The Truth About SEO in 2026

In 2026, SEO is more important than ever, but it's changing fast. But today, you're not just ranking. You're actually campaigning on two surfaces at once. Traditional web search like Google and this new era of AI search tools like ChatGpt. If you're only optimizing for traditional search, then you're missing out on all the highquality traffic from AI search. And if you're only focusing on AI search, you're missing out on the majority of the traffic and conversions that are happening today. So today, I'm going to show you the core ingredients of this new era of hybrid SEO. We're even going to go behind the scenes on one of our own websites to show you an incredible tool that might just become your best friend. But let's be 100% clear about the environment that we are doing SEO for. Google still dominates the world of search. With 16.4 4 billion searches per day happening on Google versus around 800 million inquiry prompts on chat GBT. Google is still 20 times larger in search volume terms than even the most popular AI tool. Now, that's not to say that optimizing for tools like ChatGpt isn't important. It absolutely is. Whilst the search and traffic volumes might not be as high on chat GBT as they are on traditional search, the quality of that traffic can be incredibly high with some data showing that visits from chat GBT can convert at five times the rate of traditional search. And of course, we can't really think of Google as a traditional web search engine anymore anyway because now it has AI functionality built in. This is fundamentally changing the nature of Google's search results and the amount of traffic that Google sends to your website. This data from Pew Research shows that if an AI overview is present on the search results page, people are about half as likely to click through onto a website. But the thing is, you don't have to worry about any of this because we are going to be optimizing for both traditional search and AI tools. This is not an eitheror situation. This is a both situation. So, how does SEO work today? Well, let's start with the first ingredient. And the first ingredient is traditional onpage SEO with a few tweaks. Let's take a look. We'll run a search like best vacuum cleaners for houses with cats. We'll see we've got some Google ads at the top here. Then we've got an AI overview which pulls from different sources. And then we have the regular organic results. Now, our goal is to make you visible inside here, in here, and in here. And what do all of these websites have in common? They have a really good foundation of great technical on-site optimization. And today we're going to be using this website, which is Elite Renewables, one of the businesses that we own to do a bit of a live demo. And to go through this demonstration, we're going to be using a tool called RankMath Pro. They're also the sponsors of this video to show you how each of these different features works and the different areas that you'll need to optimize. Now, if you have RankMath, it gets you started with this setup wizard. It makes it really easy to control some of the global settings on your website. I'm just going to show you what they are. So, if you don't have RankMath Pro, you can figure out what you need to do. So, with RankMath, this setup kind of gets you started with the basics of your website optimization right out of the box. You can even link in your Google Search Console and your analytics. And then that's going to show you some of your data in the RankMath dashboard and actually on a bar across the top of your website when you're logged in as well, which can be quite useful. You don't need to do that. It builds your site maps for you. It handles a few of the tweaks that you might not know to make. And there we go. We're set up. There are lots of areas within on-site optimization that you want to get a handle of depending on the type of business and the type of website that you've got. Now, in RankMath's case, it handles this on the dashboard by giving you lots of options that you can fine-tune for things like image SEO, local SEO, submitting pages to an index, handling redirections, handling schema, which is really important for AI search optimization as well, building out your site maps, and handling e-commerce SEO if you're using Woo Commerce. Of course, if you're not using WordPress, that's absolutely fine. You won't be able to use RankMath, but these are still the core areas that you'll need to focus on. We're not going to go through all of these because they're not going to be relevant for everyone, but we're going to go through some of the most common areas. Now, and if you're not on RankMath, that's okay. You just need to implement these things however you implement the on-site SEO on your website. Now, whether you're using RankMath or whether you're using a different tool, the basics of onpage SEO are still the same. Fundamentally, it's things like H1s. It's things like image alt tags, page titles, meta descriptions, inbound links, internal linking, canonicals, making sure you're not no indexing stuff. In RankMath's case, it gives you this SEO analyzer and shows you what you're doing wrong. So, on the Elite Renewables website, we don't have image alt attributes for every picture. We're not using some focus keywords. That's more of a measurement thing than an issue with the site itself. We're missing some open graph metatags. And there's some recommendations about speed. How deep you need to go with the on-site technical SEO is going to depend on how strong your competitors are. If you're stealing candy from babies, i.e. your competitors are absolute rubbish. You might be able to rank really well and get some amazing visibility with a barely optimized website. You can stick your competitors in here and see how well they are doing. So, in this case, this site is doing really well. Now, that doesn't mean that this is an amazing site or that it's going to be ranking really well, but it does mean that they've got