SEO trends 2026: how to optimise for AI search

In the US, 58.5 per cent of Google searches end without a click.

SEO trends for 2026 are about more than ranking higher. They are about appearing in AI-generated answers and earning the trust of both people and machines.

In this post I go through the most important changes in how companies get found today: what is happening, and the concrete steps you can take to adapt your strategy.

Google’s AI Overviews are the most tangible SEO trend in 2026.

AI-generated answers now appear at the top of more and more searches. In the UK, Sistrix found AI Overviews on more than 18 per cent of the keywords it tracks as early as March 2025, up from 4 per cent in the months before. On many informational searches they push the traditional blue links further down the page.

When an AI Overview appears, fewer people click. Ahrefs found that the top-ranking page’s average click-through rate was 58 per cent lower on keywords with an AI Overview (December 2025 compared with December 2023).

Being cited in the AI answer makes a difference, though. In Seer Interactive’s data, brands cited in an AI Overview got 35 per cent more organic clicks than when they were not cited. Optimisation isn’t about avoiding AI answers. It’s about getting into them.

According to SparkToro’s 2024 study, 58.5 per cent of Google searches in the US and 59.7 per cent in the EU end without a click.

If you only measure clicks, you miss part of the picture. Organic traffic as your only KPI no longer works.

Search engine optimisation in 2026 is about proving your expertise where people make decisions. That might be in an AI answer, in a YouTube video or in a review on Trustpilot.

New KPIs to track:

• Citation share: how often you are cited in AI answers compared with your competitors. Search your most important terms by hand each week and note whether you appear in the AI Overview, or use one of the tracking tools now on the market.
• Brand volume: how many people search for your brand name. Track it in Google Search Console under “Performance” > filter on branded queries.
• Share of voice in AI systems: manual tracking of how often you appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity or other AI tools when people ask questions relevant to your industry.

Tools:

• Google Search Console for branded search volume (it has a branded queries filter)
• Manual checks of your presence in AI Overviews
• A growing number of new tools built to measure these KPIs, such as Ahrefs’ Brand Radar and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit

The old KPIs (organic traffic, ranking third rather than fourth) are still worth watching. But they aren’t enough.

If you’d like help with your SEO strategy, do get in touch. You can read more about how we work as an SEO agency.

E-E-A-T gained an extra E, for Experience, in December 2022.

Google rewards content where it is obvious that a person with real experience created it, and AI answers tend to draw on the same kind of sources. Not a bot, not a copywriter who has read three articles, but an actual expert.

Originality.ai, which tracks Google’s top 20 results with its AI detector, put the share of AI-generated content at 2.27 per cent in February 2019 and 17.31 per cent in September 2025.

At the same time, Google is clamping down hard on low-quality content. In my experience there’s no single limit on how many thin pages you can get away with. In theory, larger brands can lean on the trust they’ve already built and mass-produce quite a lot, but new companies need to be very careful with their first pages.

Machine-produced content that only summarises what already exists has no lasting place in the results. What holds up is content only you can create:

• Your own surveys of your customers
• Results from real projects you’ve delivered
• Quotes from your staff, with name and job title
• Photos from your own workplaces or completed jobs
• Personal insight that can’t be found anywhere else

If you run an online shop, review the products yourself. If you’re a consultancy, share concrete examples from your projects (with permission). If you’re a local service business, show faces, stories, before and after.

Put your people front and centre.

1. Add author profiles with Person schema markup

• Include a LinkedIn profile
• Describe the author’s work history
• Link to previous publications or case studies

2. Publish original research

• Run surveys among your customers
• Document measurable results from your own projects
• Share the raw data when you can (spreadsheets, charts, figures)

3. Show faces

• Include team photos with real names
• Use video to explain concepts
• No stock photos (they show the reader nothing real about you)

4. Link to external proof

• References to case studies you’ve contributed to
• Quotes from industry reports that mention you
• Appearances on podcasts or in other media

5. Update content regularly

• In a Seer Interactive study, 75 per cent of the pages that ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cited had been updated within the past year
• Add an “updated” date at the top of articles
• Review older content at least once a year

You can read more in our guide to structured data, and the Person type itself is documented at Schema.org/Person.

