Eric Siu explains how AI overviews and agents will reshape search in 2026. Web clicks are declining, so focus on transactional content and repurpose across YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, and X. You'll still need humans in the loop for AI-assisted content, and traditional SEO won't disappear, just shift.
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In 2026, SEO will evolve more than ever, changing with the rapid rise of LLMs, AI agents, and AI overviews, just shifting search platforms in general. The traditional SEO methods aren't going to go anywhere just yet, but the landscape is drastically changing. So I want to get into what's in store so you can be successful with your SEO in 2026. In case you're wondering, AI will not fully automate SEO in 2026. You're going to have to have a human in the loop to review the work. And what I mean by that is, let's say you're producing AI-assisted content. Let's say you're making programmatic SEO pages. These are templated pages that you can produce at scale. So you think about, you know, fun things to do in Japan, things to eat in Los Angeles, all that type of stuff. Those pages will still work, but you need to have a human in the loop to check the work. Or if you're making blog posts that are maybe 80% AI-assisted, you still need a human in the loop, the last mile, to fact-check, to make sure that there's good internal links happening so there's good signals for the algorithms. And then you're doing what you can to optimize for AI overviews and also for the LLMs. These things all need to happen because These LLMs hallucinate quite a bit. For you to hand it off completely to an AI, I don't think that's going to be possible in the near future, at least yet. And that's actually a good thing because some people are kind of defaulting to AI to just produce all the work. AI is going to do all the work, right? But that tends to lead to a lot of slop. And so if you can just go the extra mile, you're going to do a lot better. Number 2, you got to make sure that you're not just posting to your website, but you got to post everywhere. So we look at this as search everywhere optimization. And what I mean by that is it's not just 15 years ago your blog was very much organic reach. Now you got organic reach on Instagram, Instagram, which is crawlable by search engines, and you have YouTube, which is obviously crawled by Gemini because Google owns Gemini, they own YouTube as well. You got to think about how disparate attention is today. That means you're doing Reddit, you're doing YouTube. If you're trying to optimize for, let's say, business, you're doing LinkedIn. So organic reach is very much distributed now, and whatever you can do to repurpose your content, that's going to help you go a long way. I'll give you an example here. So there's a tool that I use called Stanley, and it's stan.store, and I know that's a mouthful, but what it does is it repurposes a lot of my content and just focuses on writing good content for LinkedIn and it also is gonna do it for Instagram, right? And so you gotta think about when you're posting to all these different channels, you're posting natively and that you're playing the game for these channels too. 'Cause every single channel, you gotta speak to people differently. Maybe LinkedIn is a little more business. X, maybe you're a little more unhinged with your thoughts, okay? And then YouTube, you gotta think about, okay, you're playing the YouTube game. How do you optimize for the right packaging, the right thumbnail, the right headline, the right ideas that are going to help the video go viral, the first 30-second retention, right? Each channel has a native game to it, but also the vibe is different for every single channel. And you have to think about, Okay, if you've got a really good pillar piece of content, how do you repurpose it for these different channels? And maybe you start with one channel first and then you start to spread out into other channels once you have it figured out. Number 3, web traffic will continue to decrease. And that means that, like I mentioned earlier, you have to optimize for AI overviews. And that's the blurb that you have up top. And that means having a strong H1 and then having, you know, 2 or 3 sentences in a paragraph that can answer the question directly. Those are cited pretty often with AI overviews. Because of these AI overviews and how LLMs are working now, transactional content is becoming more important. And what I mean by that is it used used to be, let's say 5, 10 years ago, you would write a lot more informational content, meaning that, you know, what is SEO, for example, or, you know, what is paid marketing. That's more top of the funnel. People are, are searching for information. People aren't necessarily looking to buy. But bottom of the funnel, more transactional content— this might be paid media agency or SEO agency, for example, SEO agency in Los Angeles. These are high-intent keywords that convert. And so transactional content also might be like versus content, like Salesforce versus HubSpot or Salesforce alternatives. These are transactional pieces of