Podcast
SEO in 2026
Hosted by Majestic.com · EN
SEO is continuing to change at an alarming pace. And yet, in some sense, the principles of good SEO remain the same.
Hello, and welcome to SEO in 2026 – a significant repository of current thinking from many of the world’s leading SEOs.
We're pleased to be able to welcome you to the fifth book and fifth series in this podcast, now well and truly an annual tradition, brought to you by Majestic.
“How people search has seen a bigger shift in the last 12 months than the last 12 years, and this makes SEOin2026 a must-read for anyone working in the industry. Majestic has brought together 117 of the SEO industry's brightest minds to share their insights into what matters, and what doesn't, to continue to drive growth with organic search during a period of massive uncertainty, and the book should be seen as a valuable reference point to keep your strategy on the right track.”
JAMES BROCKBANK
Managing Director and Founder, Digitaloft
“I highly recommend that every SEO professional set aside a couple of days for SEOin2026. You'll thank me for helping you plan your year effectively. I'm extremely grateful to have the opportunity to work alongside some of the world's leading SEO champions.”
NITIN MANCHANDA
Founder & Chief SEO Consultant, Botpresso
“This collection of wisdom from many of the best minds in SEO today is a great line in the sand of where we as an industry are, what problems we face, and how we tackle them. Anyone in SEO or marketing should be dipping into this on a regular basis.”
SIMON COX
Technical SEO Consultant, Cox and Co. Creative
“This series continues to be the industry’s leading source of the most timely advice a marketer could ever want. The most forward-thinking SEO experts in the world come together once a year to create this invaluable collection of new knowledge that should never be passed up on!”
PAM AUNGST CRONIN
President and Founder, Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics
“2025 has been a sprint for the SEO industry, with AI reshaping how we understand visibility, relevance, and authority. SEOin2026 is not just another trends book; it’s a roadmap for what’s actually coming. I loved being part of it and seeing how experts around the world approach the same challenges from different angles.”
RAMONA JOITA
SEO Consultant and Founder
“David is good at drawing out the substance of a conversation. He will explore the topic and challenge assumptions, steer the conversation into an unexpected direction, and build on your ideas – making you think a bit deeper and sharper. Our recent conversation flew by as always, and as always – I’ve come out energised about the topic with more to think about.”
SUKHJINDER SINGH
Freelance SEO Consultant
96episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Invest in your skillset to advance your career – with Helen Pollitt
4d ago00:16:32Tap to summarizeOur final chapter begins with Helen Pollitt taking a look at the skills you need to personally build, to remain as relevant as possible in the SEO workforce for many years to come.Helen says: “Keep your SEO career on track.When it comes to your skillset, you need to stop thinking of ‘SEO versus GEO’. Instead, you need to understand how to apply your organic discoverability skills to each and every channel that you may need to – and how you can use AI to enhance those skills.”How much of your SEO time should you focus on developing those skills?“SEO is a career that is constantly changing, and not just in the sense that what works in SEO is changing. The tools and educational platforms that are available are changing as well.As a result of that, we really need to be investing a lot in our own careers and in our skill sets. I like to spend at least a little bit of time every day dipping into articles, watching webinars, or just making sure that there's no breaking news within the SEO industry that I'm missing.Treat it like an investment. Make sure that you are spending a significant portion of your time investing in those skills and keeping current with what's going on, without succumbing to the hype and fear-mongering that also seems to go around the space at the moment.”
Transcribe →
Be both discoverable and recognisable – with Ray Saddiq
5d ago00:16:23Tap to summarizeRay Saddiq shares that you need to be both recognisable and discoverable in 2026. Ray says: “If you want to seriously influence your consumer moving forward, brand alone is not going to cut it.We got into this mindset that brand was going to be key to driving SEO success, and it plays a huge part, but if you want to grow and stay top-of-mind, you need to drive demand and be discoverable. It's not just an awareness thing anymore. You need a combination of both. It's not enough to be known; you need to be found as well.That means building brand and category salience. You've got to own your category in search so that, moving forward – with LLMs, AI search, and social search – you are the brand that has salience to the category that you want to be known for. You’re the one most closely related to that category.This can’t just happen across Google. This needs to be across every searchable platform, because that's where intent starts now.”
