use it to synthesize its answer. Affiliate marketing helps the brand be seen everywhere on the internet. Though not exactly well received by consumers, but authentic affiliates can help businesses tremendously. Authentic and truthful affiliates are the ones who will be successful in this migration to high trust media. So if you are a business and you need you need to tap out tap into this affilate marketing and sponsorship framework if you haven't done so. And now let's talk about some business fundamentals. In the AI era, brand mentions are served to consumers and it is what happens next that matters to businesses. In 2026, poor user experience is now a critical SEO failure point. You can have the best AI citations and mentions in the world, but if your site fails the user, you have wasted all that authority. The biggest threat to your postclick UX is what I call the coherence crisis. The AI platform is a storyteller. It weaves a narrative about your brand based on the data it scrapes. It tells the user, "This company is the best solution for service A. When the user clicks through or visits your landing page, it must continue that s story seamlessly. If it doesn't, the user immediately feels betrayed and they bounce. You see, the AI search says that brand A is the best for service A. But when the user visits the site, the focus is towards service B. It is not coherent. Let me share a recent personal experience that perfectly illustrates this. Last year, I found a need to hire a personal coach. I chatted with Google's AI mode, shared my story, my needs, and what I struggle with. And the AI mode synthesized and recommended me two personal coaches. And so I only need to research just the two, which is fortunate. Of course, I didn't just trust the AI and connect contacted the two coaches. I went to do further research on them. I read their reviews and visited their website. Now on one of the websites it was full of information about corporate training with very little focus on personal training and it didn't fit the narrative that the AI answer provided. Maybe some parts of the website contain information about personal coaching but the homepage is purely focused on corporate training. But on the other side the personal trainer shared only information about personal training. It shares video testimonials about his customers, their success, his successful customers, checked all the boxes that I need. And guess what? I engaged with a coach that fit the narrative. So that first coach failed the coherence test. The AI told one story about personal coaching, but the website told another story. That friction is a fatal flaw in the AI era. The trend in 2026 is that you need to know how your you are surface in the AI searches and whether or not the narrative matches your landing page. If you just start with a simple search like you are a customer, just imagine yourself as a customer and probe questions in AI mode or chatbt basically walk yourself through in the lens of your customer. You will eventually see how your brand is being mentioned and you need to then visit your landing page to see if the content of the page is coherent with what is being mentioned on the AI search. Now the coherence crisis right is just one form of friction. Any point of difficulty on your site for example slow loading times, confusion navigation, unclear pricing is a conversion killer. The data is ruthless on this. The median conversion rate for a landing page is around 6.6% across all industries, but only top 10% of pages convert over 11.45%. The difference is almost entirely due to the removal of friction. 68 68% of users will switch to a competitor after just one poor digital experience. Think about that. The AI delivers high quality qualified lead and twothirds of them will leave because of one single point of friction. In 2026, UX is the new conversion rate optimization. You must obsessively audit your site for friction points. You should look at clarity. Does the page immediately confirm the AI recommendation. Take note of the speed. Does it load instantly? If it is not, you want to look at plugins like WP Rocket to instantly speed up your website if it's run running on WordPress. And the path is the next step, the call to action, obvious and frictionless. And here's a new critical point of friction in the AI era. Pricing transparency in 2026, businesses that are transparent with pricing will win in the AI search. Why? Because people will start s will will start searching with criteria and price is one of their inputs. They'll be searching for something like I only have a budget of XYZ and I have this criteria. Find me products or services that fits my needs. So if your pricing is not ready readily available, the AI cannot confidently recommend you. Your brand may not be mentioned. Or on the other side, the user once they see the AI answer, they click through. They will immediately bounce when they realize that they had to jump through hoops to find a cause. Businesses that hide their bis their prices behind a demo or a webinar may now lose out. But it really depends on the industry the business is in. If everyone else is doing the same thing, fine. But if it is not, you'll be losing out. For high ticket B2B businesses, a demo is still necessary. But even then, a clear pricing range or a transparent explanation of the cost structure is essential. For most other businesses, hiding the price is now a critical friction point that a deliver customer will not tolerate. The worst thing that could happen for not including the pricing is that what if your customers share your pricing on platforms like Reddit or Kora and the AI may use the pricing provided on Reddit and that defeats your purpose and may not reflect your business goals. So you want to avoid that. Be transparent with your pricing and if you do not have a specific price point then justify it with ranges and tiers because if you don't do that you risk having AI recommending your competitor instead. All right, we have reached the final and perhaps the most challenging trend for 2026 implementation which leads us to the organizational shift. SEO as a crossf functional mandate. For too long SEO has lived in a silo. It was a department that marketing would occasionally call upon to optimize a page or fix a broken link assuming it's a really large corporation. This traditional silo structure is guaranteed failure in the AI