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
110episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Maintain traffic through local SEO – with Cathryn Stormont
May 1400:14:06Tap to summarizeCathryn Stormont shares that good local SEO can still provide a lot of traffic.Cathryn says: “Focus on local SEO.With AI overviews and AI Mode dominating the SERPs, it's really important to focus on local SEO to try and maintain a certain level of traffic volume.”Is this more relevant for certain types of businesses?“There are businesses where their content is very much informational, like solicitors or accountants, where their blog content is being picked up by AI overviews dominating that space, which means their traffic volumes are starting to decrease. We're seeing that in lots of different sectors.However, they have a local edge. They have a local office, and it's those local searches where people are looking for ‘solicitors in Brighton’, where the AI overviews are not being shown as much. It’s typically around 40% for those versus about 90% for informational-led content.There's an opportunity to try and maximise that element, your local SEO, to try and get more traffic and keep that traffic up as much as you can.”
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Focus your AEO strategy on showing up in Dark AI conversations - Tom Rudnai
May 1300:16:13Tap to summarizeTom Rudnai says that instead of chasing citations, focus your AEO strategy on showing up in Dark AI conversations where problems are framed. Talking points include: What are Dark AI conversations? How do AI responses change at different stages of the buyer journey? Why are citations is a bad north star metric? How should SEOs measure AI performance? What analytics to use? What content performs best in AI? How do you research what content to write? - Key trends: intent-matching, convergence - What is "Dark AI"? - How to measure AI performance and why citations is a bad north star metric
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Stand out in any region through better personalisation – with Gemma Fontané
May 1200:15:24Tap to summarizeGemma Fontané recommends that personalisation is key when it comes to international SEO success.Gemma says: “Focus on personalisation, adapting your content in each language and across different formats, to really build your brand in each region.These actions will allow you to stand out from your competition, demonstrate authority and expertise, compete in multilingual markets, and stay visible in the era of generative AI.”How do you go about personalising content?“First of all, personalising content is very important nowadays because search engines today are rewarding depth, expertise, and true relevance, in order to stand out.In 2026, with AI-generated content everywhere, what will really make the difference is cultural, linguistic, and format-specific personalisation, if you really want to differentiate your brand.How can you do that? There are two different things that you can do. If you want to start your strategy in a newer market or you are already working in that region, you can do an EEAT analysis to analyse which channels will allow you to show expertise, experience, trust, and authority. Also, you can analyse the main experts to see how people show trustworthiness through different formats.In order to personalise your content, you can also conduct multilingual keyword research in each market. This will not only help you know what people are looking for, related to your product or service, but also understand how people are looking for your product in each market. This will help you identify the best strategy related to the format.For example, you might find that people are looking for images related to your product, a step-by-step guide, or maybe a video that will help them to understand, know, or choose to purchase your product.”
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Treat individual markets individually – with Lau Miguez
May 1100:15:35Tap to summarizeGlobal SEO isn’t about treating every market the same. As Lau Míguez puts it, ‘European markets demand full commitment and strong EEAT signals — well-positioned experts are now essential for success,’ and that expectation has only grown over the past few years.Lau says: “What’s really shifted is how demanding each market has become. Working closely with Spain, and across international campaigns, I’ve seen clients move away from the idea of ‘Europe’ as one block. A few still ask for LATAM as a region, but no one says, ‘Can you do Europe?’ anymore.The penny has finally dropped: each country behaves differently. If you want results, you have to show genuine expertise, authority, and brand trust – not generic international presence.”Is using hreflang and a direct translation of content not enough anymore?“If you’re translating a piece that was originally written for the US, what you end up with is a perfectly translated article about a completely different reality. It will still talk about states instead of regions or cities, and even if you mention Spain once or twice, you might pick up a couple of links – but you’re not building any real trust.Nothing in that content shows an understanding of the Spanish audience or what’s actually relevant to them.That’s why localisation matters. If you’re talking about the job market, and Spain is currently debating a 37-hour working week, include it. Reflect what’s happening in that country.When you speak to the concerns and conversations happening locally, the audience feels it — and so do journalists. That’s why localising your content and your strategy has become more important than ever.”
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Avoid client-side routing and rendering – with Simone De Palma
May 800:19:19Tap to summarizeSimone De Palma warns that client-side routing and rendering can be problematic for rankings.Simone says: “Align with marketing goals, and make sure to challenge anything that is client-side routed or client-side rendered, especially within React web-based apps.”What do the terms client-side routed and client-side rendered mean, and what impact does that have on SEO?“To start with, I will just make sure that everyone is familiar with routing and exactly what that is. Routing essentially means how the website itself is able to create a URL path that allows users to change pages, from one page template to another.This routing element can be a bit problematic for SEO when it happens exclusively on the client side, causing the generation of a new URL path when you click a link, which only happens within the browser.To give you an example, imagine that you land on a category page with plenty of filters to refine your customer journey. You can toggle a filter on or off, or click on a link, but the URL doesn't change. That means that no server request is being produced, which in turn means that both search engines and users will not have any idea that new content has been loaded. This is client-side routing, and it may cause a few issues with crawling and indexation.Client-side rendering can be a blocker as well. While client-side routing can affect the crawling, the discovery of search engines, and indexation, client-side rendering impacts the rendering (as it says in the title).This is particularly a problem if we're talking about web apps based on React. React is basically a pre-packaged JavaScript library, which makes it quite difficult for even the most seasoned web developers to tweak it because it's pre-configured. Unfortunately for SEO, React is built on the client side by default, so it has client-side routing and rendering by default.If you're landing on that same category page with lots of filters, it will take you some time for React to gear up the page template on the first load, because during this initial load, React will execute JavaScript in the browser, causing the browser's main thread to overload. Not only will this result in a slower initial page load time, but more importantly, it will be hard for search engines like Google to render all the content from the page.
