Bill Hartzer is a strong advocate for traditional SEO best practices as the bedrock to your future SEO success, no matter the technology or platform.

Bill says: “My number one tip has really not changed for the past few years: follow classic, traditional SEO best practices for creating content and optimizing pages and websites.

With some search engines, you can get away with 150 words of content and potentially rank on a page, but when it comes to AI, it's more about structuring a page, using the right title tags, meta description tags, headings, H1/H2/H3 tags, bulleted lists, ordered lists, numbered lists, bold, italics, etc.

Focus on the traditional SEO tactics, which haven't changed in the 20 years that I've been doing this.”

According to Gordon Meagher, the foundations of AI ranking success lie in traditional marketing activities. Gordon says: “It's time to put your old school digital marketing hat on, as we move forward in this new age.” What does that mean in practice? “We know that search behaviour is changing. ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, have basically given birth to a new way of searching that we never knew before. We were always 10 blue links on a page. LLMs have changed that. With how people want their answers now, I don't think you can put it back in the box. I think the biggest thing is the uncertainty around where Google search itself is going. Will Google search even be a thing once AI Mode comes in and the adoption rates increase for LLMs and these types of answers? I think it's going to go back to how we used to market years ago. For me, once Google released AI Mode, it was the end of SEO – and I don't say that lightly. They also broke an unwritten rule with publishers, which was always: we create the content, we live by your rules, you send us traffic. That paradigm has now shifted.

Daphne Monro shares the importance of prioritising video-led, verifiable content in 2026. Talking points include: What do you mean by video-led content? Why publish video-led content? Why priorise video-led content? What video content works best? What do you mean by verifiable content? How do you verify content? How do you measure success?

Olga Zarr says that AI SEO success isn’t achieved by focussing on what AI is doing. Instead, good, traditional SEO can deliver in an AI-driven era. Olga says: “AI SEO still runs on SEO. Although SEO has practically turned into AI SEO, and no one thinks about SEO without thinking about AI these days, AI SEO is still based on good SEO.” Does existing best practice SEO assist with AI SEO? “Yes, generally speaking. I have analysed exactly what you can do to dominate in AI SEO and rank in AI chatbots. All of the things you should do map directly to the things you need to do in SEO in order to rank, be indexed, and be crawled. I was able to map it around four main areas, which you always have to take care of in SEO: technical SEO, content strategy/creation/structure, user experience, and authority. All of them ideally map out to AI SEO, to ranking in chatbots, and all of that.”

Nikki Halliwell shares the VISIBLE Framework to improve LLM and AIO Visibility. Talking points include: What led to the creation of the framework What are the principles of the framework What is the framework? How can SEOs use it?

Victoria Olsina shares that AI can and should be used to automate your processes, ensuring that key tasks are delivered as efficiently as possible.

Victoria says: “Define an SEO process and then automate it with custom GPTs or no-code tools like Make.com.”

How do you determine the processes to focus on?

“Every person who does SEO and has done on-page optimization or an SEO audit 50, 100, or 500 times has found ways to approach this problem.

We have checklists, we have protocols, and we have templates for these tasks. Once you have the process, the checklist, and the protocol, it's very easy to give those instructions to AI in the form of custom GPTs or automations.

If you define those steps manually, it's very easy to then have AI assist you, or automate the process.”

For Giulia Panozzo, SEOs don’t have to compete with AI – rather, AI should be an effective working partner.

Giulia says: “Turn AI into your partner, not your problem.”

How do you do that?

“The industry as a whole has been panicking a little, ever since the AI revolution started taking over. There's been quite a lot of conversation about AI taking over our jobs and replacing us.

I don't think we're there yet. I don't know if we'll ever get there either, because I think we have some aces up our sleeves. The way that you turn AI into your partner is by knowing exactly where to use it versus where not to use it.”

Carla Dobson Elliott shares how to have fun with content formats in 2026. Talking points include: - How to write different content formats - How to produce various content formats - Why and how we should profile audiences by curiosity and not demographic - What to include in content - How to measure the success of content