era. The AI search engine is not just ranking your content. It's ranking your entire business operation. It is ranking your product, your customer service, your user experience, and your brand's reputation. Therefore, SEO strategy can no longer be executed by a single team. It must be a crossf functional mandate that integrates deeply with the product, engineering, UX, and community management. In 2026, cross functional strategy is not optional. It's the only way to create lasting impact. The businesses that will dominate in 2026 are the ones who have successfully broken down the silo and elevate SEO to the core business function. The most critical integration is between SEO and product engineering teams. We saw that in key trend five where we talked about competitive site experience that post UX postclick UX is the final gatekeeper. But who owns UX? The product and engineering teams in most cases. If SEO is not involved in the product development life cycle from day zero, you are building friction into the product. For example, pricing transparency. If a product team decides to hide the pricing behind a demo request, the SEO team's ability to get cited by the AI is immediately compromised. SEO must be at a table to argue that transparent pricing is now a technical requirement for the AI visibility, not just a marketing decision. In 2026, SEO is becoming a product feature, not no longer is no longer about retrofitting optimization onto a finished product. It is also about building the product with AI visibility and trust signal baked in from the start. This requires a shift in mindset. SEO is not a traffic source. It's a relevance layer that sits on top of the product. Next, we have the integration with community management and PR. We saw that in key trend three about review and reputation management that the AI is scripping dark socials, forums and review sites to gauge genuine sentiment. Who is in the on the front lines of these channels? The community manager. In the silo world, the SEO team tracks rankings and the community team track sentiment. In a cross functional world, these two roles are inseparable. The SEO team must provide the community manager with a list of high priority, high authority review sites and niche forums that the AI is prioritizing. And the community manager must provide the SEO team with real time feedback on brand sentiment, decorative narratives, and emerging questions that can be turned into high value conversion focused content. This collaboration is essential for building consistent verifiable trust that the AI demands. When the community manager successfully turns a negative review into a positive resolution, they are not just improving customer service, they are engineering a positive trust signal that the AI will reward in 2026. Breaking down the SEO, the silos between SEO and PR com essential for enterprise success. By aligning your goals around the AI core values, the trust, the coherence, and the verifiability, you force the entire organization to work together to build a product that is inherently optimized for the future of search. And with that, these are the SEO trends we have discussed for 2026. And now I'll hand the mic back over to Charlie. Jack, this was so incredible. Thank you so much for taking us through these SEO trends. The questions, the Q&A has been on fire. I've never seen so many questions coming in and this has been an extremely popular webinar and every insight that you've shared has been so valuable. Uh if it's if it's okay for you, Jack, I think what we're going to do is quickfire through these questions together. So, we'll just give our best answers to everything. The first one is quite a funny one. Um it's from Helen, who says that she finds AI overviews just awful [laughter] and wants to know what the general consumer response is. What would you say to this, Chad? [snorts] Okay. Um from what I see right the AI overviews are even though if it is the answers are awful if you just click through to chat with the AI mode it gives a different answer and usually the AI mode provides answer that is clearer and more accurate and personally I trust the AI mode more than AI overviews but AI overviews are the start of the AI mode conversation I would So if you don't trust the AI overview, just go on to AI mode. The thing I would say as well is I think consumers have really mixed feelings about AI overviews is the general consensus. But ultimately, they're not going anywhere. So how we feel about them doesn't really matter as search marketers. What we do about them is the thing that we have to think about because even if we don't love them, Google's not yet getting rid of them. Uh, next question. I love this one. Uh this is from Nadem who works in a SAS business and he wants to know what are the top three measures he should be taking to make sure that his business gets cited in chat GBT and perplexity if we were going to give a top three for optimizing for AI. Maybe I'll start with the first one and then you can um follow on. Um, so I would say the first thing is to get your website and pages indexed on Google and Bing because if your site is not indexed there, you have zero chance of being seen. That's the first thing you you need to have good foundational traditional SEO to be able to get cited on um on these chat AI chats. I completely agree and just as Jack's saying, you want a really clean website when it comes to like technical optimization. You want all of your schema, your pages, everything to be working, nothing to be broken. That's definitely got to be the first pillar. Second, I would say it goes back to what you were saying earlier, Jack. Like very clear positioning about the business, what it is, what it does, who it's for, pricing, if it's relevant for the type of SAS that you work in as well, needs to be really well written in the content on the site. And third measure I Yeah, go. [laughter] So um the the third one is for me if you are a new SAS it it really depends on if you are new or you are established but I presume your business is new. So I would say have a website that is fundamentally cor uh fundamentally well in traditional SEO but go on to other platforms. Do not focus just on SEO itself. Go to social media channels, create YouTube videos, create short videos. Do everything you can to get your brand out there because if you do not have brand exposure, you do not have brand