It’s been an eventful start to the year for AI search, and AI is moving quickly, but there’s a lot of hype and panic. When really search is just doing what it has for the last 30 years, it’s constantly self-updating.
At Search Engine Journal, as most other publishers have, we’ve experienced considerable drops from Google organic traffic. The last few years have been a challenging time for a business model that publishes information and news.
Although this has come to a climax over the last few months, we identified changes and vulnerabilities several years ago and have taken action in the last few years, which has put us in a better position today.
Last week, I spoke at the first SEJ live to talk about where we are now in 2026, what is working, and what we should be leaving behind.
From the talk, I’m going to share with you the three foundational things I think you need to be focusing on right now in 2026. Strategies you can apply which will help you as AI impacts our industry.
What You Need To Leave Behind
Before I talk about what you should be doing, let’s just make sure you have moved on from outdated modes of thinking that will hold you back.
If you’re still obsessively checking ranking on a daily basis, this is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Ranking is 2016; visibility is 2026.
The foundation of search has always been to know who your customer is, where they operate, and to use content to connect with them and encourage an action. That interaction always used to happen in the SERP, and that was our attention marketplace.
In 2026, our digitally competent audiences are now operating fluidly in a multimodal search journey before moving to their conclusion. All with an AI layer of visibility interwoven.
Even if you do get a number 1 ranking, it doesn’t mean you will get a click because the noise in a SERP can displace the visibility of a listing right off the first page.
Advanced Web Ranking found that when an AI Overview is expanded, the first organic result is pushed approximately 1,674 pixels down the page, effectively below the fold on most screens. And AI Overviews are just one layer. Between ads, carousels, map packs, and image results, a number one ranking can be virtually invisible.
I’ve experienced client product SERPs shift dramatically in the last few years to the point where we have given up chasing a vanity and put our efforts into being creative to connect with customers.
2026 is all about intent and action-based strategy.
Let’s do some actual marketing and find those users where they are and give them a reason to engage with you. And I think we are going to all be better marketers for it.
What You Need To Move Toward – Strategy That Can Survive AI
SEO technical excellence is fundamental to being discovered in LLMs. Far from SEO being dead, it has never been so important.
Alongside that, content is still the foundation of online visibility – without it, you have no visibility.
The following three strategies outlined are core factors that can offer stability through our transition to the new world of AI search.
1. AI-Proof Content
What I mean here is content that will not be cannibalized/synthesized by AI.
The paradox of visibility in LLMs is that you need consensus for trust to get attention, but you also need quality and difference for inclusion. For brands that have already been investing in conducting experiments and collating data, they are one step ahead.
I spoke to Grant Simmons on IMHO, and he described this as “golden knowledge“:
Your data.
Your experience.
Your opinion.
In practice, content that can avoid being cannibalized by AI summaries and actually feed the summary looks like:
- Video interviews and first-hand experience formats. These gain visibility across social, SERPs, and LLMs because they contain a human perspective that AI can’t generate from training data alone. It’s webinars, it’s IMHOs
- Original research and proprietary data. State of SEO and AI papers
- Opinionated commentary and expert analysis. Such as a roster of the best contributors that are offering their lived experience.
Anyone can use an LLM to generate a summary of the query “What is SEO?”
But being a brand and a community offering an experience of the best minds in the industry, live shows, unique data reports, breaking news, and offering our expert takes on why this matters and what you need to pay attention to. Being the curator and hub of everything in the industry makes it a destination and source feeding the LLMs.
Investing in this level of content strategy can elevate a brand to being channel agnostic and reduce your single point of failure from over-reliance on one channel. And that is what we aim to be at Search Engine Journal.
2. Value-Based Clicks
Different reports cite differing numbers, but what is consistent is that LLMs are referring traffic.
According to Chartbeat data reported by the Press Gazette, ChatGPT drives 0.02% of referrals to publishers. The Conductor 2026 benchmarks report says that LLM referral traffic is 1.08% of website traffic across 10 industries.