these technical SEO pieces under control. Page titles and metad descriptions have been a fundamental cornerstone of SEO. These are the bits of text that you see inside the search results page that describe your web page to potential visitors. Now, they've always been really useful to show to people, but also to give search engines an indication on what your page is about. Whatever website platform you're using, you're going to have a way to edit these page titles and meta descriptions. Inside RankMath, you can also set settings for global meta. Collectively, we call page titles and meta descriptions just meta. And on your website platform, you'll have a way to set the meta for each different page on your website. You may also have a way of configuring meta globally across your site, which is what RankMath gives us. So, we can set some global settings for things like whether we capitalize our titles, whether we want to add watermarks to our images, and setting default formats for things like case studies. So, we could set our default case study page titles and metad descriptions here. Site maps are exactly what they sound like, a map that search crawers can use to navigate through your website. Most modern search callers visit your website almost as a user and click through different pages and go between different links that way. But it's really good to give them a site map so they can see all of the pages on your site to make sure they don't miss anything. And you can configure your site map inside RankMath. Schema is a type of hidden data visible on each of your pages that gives search engines and crawler bars extra added information about what they're looking at. Is this page about a product or a business? Are there reviews on this page? And at Exposure Ninja, when we're optimizing a client's website for search and AI search, we use schema a lot. There's a few different ways of adding schema. So, in RankMath, you can add this schema through the schema section. We've already added it individually to each page on this website, so we're not going to use that here. Once you've built a new page or carried out optimization to an existing page, it's a good idea to then resubmit that page for indexing. This is basically a way of telling Google, hey, go and have a look at this page. Something's changed. You can either do this directly inside Google Search Console or in RankMath's case, there is an option where you can add URLs to this and it's then going to submit that through the index now API. So, you don't have to log into Search Console to do this manually. One of the most frustrating things for regular search engines or AI search engines is when they click on something and they get a 404 page, right? The page that they were trying to get to doesn't exist and this can really damage your search visibility. So, it's a good idea to have some way of tracking the 404s that are being triggered on your page. Various different ways to do this. In RankMath's case, it's got this 404 monitor section which shows you all of the 404s that are being generated on your site. So, you can then go and diagnose and figure out what's going wrong. In this case, there is a whole bunch of stuff going on here. It looks like some bots are thinking that the phone number link is actually a link to another page and that's erroring. But I can also see this one here, which looks like it's linking to the homepage. Now, if you see that one of these 404s is getting a lot of hits, it's a good idea to just hit redirect, which takes us to the redirection setting, which is where you can see all of the redirections that you've already set up. Now, optimizing your website without checking how your optimizations are impacting your traffic and visibility, is a bit like trying to race without using your eyes. you don't get that feedback loop. So, it's a really good idea to keep an eye on what you're doing and how it's impacting your visibility both across Analytics, but also Search Console. So, you can either do this inside G4 or whatever analytics platform that you're using and Google Search Console or if you're using RankMath Pro, all that stuff is pulled through into your dashboard here. And this pulls through a bunch of useful data like keywords that are seeing improvements in visibility, how your rankings are changing over time, as well as posts that are doing well and poorly. Now, if you find G4 and Search Console a little bit confusing, this breaks down some of that data in a much more easy to digest way. For example, you can see how each of your individual content pieces are doing, how much search traffic it's getting, and how many impressions it's getting, and how that's changing over time. Now, yes, you can get that information from Google's own tools, but I'll be honest, neither G4 or Search Console is massively userfriendly for beginners. So something like this which takes all of that data and then formats it in a really easy to understand way and just shows you the stuff that you can act upon might be a really useful option for some people. And if you want to track your ranking, you can do this in the rank tracker site. All you need to do is add [music] keywords that you want to track your visibility for over time and it will show how your visibility for each of those is changing. So that's the kind of behindthe-scenes optimization of your website, which is a really good important foundation for everything that we're doing across traditional search and AI search because remember these AI search tools are still running searches on traditional web search engines in order to find the information that they want to share with their users. But the other vital onpage part of the equation is the content that you're producing on your website. And this is how traditional search engines figure out what to rank you for and how AI tools figure out what to tell their users about your business. So your on-site content is incredibly important. One of the most common questions we get is, "Can I just use AI to