authority. And AI searches looks at brand authority and if you are not appearing anywhere, they will not site you or they'll not recommend you. Absolutely. And the amount of websites that get cited that are not your own website when people are asking queries or putting in prompts that relate to you, your own website is probably only cited a small percentage of the time. And actually a large percentage of the pie is coming from other websites, third party sources, just like Jack says, like Reddit, Quora, review sites, but also articles, PR articles in news sites, in local newspapers, blogs, all of that sort of thing. So definitely thinking about your PR. Right. Next one is from Harry. What are some of the best tools and methods to find intent specific searches relevant to my industry? He's specifically in physiootherapy supplies. So product based business here. Any tools that you would recommend that you love, Jack? Google search console always because um Okay. So, I'm not sure if you have seen one of our recent videos or a short video that talks about going into Google Search Console and filtering your um those search queries. And there's a particular or specific search um filter or regax filter that you can filter out people the things that people are typing in on Google. is the very long uh queries that are uh the people are typing in on Google and you will see the intents and everything in there. Um that is one two. The next two is basically Google Analytics. Analytics also shows you what traffic is come uh where the website is getting traffic from especially for AI searches. Sometimes you are being cited on CHBT or whatever it will be shown there as well. And um These are the two free tools. Other than that, I'm not sure because um in RankMath, we do use AHFS. Um personally, I do use Samrush as well and they do give um some brand recommendations and um how your brand is being seen on the internet. Yeah, I also I'm also a big fan of Semrush. HFS is another version of a similar tool. SE ranking another version of a similar tool. all of those where you can find uh great keywords. Do your keyword research. Look at keyword volumes. Look at CPCs to understand if there's commercial intent or if they're justformational keywords as well. Definitely agree. Got another one on tools. Uh this is from John who's asking, "What are the best tools for AI search volume tracking and specific search questions that might convert to leads?" Any thoughts on this, Jack? What specific search questions will convert to leads? I think this is another one, but it's around AI searches instead. Maybe I can kick us off and if you've got anything to add, Jack, jump in. So AI search tracking tools. There's a couple of great ones in the market that we love using that we use ourselves over at Exposure Ninja. One is called Profound. Try profound.com. One is called Peak AI. Pee c.ai. and the other one is called Scrunch AI. But there's lots of variations of similar tools and these let you actually track prompts, see what's being searched. But unfortunately, we're not at the stage yet where we can get exact search volumes in the same way you get search volumes for keywords in SEO. That data isn't released by chatbt or any of these AI search platforms one day. I hope that it will be, but you can get an idea of the kinds of prompts that people are searching for, the general topic areas, so you can start optimizing towards those. Not sure if there's anything else you'd want to add, Jack. Um, yes, I do have. So, basically, you can just Okay, first thing you can do is go to go to Google Search Console and do the future and see the long form long form question that people type onto Google. And then from there you can try to figure out what are the traditional keywords that people are searching for for that long form keyword the intent of those keywords. So based on that you can use that traditional tools to figure out the search volume of those um keywords and you basically have the search volume a demo up maybe absolutely the other thing I would say is don't overlook your own Google Analytics data. So though it doesn't separate out into AI search traffic by default, you can set up a channel uh so that you can see all of the search traffic coming from AI platforms. You have to do it manually. Unfortunately, you have to set it up manually. And then you can also see which ones are bringing conversions. So you'll be able to see how much coming from Chacht, how many of those convert and if you're an e-commerce business and you track your revenue in Google Analytics, then you can see how much revenue is driven. It will not give you 100% attribution. the same problem we have with attribution across marketing channels. You won't be able to see where it was just part of the funnel. Lots of uh people who convert from AI end up actually converting under direct in Google Analytics, but it at least give you it will give you a taster, I would say. Um, right. Next up, will onpage SEO for AI searches and traditional SEO be the same for both? If so, what would be the ideal SEO checklist? And if not, should we be creating separate pages for LLMs, for AI searches compared to Google? H I shared some ideas on our YouTube channel. Um, basically because I analyzed the chat searches and I realized that they do site information from very low authority pages. And the thing is that Google is not being uh will not index pages that are duplicates, right? But the thing is chat GBT and all the AI platforms um not not Google, right? Uh ChatgBT and Plexity, they site information from uh pages that give direct that matches directly the search intent. Okay. So from there you can um personally you can create one one bigformational page and then you create a duplicate of it but specific to a particular um keyword. For example, I'll say uh if a if a page is the best WordPress SEO plug-in and it has a lot of information on there, you can create another page that is for example uh best WordPress SEO plug-in for small businesses. Okay. And then in the traditional SEO that page will be deemed as low quality, a duplicate page. So what you can do is to add a canonical tag on those um those duplicated page to the page that you want Google to rank and chbt or AI search platforms will probably site the uh information from the duplicated page. So that and I think depending on the pages we're thinking about. So we've worked with some clients