Aleyda Solis interviews 12 SEO experts on their top 2026 priorities. They discuss controlling data feeds for Google and OpenAI, treating e-commerce packaging as a visual landing page for machine vision, using clickstream data to track AI visibility, and reinforcing internal linking as a fundamental.
Chapters
What are the top tips to win SEO in 2026? I asked this question to many of the SEOs who attended the Googler Central event last week in Zurich, and these are the answers. Let's go through them.
My SEO tip for 2026 is to get yourself and your website and your business ready for the agentic web. If you've been paying attention in 2025, you will see that we've seen the agentic commerce protocol the A2A protocol, the Agentics payment protocol, all of these things lining up during 2025. And in 2026, I think we're going to see all of those things really come to bear for the wider web.
My SEO tip is to master your feeds and optimize all the data that we're passing directly into companies like Google and OpenAI. So our opportunity to give concrete facts and clear instruction to those systems and hopefully protect ourselves from generative results that could distort or wrongly reference us. So that's what I say. Take control of your feeds, find out which teams run them, which teams build them, and get them to start including your optimization efforts into 2026.
Invest heavily in proprietary data so that LLMs can use that data and then soak it up. Then, you know, you can deny them access in the future, um, and then make them pay for it. Uh, because the way the, the web is going. is that it's going to be more costly to build content and LLMs are going to run out of content to consume. So the more proprietary data you have, the higher the chance that you'll be able to broker deals with these, these companies.
So I have 3 SEO tips for 2026. Number 1, if you're in e-commerce, your packaging is now your landing page because with machine vision, you better present that correctly. Customers are taking photos and asking questions. Tip number 2, Get familiar with clickstream data because if you're tracking prompts and trying to figure out your AI visibility, you have to confront your ideal prompts with reality and what people do, and that's with clickstream, okay? And number 3 is get comfortable with the technical side of branding. Handle that stuff that the branding department won't, like hallucination containment. What do you do when there's brand drift where features are made up? Who handles that? who handles the bots and checking, hey, is this bot coming to train or answer a user question? That's on you now.
My SEO tip is don't forget about internal linking.
Optimize your internal linking and not just backlinks.
My tip for next year is of course focus on indexation because in the future you might have some issues with it because of all that spammy content out there. Hi everyone. My SEO tip for next year is focus on the tactics, on what always worked. We have just heard it at Google Search Central, like, just do SEO, keep doing SEO, and you will be ranking in AI as well. And I really, really hope to have a Google Search Console for AI overview. So please, Google, just do it.
My SEO tip for 2026 is to actually bite the bullet and face your Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics data head-on. Organic is facing a lot of issues with loss of clicks and and lots of sessions and the journey's becoming more multimodal. So you really want to be drilling down into advertising reports and looking at how much value a new-to-brand touchpoint's organic is driving to your website and then which channels are then taking the preference through last click. It's— GA4's not the greatest, we all dislike it, but it's time to actually start doing that and telling better data stories to stakeholders and to C-level.
Hi guys, I'm here to tell you my SEO tip for 2026 is that SEO is gonna be more exciting than it's ever been. We've got more surfaces and and more data to find out what users really want. So get smart, use it, long live SEO.
My tip for 2026, I think SEOs will start putting more emphasis on understanding their audience. So what I'll— what I believe is going to happen is that there's going to be more attention paid to like media consumption. So if you think of who your audience are and you know who they are, where they live and what they do in a day. So for example, who you wake up, you have breakfast, what websites are you reading, what social media platforms are you going on, and then maybe you get in your car or you go on the tube to the office, then what podcasts you're listening to. So if you imagine that process throughout the day, I think more attention is going to be paid to who the audience is and where they're going to consume media, and then they're gonna factor that into how to reach those people through different, different forms of content, and then optimize for that accordingly. And then that's gonna factor into understanding this, this messy middle, which ultimately helps us with, uh, optimizing for things like AI overviews and large language models.
So my top SEO tip for 2026 is, and guess what it is? Schema. It's always been schema. Schema. But next year, I think as LLMs get a bit more sophisticated with understanding what's under the hood in code, they'll want to save a bit on token optimization. They'll want to save those tokens and understand what an entity is and what the meaning of something is in as much less time as possible. And I think by doing that, that's where schema comes in. It tells you what the entity is, tells you what the context is, and then it can read the format and the structure of the content on it.
To wrap up, I want to share my own SEO tip for 2026, and it is to every time that you do anything, create content, optimize content, enable a new section, take actions to improve the indexability, crawlability, rendering of your content, anything, is to ask if this aligns with your brand. Is this on brand? Because realistically, we need to be much more mindful on what we invest our efforts on. It's not about stopping to invest on informational top of the funnel. Content? No, it's making sure that that informational top-of-the-funnel content is actually meaningful to our brand, is very well connected with our product offering or service offering. That's the key here. And it should be a question that should be asked not only when you create new content or optimize content for that matter, but whenever you do anything to deliver an experience to the user that should be aligned to the way that you want to be recognized. And This also can be very well extrapolated and not only on what you do on page, but with the alignment of your marketing efforts elsewhere as well. Digital PR, community management. We can see how a lot of the answers from LLMs, citations are coming from these external sources. So again, not only brand building, but brand optimization, entity optimization, alignment from a topical standpoint to create and optimize content in a way that is very well connected. Connected with your topical expertise should be a must and is my tip for next year. If you want to keep up with the latest in SEO, don't miss out and remember to subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter. 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.
