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2024 introduced AI in search, but 2025 is the year we started to live with this new experiment. The complete rollout of AI Overviews across almost every country for all users by the start of 2025 significantly shifted the way users interact with search engines.
While it certainly wasn't the ‘end of search’ that some headlines predicted, it did change the game when it comes to organic traffic. The standard ten blue links were pushed further down the page once again, and for informational queries like quick definitions or simple yes or no answers, click-through rates declined a considerable amount.
Google’s addition of 'Experience' to its E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) back in 2022 was a clue as to how things would work going forward, and now experience is more important than ever.
This year, we saw that content clearly written by humans, featuring personal insights or unique data which couldn’t have been scraped together by an LLM, came out on top. Meanwhile, generic content aggregators and mass-produced articles saw a decline in visibility.
As we move into 2026, the industry seems to be settling into things. Like with any big change, the initial panic did subside and people are starting to adapt. However, there’s still plenty on the horizon, and so with 2025 drawing to a close, we thought we’d share our predictions for SEO over the next year.
The concept of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) may well be a bit of a buzzword, but it’s clear that there’s something in it.
With AI providing direct answers at the top of the results page, the goal for certain types of content will probably shift. Rather than striving solely for a website visit, which is harder to get, the objective becomes being the source cited in that AI answer. This may be less valuable, but with competition in the SERPs ever increasing, we might just have to take what we can get.
This means a little extra thought in how we format content. In 2026, we expect to see pages structured more logically for machine reading. This means using clear, concise definitions at the start of articles, utilising bullet points for steps, and presenting data in clean HTML tables. This makes it easier for an LLM to understand because it shows the hierarchy and relationships within it, and the easier it is for a bot to read and understand your answer, the more likely you are to be featured as the primary source.
For the last year, AI search results have been largely organic. In 2026, we expect that the most-used LLMs will begin to open up their chat windows to advertisers. The pattern has been the same for a quarter of a century now - get big and then offer PPC space.
The LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude can’t continue to run on subscription fees alone. We anticipate the introduction of things like sponsored sources and featured products within AI-generated answers to make up for the losses.
For example, if a user asks for ‘best gifts for boyfriends’, then AI might list three organic recommendations. Next year, we may see a fourth recommendation paid for by a brand, integrated almost seamlessly into the conversational response.
For marketers, this introduces a new paid channel that sits somewhere between Search and Display. It will likely also require a different approach to copywriting, less about 'buy now' headlines that would capture a user’s attention on-page, and more about positioning your product as the answer to a particular problem that might come up in conversation.
The industry has been moving away from strict keyword matching for a while now, but 2026 could well see ‘Entity SEO’ become the dominant model. Again, this is another buzzword and not necessarily a new kind of SEO, but search engines are now pretty good at understanding a brand or person, as an ‘entity’. This means Google relies less on seeing the exact phrase and more on understanding who you are and whether the wider web associates you with it.
This shifts the focus back toward more traditional PR, digital PR, and brand management. Gaining mentions in relevant industry publications (even without that valuable dofollow link), helps reinforce your entity’s authority. A consistent presence across the web will carry more weight than ever before.
With the rise of zero-click searches, traditional traffic metrics probably won’t tell the whole story in 2026. If a user finds your opening hours, pricing, or product summary directly in the search results, they have been served by your brand without ever visiting your site. The headache now, and into 2026, will be how this gets attributed.
We expect to see marketers looking for new ways to measure share of voice in the whole search market rather than just organic sessions. This involves tracking how often your brand appears in things like AI summaries and featured snippets. Visibility contributes heavily to brand recall, even if it doesn't immediately register as a session in Google Analytics. And for physical stores and service providers, it’s even more likely that a sale could be made in-person that started online, without the customer ever having visited the website.
The fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed. Technical health, high quality and relevant content, and external authority are all crucial. However, the application of these elements is changing.
Success in 2026 won't come from chasing algorithm updates or trying to trick the system. It will come from ensuring your content is technically accessible to crawlers of all types (and genuinely useful to the humans that read it), embracing at least some of the change that AI has brought, and thinking a little more about the value of old-school PR.
If you’d like help from the experts in 2026, get in touch with us today. We can help you stay on top of the ever changing SEO landscape.