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Put your best foot forward with consistent data – with Kaspar Szymanski
May 700:17:28Tap to summarizeOne of the ways that AI engines struggle with determining a brand’s topical relevance and authority is when they encounter inconsistent data, highlights Kaspar Szymanski.Kaspar says: “My tip is about data consistency, which is a topic that is very close to my heart.”How do you ensure data consistency in 2026?“Some people may not consider this to be the most innovative or popular concept, and it’s certainly not a buzzword making the rounds nowadays.However, data consistency differentiates the companies and brands that are really successful in competitive environments from those that try to catch onto the latest buzzword or bandwagon, promising a silver bullet in an industry where silver bullets are few and far between.Data consistency is ensured when we make sure that all the data points towards the desired landing pages that we wish to be indexed, reindexed, and ranked within Google.It's important to remind ourselves that Google is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, the dominant force in the industry. Particularly for those YMYL companies and companies that deal in retail, with Q4 coming up, it's not too late to work on that.For these companies, it is most important that their websites, their stock, and their products get crawled and re-crawled on a regular basis, so they can put their best foot forward in order to generate relevant converting traffic – more than anything else.”
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SEO is not dying, but bad SEO is - Krešimir Ćorluka
May 600:17:40Tap to summarizeKrešimir Ćorluka shares that SEO is not dying, but bad SEO most certainly is. Talking points include: What is bad SEO? What doesn’t work anymore? What fundamentals work now? Where are SEOs confused with what works now? How do you learn and stay on top of what works now? How do you futureproof your future success? A lot of the stuff the average SEO has been doing has had the wrong fundamentals. Technical SEO, backlinking and good content is more important than ever. But, most SEOs weren't doing these things right so now they're confused with what LLMs expect of us. This stuff works and jumping on every new technique is killing your SEO gains, especially like the stuff we've seen with listicles, Reddit SEO, trying to manipulate Quora etc. Do the fundamentals right and only then can we go on to experimenting.
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Show AI crawlers what you want them to see – with Arnout Hellemans
May 500:14:58Tap to summarizeArnout Hellemans advises that you don’t have to provide AI crawlers with full access to all of your content.Arnout says: “People really need to look at their technical setup.With that, I mean the rendered version versus the raw HTML – especially with a lot of AI crawlers not rendering yet, and also because I've seen a lot of discrepancies in that area.”Is the rendered version typically quite different for different search engines?“As with a lot of things in SEO, it depends.Sometimes, when websites are built using JavaScript frameworks, the content is actually different in the raw HTML versus the rendered HTML.Titles might be different. There might not be schema markup, there might be different headings, etc., because those can be changed by the execution of JavaScript.That can severely impact the discoverability of your page.”
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Strengthen your foundations with technical SEO and user experience – with Iva Jovanovic
May 400:18:47Tap to summarizeOne of the ways that you can enhance your website foundation is to combine high technical SEO standards with great user experience, shares Iva Jovanovic. Iva says: “Technical SEO and user experience will remain the foundation for websites, even when optimizing for AI chatbots.”Why do AI chatbots like user experience?“To start with, crawlability has been a topic in SEO for years and years. It's now gaining even more importance because of the way that chatbots crawl websites. They crawl a bit differently.We're used to Googlebot and other search engine bots adapting to what the websites are serving, and adapting to crawling them. Chatbots are not exactly the same. A lot of studies and research confirm that many of the chatbots do not crawl JavaScript, for example. So, a lot of websites that have been using JavaScript, that Googlebot has been able to crawl, are now not going to be as accessible to chatbots. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and even Perplexity don't crawl JavaScript.Aside from that, the bots crawl websites a little more simply, and it's really important to structure your website properly for that, so that the chatbots can access your link. Also, make sure all the links are there, avoid having 404s and redirects, have a pure structure of the website, pure links, and make sure the link juice is going on.Even before, websites that used JavaScript were not rendered as much. A long time ago, using JavaScript, you could hide links and do spammy stuff. Later on, Googlebot developed a way to make sure your JavaScript is crawled properly, and Martin Splitt has talked about it many times.However, it is frustrating for developers who are used to using JavaScript in frameworks like React and Vue to create their websites, especially in SaaS businesses. Now, the way that the bots will render it is a bit different. It's going to be a bit difficult for developers and SEOs to find common ground in that.”
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Don’t accept a janky website – with Jono Alderson
May 100:17:02Tap to summarizeTo commence our technical SEO discussion, Jono Alderson advises against settling for an average website.Jono says: “Stop accepting technical mediocrity.”What does mediocrity look like in the world of technical SEO?“We all know it, and we see it all the time. We have accepted that it's normal for websites to be rubbish.Whether they're the ones we work on, our clients’, or the ones we browse, things are slow, we hit 404 errors, there's a bunch of JavaScript loading so that when you click the thing, it doesn't respond quickly, stuff doesn't quite show on screen properly, the font's too small, things are ugly, it takes four minutes for something to add to the cart, and then the cart was empty all along.Somehow, we're all okay with this. It's so normal for all of these interactions to be this bad that we just get on with it – and, for the most part, Google has coped with that and made the most of the web being janky, broken, and poorly built.However, as we enter the age of AI, the rules change slightly because those systems aren't as good at unpicking that mess. They’re simply not as incentivised to. When you look at their commercial, political, and product roadmaps, and the way they interact with websites, it's a very different machine. They are much less tolerant of faults, errors, omissions, and gaps – and they won't put in the same resources that Google has to wade through that.We all feel how janky the web is, and see it all the time, and we just kind of accept it. It's nice to take a step back and say, actually, this isn't good enough. It's not how it should be.”
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