LLM optimisation (or GEO, generative engine optimisation) is about structuring content so it is easy to quote accurately.

AI models don’t want to hallucinate. They want to cite credible sources. Your job is to make that as easy as possible.

Practical techniques:

• Answer capsules: self-contained answers of 40–60 words to specific questions, placed directly under H2 headings. No introduction, no filler. Just the answer.
• Fact density: every sentence should add something. Cut “as we all know”, “it’s important to remember” and “in today’s digital landscape”. Get to the point.
• Structured data: keep your markup accurate and in line with what the page shows. Google says no special structured data is needed to appear in AI Overviews, and in SE Ranking’s study of ChatGPT citations, pages with FAQ schema were cited slightly less often than pages without it.
• Load time: in the same SE Ranking study of 216,524 pages, pages with a First Contentful Paint under 0.4 seconds averaged 6.7 ChatGPT citations, against 2.1 for pages slower than 1.13 seconds. That is a correlation, not proof that speed is an AI ranking factor, but a fast site rarely hurts.
• Content structure: pages with 120–180 words between headings performed best in the same study. A very long section is harder to extract as a single answer, and a very short one carries too little context.

The difference between Google and ChatGPT:

Google uses structured data to understand pages, but says your markup must match the visible text. ChatGPT search fetches your pages with OpenAI’s crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI hasn’t published any guidance on structured data. So you need to cover both: sound technical structure and text that reads well.

If you’d like help getting your business cited in AI answers, take a look at our AI search services.

In our experience, AI answers lean towards well-known brands rather than unknown sources.

Branded search, people searching for your company name, is a strong sign of trust. Google doesn’t say how much weight it carries, but it is hard to fake.

The logic is simple: if people search for you, they already trust you. Google doesn’t have to guess whether you’re credible, because your customers have already shown it.

The strategy: use other channels to get people searching for your brand name.

What you can do in practice:

• Write guest posts on trusted websites where your name is mentioned (not just a link in the author bio)
• Ask customers to name specific experts at your company in their reviews
• Be active on LinkedIn, building personal brands that connect back to the company
• Take part in podcasts and YouTube conversations where your company name is said out loud

When someone then searches for your name and clicks through to your website, that is a clear sign the company is relevant.

This is sometimes called “the Great Inversion”: you used to build a brand by ranking. Now you rank by building a brand.

If you’d like help with a long-term SEO strategy that builds your brand as well as your rankings, get in touch.

Video takes up more and more space in search results.

YouTube videos regularly appear in Google’s results, and AI answers cite them too. Google Lens is used for nearly 20 billion visual searches a month, according to Google. And people tend to trust a brand more when they can see and hear a real person.

Do this:

• Make short (2–5 minute) how-to videos that answer common questions in your niche
• Upload them to YouTube, not only embedded on your website (a YouTube video can be found on YouTube itself and in Google’s video results, not just on your page)
• Optimise video titles and descriptions as you would blog posts
• Add timestamps to the description so AI and Google can find specific parts

Getting started with video doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. A phone camera and natural light are enough in many industries.

You can’t do everything at once.

Here’s a prioritised action plan based on what actually moves the needle.

1. Prove expertise (E-E-A-T): add author profiles, publish your own insights, show faces
2. Answer your customers’ most common questions clearly on your most important pages, and keep any structured data in line with what the page shows
3. Start tracking branded search volume in Search Console

1. Create answer capsules (answers of 40–60 words) for your most important topics
2. Produce video for YouTube and embed it on relevant pages
3. Build a digital PR strategy aimed at mentions on trusted websites

• Over-optimising for exact-match keywords (AI understands intent, not just words)
• Mass-produced AI content with no human angle
• Obsessing over position one (visibility in AI answers matters more)

To succeed with SEO in 2026, treat it as part of a bigger strategy. Traditional technical SEO (a fast, mobile-friendly site with good content) is still the foundation. But it’s no longer enough.

SEO is now about building trust in every channel where your customers are.

As always, get in touch for a free search audit. I’ll help you work out which of these strategies will have the most effect for your business.