specifically who are e-commerce looking at their product pages in informational content you might be able to create variations like Jack's recommending. If you're thinking about duplicating lots of product pages, I would definitely recommend not doing that. It'll get ve very messy and not what you want. We have been able to optimize exposure ninja for both Google SEO rankings and for AI search visibility just by making some really good on page changes. Things like really good headings, really clear checkout, changing benefits, technical specs of products, uh content chunking, and making sure that the information is broken down really nicely so it's readable. uh by LLMs as well. Okay, next question. Jack, this goes back to what you were talking about around case study content. You gave loads of amazing recommendations about creating case studies, doing different variations. This person, Jennifer, has asked, "What's the best content format for case studies to help with that content being surfaced in AI? What is AI looking for from that content?" So I would say that the AI is not basically citing case studies but the case studies are being used to train the AI models. So in a sense that you need to create case studies so that you can train the AI on their next update. Currently if like for example in live searches they will not site information from case studies but they will based on their information that they are trained on. So case studies you need to have different um different focus I would say because case studies itself is um the best format is basically to interview your your successful clients and they will give you all the you know what you have done for them. So you want to list down, you want to include every information about the case that you have done for your customer. Include their pricing, include their uh what they are challenges are, what they the things that you have done for them that made them successful. So with creating case studies, right, you can actually um train the AI to basically mention your brand. Brilliant. And here we go. What importance does AI place on forums like Reddit, Mom's Net? Is it where it's actually difficult to manage brand sentiment? Um, because individuals can put their own perspectives and then always accurate or fair for the business. Any recommendations around this, Jack? Because we know that AI does often reference Reddit, Quora, Mumsnet, and other forums when it feels like it's relevant to the answer it's giving. What importance does AI place on forums then? I [snorts] think this is always changing. The AI will sometimes they will change to focus more on Reddit. I'm not sure in the future it you it'll be the same. But I would say that wherever your customers are mention wherever your customers mention your business, you want to be there to if it's especially the negative ones, you want to be able to answer them. And if it's like misinformation, you want to correct them. But in a way that is not um judging but in a way that is more in a positive light. Give your customers like if they're not happy you have a resolution because the thing is if AI or whatever even your customers see that you are giving resolution to your to a negative comment and you are being humble and stuff like that um it it sends a positive signal to your customers your future customers or the AI as well. And uh in terms of Google Google just set up Google alerts on your brand name and uh basically just you will know where your customers are mentioning you. Brilliant idea. I absolutely love Google alerts. Okay Jack I'm taking us to the final question and I think this is probably going to be a common situation for many people on the webinar. Uh they're getting some traffic from AI platforms but how does someone pull more traffic from AI platforms? How do they create a plan around this? What would be your top recommendation? Uh I I would think that don't focus on um pulling traffic because you can't tr personally I think you can't basically track real traffic from the AI mode because the thing is it it is being fractured. The customer journey is being fractured right now. You can't basically pinpoint on one specific point uh one specific platform that this is the platform that drives the sale to your business. they will go into many different stages and uh they will probably go onto YouTube, they will go onto Tik Tok and it's very hard to measure that um that sale itself. So yeah, my recommendation as well would be not to focus too heavily on traffic more to think about where your conversions are coming from. If your customers say that they have used chatbt when you ask them things like where did you find out about us? Um, and also to think about how your business is described, how you want to be spoken about in AI. Is it using the kind of descriptors you want your business to be known for? And is the information in AI accurate as well? Because it maximizes your chance of getting relevant customers and leads through to your business, which is ultimately uh what we all want. Jack, thank you so much for jumping through that quickfire round. Thank you so much for your fantastic presentation. If anyone wants to find you online, where can they where can they find you? Okay, so let me end with this. Okay, if you are a WordPress user and you are not using RankMath, do look out for us because this year this is the year I foresee we are going to roll out many features that will help AI search optimization. And if you haven't subscribed to our channel at Rankmth, consider doing so because we are going to share lots of useful information and knowledge about how to win in AI search environment. Do search for us our do search for our handle at rankmath on YouTube. Thank you and have a nice day. Brilliant. And if you need support with putting into place an AI search strategy, you have no idea how you're doing in AI or you're thinking that AI doesn't describe you in the way that you want your business to be known, then this is exactly what Exposure Ninja helps with. Please feel free to get in touch our website exposioninja.com. have a speak, have a chat with our team, have a think about how AI is representing your brand and we'd be more than happy to help. And you can always find myself and Jack on LinkedIn if you want to hear more from us personally as well. Thank you so much everyone and have a fantastic rest of your day. Jack, thank you again.