Right now, it might feel like a fraction of what we grew accustomed to from Google, but don’t forget, 1% of trillions of searches is still a considerable market of opportunity.
To capitalize on this is to consider what we can offer to encourage the clicks from the LLM to our brand site. Ask yourself:
- Why is someone clicking on a link in an LLM?
- Why would someone want to read more than the AI summary?
- Or, why would someone want to know more about my brand/product or service.
Pre-carousels, featured snippets, and AI summaries, it was far easier to gain a click from ranking highly on a SERP. When you’re one of only 10 options, you’re going to get the test click that checks out if you are the page they are looking for.
But, much like it was a far more difficult job to retain that click, if you have something of value that connects with the user, you can still get the click from a citation or card in LLMs or SERP AI summaries.
Featured snippets may have reduced click-through rate, but they didn’t kill it. Visibility layers can be opportunities, and SEOs worked hard to get #0 because it was a way to jump up the SERP to a top position.
What can drive a click in an AI search environment:
- Depth the summary can’t contain, case studies, implementation detail, nuance that offers a reason to want more.
- Credibility and trust, according to Amsive, branded queries with AI Overviews actually see an 18% CTR increase.
- Actionable assets, offering resources where the intent cannot be satisfied by a summary.
If you can distinguish the difference between instant answer traffic and build content for the people who don’t want the summary or the quick answer, then your brand can become valuable to users.
3. SERP Opportunities Resistant To AI
Despite the concern that AI is going to kill Google, the search engine is not going anywhere.
Where Google has the edge in the race against LLMs is years of understanding their user and understanding how to deliver answers to queries to satisfy the consumer. They have an established audience and technology infrastructure. And a LOT of data.
Regardless of the stampede towards LLMs and the AI hype cycle, there is still a lot of opportunity to be had from the search engine.
Brightedge data says that just over half of queries have AIOs, and Conductor reports that just over one quarter of analyzed searches triggered an AIO (21.9 million unique Google searches).
This indicates that anything between half and three-quarters of SERPs do not have an AI overview. And this means, there are a lot of searches where intent will be satisfied by clicking on a page. Content that targets these queries and drives a specific action sidesteps the AIO problem entirely.
Think about what is resistant to LLMs:
- News – breaking news that is happening too quickly for LLMs.
- Branded – lean into trust and build a community that actively searches for you.
- Downloads – my favorite conversion tool that has worked for years.
My belief is that AIO might take away traffic volume, but not the traffic of value.
Build Consensus With Your Website As A Hub
Finally, if there was one tip I would offer to everyone that could have the most impact, this would be “consensus.”
LLMs generate responses based on statistical patterns across their training and grounding data, so when a brand or message appears consistently across many sources, it is more likely to surface in AI answers. Ahrefs found that branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with appearing in AI conversations, stronger than any other factor tested. If you can maintain consistent messaging across multiple channels, you are in the best position to be featured.
Alongside this, a study from the University of Toronto found that LLMs prefer ‘earned media’ from trusted sources that can offer more authority than posting on your own site.
Posting and layering your content across channels such as Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, or any industry publications relevant to your industry, will help to build the messaging associated with your brand and help with inclusion in LLMs.
Make your website into the hub that connects to all the channels online where you are active and contributing, and don’t be afraid to put some of your best content on other channels to get visibility.
The 3 Changes We Made At Search Engine Journal
The biggest mistake publishers made in Q1 wasn’t AI. It was treating AI as something happening to them instead of something they can navigate strategically.
At Search Engine Journal, we’ve made three specific changes in response:
- We shifted editorial toward experience-first formats with interviews, analysis, and original research.
- We moved from programmatic revenue to asset-based sponsorship.
- We made growing a direct audience our top metric priority, so that we own our own audience.
If you’re still using the same tactics you have been applying to SEO since 2020, then you need to reconsider what your audience wants, where they operate, and who your competitors are.
SEO in 2026 includes visibility in all discovery engines. To remain relevant, be sure you are part of the conversations.
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Featured Image: Shelley Walsh/Search Engine Journal
