A Complete Guide to AI SEO in 2026 (AEO, GEO, LLMO)

If you're just learning SEO, you picked the perfect time because the game has changed more this year than it has in the past 10 years. And that's to your advantage. People are finding answers on ChatGPT, Reddit, and YouTube rather than just Google. Google is rewriting search with AI overviews, and new tools now exist that can do 80% of the work without you. This is your no-fluff beginner's guide to what actually works this year. SEO used to be about optimizing for Google. 15 years ago, the only organic game in town was very much Google. There was no YouTube, there was no Instagram. All of these platforms either didn't exist or they were very nascent. Nowadays, you have to think about optimizing for YouTube. That's the second largest search engine in the world. You have to think about Amazon if you are optimizing for shoppers. If you're optimizing for different communities, you're optimizing for Reddit. The main thing to think about is that if you're only focusing on Google, you are missing out. Now, although SEO is changing rapidly, it still has 3 essential building blocks that stay still hold true today. These have been the building blocks for a long time, but it's how you use them across different platforms like Google, YouTube, and Amazon that makes the difference today. So let's start with how you can use content to rank on any platform. Winning this year when it comes to SEO means targeting long-tail niche queries with real intent. I'm going to give you a couple examples of that. Instead of optimizing for, let's say, Salesforce as a keyword, you might be thinking about optimizing for keywords such as how to integrate NetSuite with Salesforce. Or instead of red shoes, you might be optimizing for what are the best red shoes designs for this year. And so anything that has, let's say, 4+ keywords in it, these are longer tail niche queries that have real intent. And when people are searching for these keywords, they are often lower competition and lower volume, but they have higher intent, which means that the conversion rates for these keywords, the ability to convert these into customers or convert them into email subscribers is a lot higher. What that means is because search is getting a lot more competitive nowadays, what's happening is because of AI overviews, the impressions for websites, that's actually going up, but the number of clicks is going down. And I actually just spoke to to a CEO of an enterprise SEO company earlier this week. And he said they have a lot of data where it shows that your graph now, when you look at your analytics, it looks like a jaw. Your impressions are going up, but your clicks are going down. So you have to optimize for wherever you can find high intent. You're going to have a much easier time of optimizing for those because the game of website traffic is continuing to change. So how do you go about doing that? What you can actually do is use products out there like ChatGPT or Manus AI, and these can help you find these long tail keywords. And you can just give a couple examples of high intent long tail keywords that you want to optimize for. And talk a little bit about your business. And then what will happen is it'll spit out 50 or 100 of these, and then you can pick the ones that you like, and then you can focus on creating the content for these long-tail, high-intent keywords. Okay, so we briefly touched upon large language models such as ChatGPT, which help you generate keyword ideas, analyze transcripts, and refine your SEO strategy quickly. What you can do is, yes, you can create those high-intent long-tail keywords, but it can actually even create blog posts based on whatever your writer guidelines are. And what I mean by that is your writer guidelines are your way, your style of creating content. You can actually have LLMs now scan your blog content on your site and it will figure out what the writer guidelines are. So for example, typically our blog posts are around 1,500 to 2,000 words and they're backed with a lot of links, a lot of statistics, a lot of tables. And an LLM was able to figure that out. And after it figured it out, it was able to create high quality blog posts, extremely high quality blog posts, basically 95 to 99% there. And it was able to do 21 of these in a span of 30 minutes. So you have a lot more power in your hands now as an SEO because you have an AI assistant that is infinitely patient, that will help you figure out what you should be doing next with your strategy and then help you execute on that strategy. All right. So we touched upon some of the more advanced things, but I do need to talk about some of the basics here. We talked about citations. The currency when it comes to SEO, it's still content and links even this year. And so content and links, what does that mean? That means you have to create very high quality content and you have to have other sites linking to you to prove that your site deserves to rank in the search engines. So citations can mean links. Citations can mean from a local SEO standpoint, it can be the people that are giving you reviews. There's a lot of different citations across the internet. So we talk about content, citations, and double E-A-T. What that means is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And because there's so many people creating content on the internet now, this is going to continue to be more important. And so me creating this YouTube right now, it does show me sharing experiences. So stories, for example, there is the expertise, there's authoritativeness, and there's a trustworthiness. Can you trust this person, right? Even if we're talking about expanding beyond organic SEO, that's still going to carry over into other algorithms because it just makes