Martha van Berkel follows on from Pam’s tip by highlighting that it’s key to manage the information that you’re providing to AI.

Martha says: “SEO is now about managing your data layer for AI.”

What is your data layer for AI?

“We really have to think about the data we're putting into the machine.

Most people still think of schema markup as just trying to get visibility, but it's way more than that. By doing semantic schema markup, you're building a knowledge graph, which can be a contextual thing that allows machines to understand.

SEOs need to think beyond doing it for search visibility and start seeing it as the input we can use to control brand and understanding for large language models.”

How are you preparing for AI? Pam Aungst Cronin starts off not by exploring how to use AI in your day-to-day activities, but how to position what you do, with AI as your primary audience.

Pam says: “Start preparing for an AI-first future, where the AIs are your primary target audience, not humans.”

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?