Transcribe →
Most sites have high search visibility but zero AI citations - with Nickolass Jensen
6d ago00:24:37Tap to summarizeNickolass Jensen shares that most sites have high search visibility but zero AI citations, and the gap is diagnosable, measurable, and fixable with a structured three-layer audit. Talking points include... The three-layer diagnostic: Why sites fail AI visibility at the human layer (UX/trust), the search layer (authority/structure), or the AI layer (machine-readable proof) - and why fixing the wrong layer first wastes months. AI crawler visibility: Server log analysis reveals real-time and historical crawl patterns from GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot - most site owners have no idea which AI bots visit them, how often, or what they fetch. The gap between what AI crawlers index and what gets cited is where the work happens. GEO in 2026 is still mostly theoretical. The only practical path forward is tools that enforce structured execution. Rankings remain infrastructure, but the real competitive moat is whether an LLM cites you when a buyer asks. Read the full transcript of Nickolass's interview at https://majestic.com/seo-in-2026/additional-insights/nickolass-jensen
Transcribe →
Don’t trust the data – with Dixon Jones
1w ago00:15:01Tap to summarizeWhen you’re analysing data, you shouldn’t necessarily treat it at face value, shares Dixon Jones.Dixon says: “You need to think about what you are trying to measure.Buyer behaviour is changing dramatically with the advent of AI. Users are going to be sending out their little AI bots to ask questions on your website instead of going there themselves.If you're trying to buy a vacuum cleaner, you might ask, ‘What's the best vacuum cleaner for pet hair?’ Of course, Shark, Dyson, and Hoover all want to be in that list of recommendations, but it's the AI that's going to do the investigating.Potentially, an AI is going to go and find these brands, have a look at those brands, compare the information about pet hair, and then come back and provide an answer to the user that says, ‘X brand is slightly better than Y brand for this particular type of pet hair.’ At that point, the user doesn't need to click on any of the websites, but they will still buy a Shark, a Dyson, an Electrolux, or whatever it may be. They'll have made their decision.All of the metrics that we've been using for the last 20 years have measured the visitors that come to the website. That's been a key performance metric: has your visitor come from search, from pay-per-click, from direct, affiliate, etc.? That's been the mentality, but that doesn't really work in an AI-driven world.Firstly, that’s because AI is doing the search for you. Secondly, the AI doesn't typically trigger a visit on most web analytics systems. Most web analytics systems are JavaScript-based: the web page loads, it triggers a JavaScript call, and that will record the visitor. However, LLMs are really lazy when it comes to crawling the site. They just want the text. If the text doesn't appear, they can't be bothered to call the JavaScript.Often, it won't even come up as a click in your systems, so you're going to have to change the way you measure success.”
Transcribe →
Track more than basic keywords – with Andy Mollison
1w ago00:17:26Tap to summarizeSomething else that’s arguably changed a great deal in the past few years is keyword research. Andy Mollison advises on tracking more than basic keywords.Andy says: “In a world of generative AI, keyword tracking as we know it is no longer good enough.”Why is keyword tracking no longer good enough?“The way we track performance in SEO has historically been through organic sessions, organic revenue, organic lead generation, and that kind of thing. Obviously, that is still very relevant, but it's also been about keyword position tracking as well – tracking your individual single keywords, or long tail keywords, or whatever it is you're tracking.To an extent, that's still fine. However, you can’t ignore what’s going on. If you're not tracking outside of that, you're not tracking your performance as a whole. With AI overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT, people are searching in so many different ways now. Tracking keywords is not everything anymore.”
Transcribe →
Target AI search visibility with new metrics – with Marta Szmidt
2w ago00:14:41Tap to summarizeFollowing on from the previous ‘Testing’ chapter, Marta Szmidt begins chapter 19 with an introduction to newer metrics that you should be considering.Marta says: “You need to add new metrics for measuring SEO success and face the reality that search has changed.It's no longer the same traditional search engines we used to know, and you need to adapt to the reality. You need to combine classic traditional SEO metrics with new ones that target AI search visibility.”Which metrics aren't as relevant anymore, compared to the metrics that you have to focus on in 2026?“There has been a big shift in metrics. Clicks, organic traffic, and click-through rate have all been hit by what is happening with the shift in search behaviour, so they have become less relevant. They're not going to give you the picture in the same way they used to.We are seeing a big rise in zero-click search results. People find the answer very quickly now with AI tools, and even if you appear in an AI overview, that doesn't mean that the user will click on to your site. This shift means that we’re seeing a drop in clicks and organic traffic.In the same way, the rankings are not going to show us the whole picture because, according to some data, 36% of people in the US will be using AI for search by 2028. We need to adapt to it. That doesn't mean that the normal traditional search and engagement metrics are going to disappear, but we need to adapt and find the metrics that are relevant for us now, with AI search in the picture.”
