Taylor Kurtz provides our final SEOin2026 tip, advising that we stop obsessing over AI and instead, focus on high quality content.

Taylor says: “Do not obsess about AI. Don't obsess about it.”

Why shouldn't you obsess about it?

“I'm sure a lot of people have helpful suggestions about it, but frankly, it's all so new that it’s on a trial basis. Anyone saying that they know what to do for this environment, it's not true. They think they know what to do, but nobody knows for sure. It's all based on: What am I doing that's working? What are my peers doing that's working? How do we navigate this?

Google has not provided any guidance – and even if they did, who really cares? As we saw with organic search, even if they did provide specific guidelines, those aren’t always true. My issue is more the fact that people feel so concerned about it. For instance, I have so many clients asking, ‘How am I doing on ChatGPT?’, but a study came out yesterday showing that referral traffic from ChatGPT from July 21st through yesterday (August 26th) was down 52%.

AI is not going anywhere, and we're very much going to have to adapt to it, but I do not think search will change very much. We're going to have to adapt to utilising it as a new technology, similar to how we had to adapt to voice searches using Siri and things like that.

One thing that really does bother me is seeing so many people online talking about GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. To me, that does not exist. If you want to really get down to the bare bones of it, the crawlers – whether they're crawling the robots.txt file or the newer llms.txt file – are still crawling your source code. The source of information is the same.

I'm constantly hearing that GEO is the new thing because the landscape has totally changed with AI search. Typically, the people who say that then go on to present obvious and foundational tactics that have always applied to SEO. For example, ‘We should use schema.’

One thing we've been really focussing on with our clients is making sure that the authors have authoritative bio pages that show their credentials and show who they are. Are the articles fact-checked? However, that all pertains to EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust), which has been an acronym in SEO for going on a decade.

Will Rice discusses the importance of creating useful tools to convert more of your existing traffic. Talking points include: How to understand what is going to get your traffic to convert more. How do you know what traffic is likely to convert? How do you put a financial value on traffic from different sources? How to rapidly build tools to provide genuine value to your customers. Which tools are best? Why is this better than other forms of traffic? What else to do with the data you get from the tools you build?

Jason Kramer shares why businesses not doing a good job of leveraging leads from organic - and what to do about it. Talking points include: Why are businesses not doing a good job of leveraging leads from organic? How does a business better identify leads from organic? How can businesses do a better job of utilising these leads? How can SEOs work better with other marketing team members to better utilise these leads? What systems and software should be used? How should this better affect and improve organic search strategy?

In 2026, the most effective SEO strategy is to create truly unique, non-replicable content, which means avoiding the use of AI to mass-produce generic pages at scale. What do you think?

Discussion points include:

Why is mass-producing content a fragile strategy?

How do you differentiate content?

What are examples of types of content that nobody else can produce?

How do you know if your target audience is likely to want to know about your personal perspective?

What are the downsides of this strategy?

Where should AI be used?

Stop trying to reverse-engineer what AI wants in 2026, just interrogate the model on the exact sources it relied on after it answers, and it'll tell you precisely what to fix to get cited. That's what Claudia shares in this episode. Talking points include: - AI visibility is business-specific. - AEO is an extension of SEO, not a replacement. - After the AI answers a real customer-style question, interrogate it - AI is capable but still runs on data it has to interpret, sifting mountains of it. - The content bar didn't rise, it split. - Interrogation turns AI visibility from guesswork into evidence.

Brett Farmiloe discusses why journalist request platforms are so important for SEO with David Bain. Talking points include: What is Help a Reporter Out? You’re founder of Featured.com - what does that offer? How do these platforms actually work? Who uses them? What can you actually gain from using these platforms? What are some Best practices for cold pitching podcasts and journalists? How do you measure success? What are some bad or ineffective practices?

Stefan Lozo shares the importance of not neglecting traditional SEO int eh age of AI. Talking points include: What activities would you describe as traditional SEO? How should an SEO define their services in 2026? How should this be communicated with clients? What happens if clients push back and are looking for other services or ways of doing things? How do you set realistic expectations for clients? Is it a good idea to do white label SEO for other agencies? How do you see the traditional agency SEO offering continuing to evolve?

Michael MacMillan shares our penultimate piece of advice by encouraging you to ensure that all the good SEO that you already intend to do, is being done.

Michael says: “While AI is flooding the web with content, it’s also assisting teams to create huge strategies and big plans. However, we're still not seeing them getting executed.”

What does execution actually mean, and why is it not happening?

“Imagine that you’ve gone through and done an SEO audit; you've explored all the opportunities, you've gone through the competitor set, and you've gone through what you have for existing content and how you're performing.

Then, you get this beautiful list of what you should do to get things done – much like going to the physio, where you get a list of the exercises you should do when you're not at the physio. In the meantime, between visits, the work's not getting done.

There's definitely a place for using AI. It's great at analysing data. It's great for giving a first draft of a piece of content. We're leveraging it to get content briefs put together and get a first draft of content. However, a lot of the time, we're seeing things getting shelved.

Priorities start getting pulled. It's sometimes the fact that there is a whole lot that needs to get done. A lot of marketing teams are dealing with having fewer people to execute with, and they're having to rely on other sources to get things done.”