generate all of my content?" Well, this is a little bit like when your child asks you, can I just eat McDonald's? The answer is technically yes, but you probably wouldn't want to just do that. But that's not to say that AI isn't an incredibly useful tool in the content generation process. Now, at Exposure Ninja, we've got dozens of content writers on the team. Why would we do this if AI can generate content? Well, the reason is because when you have a human using these AI tools, you get far better content that tends to rank and get recommended a lot more often than if you just went to chat GBT and said, "Write me a blog post." And then just posted that AI slot onto your website. And of course, there are tools that will help you do this. Uh, RankMath has this entire content AI section of the site, which is actually pretty cool. It can do things like help you come up with ideas for your blogs, create blog outlines, write introductions. One of my favorite tools is actually all the way down here, the AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action tool. What you do here is you give it a bit of information about the thing that you're trying to sell. It will then generate copy which sells that thing using the attention, interest, desire, action framework. I'm not going to say it's absolutely perfect because no AI tool is, but it's a really good way to get you the starting point for your copy, which you can then tweak and refine. It's much easier to tweak and refine something that already exists than trying to start from scratch. So, here we've got the output. Unlock your home's energy potential. This is the thing to try and get your attention. Then we've got the paragraphs designed to attract your interest, building your desire, and finally ending with the call to action. There is also a content editor inside the back end. Again, I'd be really cautious about publishing this stuff as it is without adding any of your own experience, firsthand perspectives on this, or without checking it and improving it, but it's a decent way to get a first draft, which you can then tweak and optimize, and that will save you a ton of time. Any talk about the future of SEO wouldn't be complete without talking about the impact of agents. And this is the ability for these AI tools to actually not just answer questions in a chat interface, but actually take action on the web on your behalf. I'm on chat GBT Atlas, which is Open AI's browser. And I'm in agent mode. I'm going to ask it to go and find me the best price for this product and accessory, and navigate me to the checkout page. Spoiler alert, it's going to take absolutely ages to do this and it's going to get lost along the way and it may even need help. But this technology is developing fast and many people are saying 2026 is going to be the year of the agent. Of course, what this means is that you're not just building your website for humans to visit. You're also building your website for AI tools to visit. This makes user experience incredibly important and making it very straightforward for people and agents to find the right sections of your website. So that's the stuff that you need to do on your website. Both the technical stuff and the content stuff. What about stuff on the rest of the internet? What about backlinks? Well, backlinks are as important today as they ever have been, but with an important caveat. Backlinks, i.e. other websites that link to your site, improve your visibility in regular traditional search. But getting your business products and features mentioned on other websites is increasingly important today because of this new era of AI search. I've just run this search inside chat GPT. Now, some people might say the thing I've asked for is a bit of an oxymoron, but maybe I'm just an oxymoron. Well, the first thing that you might notice about the sources of these recommendations is that none of them are the brand's own websites. I the brands aren't shaping the narrative about their own products. All of these recommendations are coming from third-party websites. Meaning that if you don't have visibility on the third party websites that these AI tools are sourcing their recommendations from, you're just not going to get recommended. For that reason, at Exposure Ninja, the team heavily focuses on digital PR, i.e. getting you mentioned, getting your products and services featured on other websites around the internet. And this is increasingly becoming the core way that we build links for our clients. If your SEO strategy doesn't have some way to get your brand products and services featured on other people's websites, it's very difficult to really hit those top levels of visibility, particularly in AI search. Of course, if you want help doing this, we have a team of people, yes, people that actually do this for our clients all day, every day. If you're interested in working with them and us more generally, you can request a free digital marketing review from the team at Exposen Ninja. Just head over to exposurinja.com/re. We'll ask you a bit of information about your website and your marketing goals. We'll then take a look at how you're doing at the moment and map you out a prioritized action plan that either we or you can follow over the next 6 to 12 months. Now, not everybody is eligible for this, but if you're interested in working with Exposion Ninja and you'd like to see what that looks like, then go and request your review from exposioninja.com/re today. Oh, PS, before we finish, let's see how Chat GBT did with our task to go and find us the vacuum and the roller. Well, good news. We've got a two pack of rollers for a very reasonable price on this page, and we're ready to check out. And on this page, we've got the vacuum cleaner itself for what looks like the lowest price in the UK. Again, on the checkout page, ready to do it. So, yes, this stuff takes time, but looks like it works. If you want to dive into more detail about AI search optimization, then you might want to check out this video.