Ramona Joita recommends that strong branding in 2026 is key – and shares why research is an integral part of this.

Ramona says: “Strong branding, not just keywords, will drive organic visibility in the AI-powered SEO landscape in 2026.

2025 has been the busiest year ever. I have been in this business for 15 years now, and I have faced all the changes that Google has put us through. We had the mobile-first index, where we had to adjust our websites to fit the mobile version. We had RankBrain, where Google started focussing on how people react to our content and not only to the keywords that we were publishing or the backlinks pointing to our websites.

However, this has been the busiest year by far, and we are still in an early stage of understanding how this is changing the game.

2026 will be an even more challenging year. If there is one thing that I believe will work, it will be to start building a brand. You cannot go wrong with that; Google loves brands, and LLMs will love brands too.”

Joseph Kahn expands on Christian’s tip to emphasise that building authority in 2026 is multi-faceted.

Joseph says: “Look beyond the blue links and build for AI.”

Are we just talking about blue links in Google?

“We're talking about blue links everywhere. Most people think, ‘Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks.’ The old world of SEO was just about using backlinks to build authority, and that isn't the way to build authority anymore.

Links still matter, but it's very specialised. I can beat just about anybody in the service business, and in a lot of different places in SEO, without using a single backlink strategy.”

Roman Leliukh discusses how to SEO for LLMs.

Key talking points include:

Which LLMs should you optimize for?

Chat GPT / AI Overviews / Gemini

Why are certain LLMs best?

How do you optimize for them?

How do you measure success?

Christian Rigg follows on from Otuto Umeji’s tip to share that, if you can form a brand association in someone’s mind, it makes many aspects of SEO a lot easier.

Christian says: “2026 is all about brand associations: in people's minds, in search engines, and in LLMs.

Optimizing for brand associations means building deep and meaningful connections between your brand and the topics, products, features, outcomes – all of the things that matter to people and machines.”

Otuto Umeji shares that one of the key elements to building a successful brand in 2026, from an SEO perspective, is to be the go-to, remembered brand for a particular keyword phrase.

Otuto says: “Use brand positioning to move from SERP rankings to mind rankings.”

What are mind rankings?

“Recently, we have seen that SEO is shifting, and AI search is now summarising results. Because of this, it's no longer enough to just chase rankings. The brands that will win are brands that strongly position themselves in people’s minds, to the point where they search for them by name, regardless of where they are on the SERP rankings.

For example, if I say ‘best soda’, the brand that automatically comes to mind is Coca-Cola. If I say ‘energy drink’, the brand that comes to mind is Red Bull. If I say ‘SEO audits’ and ‘keyword research’, Ahrefs and Semrush are what come to mind. If we talk about ‘link building analysis’, Majestic comes to mind. That is what brand positioning is: when your brand is the best at delivering a particular value that your customers truly care about.

When they care about this, they will remember you, and they will automatically search for you by name. In 2026, what will win is when you are not just found; you are remembered.

This might not sound like SEO, but it’s something that we can introduce to SEO to make your SEO processes better. You are focussing on optimizing your brand so that people search for you automatically.”

Charlie Clark shares that as we move towards an AI search-first world, brands should move beyond "links for links’ sake" and focus on semantically relevant brand mentions that align with key topics and entities, helping AI engines better understand, associate, and prioritise them in results.

Talking points include:

What’s an example of links for links’ sake?

How do we focus on semantically relevant brand mentions?

How do we measure the success of semantically relevant brand mentions?

How do we ensure that semantically relevant brand mentions align with key topics and entities?

Why does this help AI?

How do we measure success?

Following on from Aleyda’s advice to optimize for citation-worthiness, Sukhjinder Singh shares that brand recognition is key.

Sukhjinder says: “Say goodbye to rankings and hello to recognition. It's time to appear everywhere.”

Why is it time to say goodbye to rankings?

“It's not a complete goodbye, but it’s changing your mindset. We're still comfortable with tracking ranking positions as one of our main metrics, and it should be one of our metrics, but we need to become more comfortable with appearing in different ways and broadening our idea of what it means to be discoverable.

We should be focussing on things like brand mentions, entity strength, visual content, and all the different ways that you're surfaced in the SERPs and the more conversational interactions across platforms.

It's broadening that idea and getting out of the comfort zone of tracking the top 10 ranking positions. Even now, that has been made more difficult with Google's change to pagination and how tools are picking up information from beyond position 10.

It’s not a complete goodbye, but it’s time to open your mind to other ways of tracking brand recognition instead.”

We all know that one of the most effective forms of SEO is to create a resource that garners natural links. A big part of brand SEO is to build a brand that people want to talk about.

Aleyda says: “Optimize for citation-worthiness.

This is easier said than done. It's about establishing yourself as an authority in your field, but in order to do that, you have to make it very clear what your unique selling proposition is and create and optimize your assets and web presence accordingly – both within your own website and externally as well.

We have heard so much regarding how LLMs are getting citations from social media, and all of these features are giving visibility to Reddit, YouTube, etc., so we need to put some content out there. However, a lot of those conversations aren’t thinking about the alignment with your product, your brand, your USP, and what actually matters business-wise.

Time and time again, we have seen how Google updates have negatively affected the rankings and the traffic of topics that are too shallow, too broad, and are not aligned with the subject matter expertise and uniqueness of the brand. We have also seen a lot of comments saying, ‘Because of the Crocodile Effect, it's no longer worth targeting broader informational queries,’ which I also think is too simplistic an approach.

The truth lies in the middle. What actually matters is the angles, topics, or specific areas that you can cover as a brand. The topics that make sense business-wise won't be fulfilled by generic concepts, and will incentivise the potential customer to learn more about your brand.

It's still worth targeting, not only because it will maximise the chances of a click, but even if it doesn't end up generating a click, it will be worth it just to be visible, because that will help the user make their decision later on in the process.”