sense. At the end of the day. So again, EEAT— you have citations and you have content, and that's still very much going to play, but that's going to evolve over time. So those building blocks, keep those in mind, because whatever game you decide to play when it comes to search everywhere optimization, these will always be— should always be in the back of your mind. All right, so now that I gave you the building blocks, I want to go more into the new toolkit. These are tools that can do 80% of the work, and these are new tools that can automate SEO tasks such as internal linking, content pruning, making SEO more efficient than ever. And so some examples of this, you can definitely use an anonymous agent like Manus.ai, or you can use something like GenSmart.ai. When it comes to internal linking, you can have it scan your entire website or scan sections of your website and help it figure out where you should be adding internal links for keywords that you want to be ranking for. You can say, my website stands for this, it's a digital marketing agency, I want to make sure that these keywords are prioritized and we're adding more internal links for them. Or you can go out there and you can build products yourself. You can vibe code internal linking tools using Replit or using Cursor. Internally for us, we built product called ClickFlow, and these are products that we use for our clients, and that helps us create internal links, that helps us figure out what content we should be pruning, we should be consolidating, or content that we should be deleting. But the main thing now is that you have a lot more power in your hands, even as a non-technical person. You can actually deploy these little tools, these little apps that you can use, and you're going to be able to do your work a lot more efficiently. And so when we talk to our team about using these different products, they're saying they can do 70 to 80% of their work a lot faster. They're saving a lot more hours, and they're spending their time on higher leverage work. A lot of what we covered so far used to take weeks or days This is where you're lucky if you're a beginner now, because there are so many tools out there that automate the heavy lifting. Now I want to talk quickly about surviving the future, because AI overviews are completely disrupting organic search. In fact, Google's AI overviews are reducing organic traffic, studies show, by drops of more than 37%. So just to give you a little more context on AI overviews, these are the answers that Google offers at the top of the page to reply to search queries. And so what that means for your strategy is that you've got to shift rapidly because the game now, as I mentioned, is the search everywhere game. Optimization future. Most AI writing tools were built by engineers who've never written a blog post in their lives. ClickFlow is entirely different. It's built by my team of SEO marketers and learns your business inside out, delivering automated, scalable content that is optimized for search engines and reads like it was crafted by your own team. No more managing freelancers, no more babysitting briefs. Just press go and grow. So head to clickflow.com and get your first 25,000 words free. That's not a typo. 25,000. Go get them. Clickflow.com. So website traffic is going to continue to decline over the next 5, 10 years or so. And like I mentioned earlier, you think about looking at your Google Search Console. You definitely should still have Google Search Console today. But when you log into it, you're going to see that in the purple, usually it's in the purple, that your website traffic impressions are in fact going up and your clicks are going down. So that's going to decline over time. But that doesn't mean you should completely give up on organic search because I look at it as a cigar butt type of business. And so Warren Buffett likes to say that there are businesses that are dying, but it's going to take time to decline over time. And so over the next 5 to 10 years, you can still take advantage while everyone runs for the exits. You can still be in there taking advantage while you're covering other areas around search everywhere optimization. So websites still matter and you need to optimize for where your audience actually hangs out online. So I just want to reemphasize this, that traditional SEO is not dying. It's simply spreading out. What that means is going back to optimizing for multiple channels now because attention is so fragmented, it is the search everywhere optimization experience. And the problem that traditional SEOs have had in the past is they are one-trick ponies. They only focus on one basket. You cannot play the game that way today because the marketing game has changed. And so the best way to do this is by learning by doing. That means, for example, getting better at YouTube. That means if you're going to start a podcast, start a podcast, and then you can figure out how to publish it to short form. Within short form, let's say TikTok, for example, people are searching for things. On Instagram Reels, people are searching for things. On LinkedIn, people are searching for things. Humans are always going to search for things because humans are infinitely curious and the mediums always change over time, but the messaging doesn't change. You just have to adapt to the meta, the most optimized way of playing for each channel. And you have to experiment, you got to make mistakes, and you have to keep building. So with the right AI tools and the right strategies, SEO is actually easier than ever, and you'll improve much faster than you think. If you enjoyed this video, I want you to watch this next one over here on how Manus AI just completely changed the SEO game to learn more about how to scale up your SEO efforts even more.