SEO Predictions and expectations of +20 SEO specialists for 2026

What are the predictions and expectations of the SEO community for 2026? This was a question that I asked to many SEOs who attended last week the Google Search Central event in Zurich, and I got very, very interesting, including the ones of John Mueller and Barry Schwartz. Let's go through them.

My top expectation for the 2026 year is that more publishers will continue to see negative declines in Google Search.

My prediction for 2026 is going back to the fundamentals and going back to your audience. One of the things that people forget is ultimately we're there for our customers. And the more you know about your customers and their needs and their objective, where LLMs actually are really handy in helping you do that, the better your results are going to be. So rather than chasing the shiny new thing that's coming along, You need to think about your audience and your fundamentals.

My prediction for SEO in 2026 is avoid shiny toy syndrome. Focus on the SEO fundamentals. Keep an eye on AI, but depending on where you are as a business, focus on the SEO fundamentals. Don't get sucked into all the cool tools and pay a fortune. Focus on the SEO fundamentals and what will move the needle and achieve your goals for your business.

So my prediction for search in 2026 is attribution. It's going to change. A lot of the user journey is going to take place offsite in LLMs and other AI platforms. So that's something I think brands need to think about and look for ways to get around that and be comfortable with less traffic coming to their sites potentially.

My expectation on what is going to happen in SEO in 2026 and AI search is I think that people are going to continue using AI search. more deeply and more frequently for informational queries only. I think that people will push themselves over to Amazon more frequently in order to do retail queries, and I think Google will lose a little bit of volume, but not much at all. I really think Google will stay the dominant player for finding things, and with the links in the search results— or sorry, the AI results— We will see more clicks from AI into search or AI results links, and we will see that people actually come from those as well as from Google. So it will become an important channel, but never as important as Google. I'm sorry.

My SEO prediction for 2026 is that half of the AI trackers will die.

My SEO prediction is that in 2026, the humans become more important than AI. As companies start realizing that AI has ruined a lot of marketing and they want to bring the humans back in who understand how to sell to other humans, and the value of SEO and the value of SEO strategists will skyrocket. So I am excited to see this happen in 2026. I'm excited for the future of SEO, and I'm excited to see how these brilliant marketers bring AI in as a tool instead of a solution.

My SEO prediction for 2026 is that I think that content creators will be more important than today, and we will use them and we will incorporate them in all the content strategies that we will work together.

So my SEO expectation for 2026 would be that there will be more AI involvement in the search results, both on the algorithmic side as well as on the UX side. And that can be a challenge and an opportunity for especially for SEO people, I guess, because the challenge is to try to figure out what makes AI different from regular search results and what SEOs need to do different in order to optimize for that. It's also a neat challenge because if you manage to keep up with everything, then you have the opportunity to stand out versus more general marketers that can't really be on top of SEO and everything else and might be left behind.

So my SEO prediction for 2026 is people will have to build more business cases. I think there's so many new things around. There's AI search, there's people having difficulties to prioritize. And I think the more you actually try to build a real case behind it, the easier it is for you to get anything prioritized with your development teams. And so if you don't build these cases, you will end up just building a lot of things out there that have no impact. And by the end of the year, you will think you have done a lot of work, but ultimately there's no impact on the business.

My SEO prediction for 2026 is that Google Overviews and the zero-click searches will dominate SERPs. Keyword tracking tools will all die.

So I would say that my SEO prediction, also based on what I just saw, is that schema markup and schema markup that really gives the user an insight on how shipping is going to happen is going to be quite important. If you get that right, you have a competitive edge over other market participants. And I think implementing that and getting that whole line of shipping right is going to be quite important next year.

When we talk about a prediction, I think that we should think about the past and look what really happened there. And related to the SEO and AI searches, I believe that the most important thing is related to semantics, about the entities, about to recognize what really users search. And of course, the next big thing is how to combine the data related to GA4, GSC, and other tools related to the world of AI and SEO.

All right.

My SEO prediction for next year. Is there are going to be some updates in Google Search, and some of them you will like, and maybe some of them you won't, but they're going to be updates and they will happen.

Schema is actually going to be huge, huge, huge, huge again across everywhere next year, or maybe next year and onwards, because they've revealed here that there's going to be additional, like, use of schema on shopping. But it's the fact that schema adds structure in an unstructured mess, which is obviously LLMs and so forth. So start to reimplement schema as much as you possibly can. Mark up all the things.

My SEO prediction for 2026 is that people are going to finally start looking at the actual traffic. So for years, a lot of us as SEOs have wanted more traffic, more traffic, or at least the clients have, but it wasn't really traffic that converted. I think some people are finally— which they should have done 15 years ago— but some people are finally going, wow, just traffic for the sake of traffic isn't exactly what we want. You know, 10,000 people visiting our blog that don't convert to anything isn't really worth our time. And so I think it's going to continue where people are going to look at some of the content and some of the things they're doing and go, what is the ROI? What are we really getting? Are we just getting traffic for the sake of traffic, or is it actually something that converts?

Okay, my top SEO prediction for next year, I think nothing is going to change that much. We will see shifts maybe in the search behavior that people are shifting away from the classic Google search even more to ChatGPT. But if you're asking, or if you're asking me if there's something majorly changing in how we need to do SEO, I would say no, just continue the work you're doing.

All right. So my top trend for 2026, I think, is going to be a lot of focus on structuring your data and your content. So that the LLMs and search engines are using as few tokens as possible to get the best message possible. So that's going to be a lot of removing all the digital jazz hands that we've been building into our websites because they're pretty and people like them, because the people aren't going to be experiencing the website as much as I think the machines will be. I think the portal that people are going to be experiencing your content in is not necessarily going to be your website, and we need to start adjusting to accommodate that. So that's what I think is going to happen in 2026.

My prediction for next year is— it's a tough one, it's a hard one, but I'm going to say it. I think SEO is dead next year, and, uh, geo is the new SEO. But in the end, just focus on fixing problems that users have, and then You will increase in rankings and in traffic and more conversions, more money, more margins. Happy days.

Hey everyone, my SEO prediction is that it's going to remain not just an SEO marketing niche, but also the naming convention. As you know, Dan Petrovic, we are constantly bombarding people about AIO, GEO, whatever. It's still SEO. It's SEO with AI, you know, parts and So we are staying, we are here, we're not going to go anywhere. Let's go.

To wrap up, I want to share my own SEO prediction, and it is that we are not going to see the AI mode as a default experience instead of the traditional search results in Google. Instead, what we are going to see is a blend of the Web Guide format. In case you haven't tested it yet, go and take a look at the experiment that is going on right now. Google has also released it even further to be tested for more queries as well. And I believe that it provides a much better experience in a way that will better satisfy many more search intents and needs of users and can be also blended with the AI overviews at the top whenever needed. What are your own predictions and expectations? Go and leave them in the comments and/or in the SEO FOMO survey that I am doing at the moment. I would love to hear your thoughts. Last but not least, I want to thank Similarweb, who is an SEO FOMO 2 London Read and Crawling Mondays sponsor and who are also sponsoring this video. Thank you very much. Until the next one, and don't forget to subscribe to avoid missing out.