Emina Demiri-Watson shares that focussing on your audience can help you avoid getting bogged down in what technology can offer. Emina says: “First of all, don't get bogged down with all of the flashy terms. We're all talking about fan-out, chunking, and cosine similarity. All of that is amazing, I love technology, but also go back to the basics of marketing and who your audience is. Those tools are brilliant as a way to help you understand your audience better, but they are not the goal in themselves. Understand the basics first.”

Silvi Nuñez shares that in an AI-heavy world where content feels generic, localized and culturally aware content becomes a powerful SEO strategy in 2026. Talking points include: What is localized and culturally aware content? How do you localize content as effectively as possible? How do we make content more culturally aware? How do we measure the impact of this? Why is this a powerful SEO strategy? How do we incorporate this as part of an overarching SEO strategy?

For Travis Tallent, it all begins with discovering who your audience is before deciding on how to serve them. Travis says: “Audience-first marketing has and will always win, no matter how technology advances. It's not a new concept, but it's more critical than ever. With AI entering the space, we are seeing huge shifts with AI and agentic search. The only way to thrive is to really understand your audience and how the people you are trying to reach search and find brands.”

It’s easy to get dazzled by the next shiny bright thing, but Tin Đudajek is keen to highlight the importance of delivering on ‘proper SEO’. Tin says: “Don't get lost in AEO or GEO, and keep doing proper SEO.” Answer Engine Optimization focuses on answering common questions and long tail queries that can appear in AI, so isn't that good for SEO? “It's good for SEO, but what I'm aiming at is that, currently, nothing exists that proves that optimizing solely for generative AI is different from real, proper SEO. What I'm trying to say is, just keep doing SEO as you have been doing so far, and you will be featured in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and everything else. As far as I've seen, there's nothing different that you have to do in order to rank better in generative AI right now.

Greg Heilers emphasises the importance of not letting newer tactics direct your existing good SEO practices. Greg says: “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t throw out all of your SEO best practices just because we're in the hype cycle of GEO.” How do we know which SEO practices to throw out and which ones to keep? “Right now, we're simply adding on and not throwing out. We are working with the assumption that roughly 90% of GEO best practices are rooted in SEO. We need to tweak a little bit and add in some new best practices, but most of our SOPs are still valid.”

Anthony Barone understands the importance and impact of AI, but tempers that with the essential nature of fundamental SEO principles. Anthony says: “AI/GEO/LLMEO is all the rage, but core fundamental SEO principles still apply.” What's distracting SEOs at the moment, that isn't worth spending time on? “A lot of SEOs are just jumping on the bandwagon, which I get. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Manus, and all of these are coming in, and yes, some behaviours are changing. We've got AI Mode coming in. We'll have Web Guide coming in. I get it. However, from an SEO perspective, but also from a business perspective, core SEO fundamentals still apply. You want to be able to crawl before you can sprint. With shiny toy syndrome, and everyone wanting to be the latest and greatest and wanting to jump on the trends, they're forgetting that those SEO principles still apply.

CJ Emson shares that brand is back and it’s bigger than before. If your branded search footprint isn’t strong, you’re going to lose out in AIO and as we see continually seeing and hearing - traditional organic search traffic is down, zero click search is up. The remedy to this is branded search. From there you can determine if your Demand gen engine is really only a demand capture engine…and remedy how brand building in search can fuel demand gen and pipe. Talking points include: What does successful brand SEO look like in 2026? What does success look like? How does brand SEO fuel demand? How has brand SEO changed? How will it continue to change? How do you future-proof brand SEO?

Nitin Manchanda agrees with Simon Cox, encouraging SEOs to concentrate on timeless activities. Nitin says: “Don't get lost in buzzwords and stay focussed on the fundamentals.” What buzzwords do people get lost in? “A lot of them. People talk about AI-first indexing, zero-click optimization, voice search dominance, entity-first strategies, and much more. Now, they're also talking about AEO, GEO, and a lot of other different names. Essentially, though, it’s SEO.”