Transcribe →
See the bigger picture through BigQuery – with Priya Verma
2w ago00:17:07Tap to summarizeThere’s one tool that Priya Verma finds particularly useful at combining data from various sources and conducting analysis – BigQuery.Priya says: “Gear up your SEO analysis through Google BigQuery.”Why BigQuery in particular?“SEO analysis in BigQuery is powerful because it lets you move beyond the existing tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, etc., and their limitations. It allows you to see the full picture at scale.By analysing millions of queries alongside other data, you uncover deeper patterns, user behaviour insights, and real opportunities to grow your traffic. We are focussing on BigQuery because of a subtle limitation of the most widely used tool for SEO, Search Console: you can only look at the top 1,000 keywords.For big businesses, that doesn't give a full picture. That's where tools like BigQuery come in. There are alternatives like Google Sheets plugins, where you can import 25,000 rows. However, if you are in an industry with thousands of keywords, that is still a huge limitation.That's where bulk export comes in. By connecting your Search Console to BigQuery, through the BigQuery API and the BigQuery Storage API, you can capture and store all your data at scale, without hitting those raw limits.This is where it really gets interesting, because the retention policy in Google Search Console is 16 months. After 16 months, the data is lost. In BigQuery, you can keep it for as long as you want.Then, when you take those insights and combine them with your analytics data – in GA4, for example – suddenly you're not just looking at what people are searching for, but how they behave when they land on your site. You can connect the dots between search demands, journeys, and conversions, and it makes the game more interesting.Not enough SEOs are aware of this. They just think of BigQuery as a database where you kind of store your data, which is true, but when you talk about the analysis of your historical data set, that's where it all changes.When you go to legal, they will ask you questions about retention and what you are storing. You need to spread that knowledge around to say that this is something that could be changed in BigQuery, and not just for SEO, but for things like analytics as well.”
Transcribe →
How to write the best listicles & find the best media to push them to be cited by GPT: Leo Poitevin
2w ago00:19:42Tap to summarizeLeo Poitevin shares how to write the best listicles & find the best media to push them to be cited by GPT. Talking points include: How do you define listicles? How have listicles changed? How do you structure a listicle for success in 2026? You say that GPT uses Google to find solutions via fan-out - what do you mean by that? You say that you should find the media that'll rank according to topic and competition - why, and how do you do that? How do you monitor success?
Transcribe →
Combine the powers of SEO and Google Ads – with Krzysztof Marzec
2w ago00:20:31Tap to summarizeKrzysztof Marzec emphasises the alignment between organic search and paid search – and the useful additional data that one can provide the other.Krzysztof says: “Use your data from Google Ads to improve SEO, and use data from SEO to improve your Google Ads campaigns.Also, mix it and blend it with AI, because now we have AI to improve it all.”If you're not actively using Google Ads, is it worthwhile having a small campaign up and running simply to use as data to power your SEO?“Yes. If you are not using Google Ads, you are losing a lot of data, and you are also losing clients. When you are generating organic traffic to your website, you should fight for a conversion rate. Using remarketing in Google or Meta Ads can improve your conversion rate because you simply have more attention from your users after they leave your website.We also see that, in long-term projects, when you are fighting for keywords in organic, you are losing the potential of getting new clients when you could use Google Ads to run for the same keywords and the same targets, and then gather some data.When you run a Google Ad campaign, you can check the Quality Score, the CTR, and whether it's a good ad, and you can check your landing page. You can learn whether your SEO campaign might fail, or it might be much harder to gain traction, visibility, and a high position in SERPs because there's something off with one of these parameters.With Google Ads, you can test your ideas. In SEO, you only have one landing page. It's extremely hard to do A/B testing on the same website because you want to use everything for the user base, and you don't want to risk anything. In Google Ads, it's very simple.
Transcribe →
Leverage your analytics platforms more effectively – with Dan Taylor
2w ago00:16:34Tap to summarizeDan Taylor feels that SEOs aren’t taking full advantage of the data that they already have.Dan says: “Start understanding your analytics platforms a lot better, and start leveraging them – not just for attribution and ROI, but to look at your organic strategies and the second-order effects of what those strategies are bringing to the business.”Have SEOs focussed less on analytics since the release of GA4?“We didn’t put our heads in the sand, but it is a very different model. We'd grown accustomed to something. We'd grown used to reporting, and then bringing in user events and other event types really mixed that up.A lot of opportunity was lost in terms of what could be set up with the analytics models itself, and it gave us greater scope. We probably did want to divert attention to data analysts and away from SEO in the actual setup of it, because it was like relearning a completely new skill.Realistically, you don't always get paid for analytics; it's seen as a given in terms of using those platforms, reporting, and understanding the data. It's a heavy investment into a skill set that you don't necessarily get a direct return on.”
Transcribe →