content. More people now— it used to be 80% of your content budget might be towards top of the funnel and 20% might be bottom funnel. Now it might be a little more flipped, right? And maybe it's not quite 80%, but a lot more is going towards transactional because if website traffic is decreasing, you want to try to get as many clicks as you can coming to your site. And oftentimes I would say these LLMs, also AI overviews too, they like citing transactional content. They also like citing listicles too. And so you got to think about how the game is changing when it comes to web traffic. When you look at web traffic now, I would say that impressions are going up. Okay. In general, this is— you got AI overviews, right, that are decreasing clicks to websites. Clicks in general are going down. So you got this open jaw like Alligator-looking pattern. That's what I would say. Number four, so updating, deleting, and consolidating your content is now more important than ever because when you update a piece of content, a ChatGPT, for example, 95% of its content that it's looked at in the last 12 months that it's citing has been updated. Okay, so you got to make sure that your contents, especially your best content, is constantly being updated. Deleting your content is important too because you know if you're let's say you're you're Google, for example, you're crawling websites. You want to make sure that the website's efficient and you're not wasting a bunch of crawl budget on websites. So if you have millions of pages on your website and maybe only 100,000 are useful, then you probably. Need to be cutting millions of pages, right? Just to make it easier for it to be found by LLMs and also to be found by search engines. And consolidating is more important than ever too, because you might have a lot of content that's similar. And again, when you have content that's being consolidated, that's more likely to be cited because it's a more comprehensive piece of content. And also you're making it less confusing for search engines or LLMs. Number 5, good brand sentiment is key. And so when an LLM looks at you, they are looking across the board, hey, is this a brand in general? And even search engines back in the day, Google's Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO at the time, said that the Brands are going to rise to the top because the internet is just a cesspool, right? So when you have LLMs now that are getting smarter and smarter, they're looking at videos, they're looking at Reddit sentiment, they're looking at reviews. For example, you want to make sure that whatever reviews that you're getting for, let's say, the content that you're putting out, it's good. You want to make sure that you have a lot of citations and a citation could be the number of times that you're showing up like that. That to me is a citation, right? The number of links that you have coming in, good brand sentiment, a lot of signals that are easy for an algorithm to pull. That's what you're looking at, right? And then if you're Gemini, for example, you're looking at YouTube, maybe you're looking at the number of views views, the engagement, how are people talking about this person outside of just YouTube in general. It's becoming a lot easier. These, these things are becoming a lot smarter. Being cited in listicles are also important too. This is another form of a citation because the LLMs, when you ask for what's the top marketing podcast, they typically like to pull from different lists. When you ask for what are the top SEO agencies, they typically like to pull from, uh, from lists as well. And they also know that good brands continue to work on their sentiment and they continue to make sure that they're relevant. And number 6, free content is becoming more important than gated content. And so when you look at my podcast co-host, my counterpart, for example, he actually shares a lot of data and he goes into each channel from X or Instagram or YouTube. It just shows a lot of questions that marketers would ask. When he shares that, it's getting a lot of views and that actually does drive leads, you know, for his business, right? So free content's becoming a lot more important because you want to get cited and you don't want to gate what you want to be found for, right? If you want to be known for that stuff, why would you be gating it? That's a much more short-term way of looking at things. And I get it, if your business is maybe selling subscriptions, okay, that's fine. But I'll say for most of us, we don't want to be gating our content that much. If you want to run personalized LinkedIn ads at scale and get these ads up in minutes instead of weeks, you've got to check out Karrot. So Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai, will allow you to create personalized ads on LinkedIn, personalized landing pages. We are also adding in different automations to spin up these ads quickly. We have different creative options as well that will integrate even cool things like Google Nano Banana. A lot of cool things coming down the pipeline. If you are serious about B2B marketing, you're serious about LinkedIn, you've got to check out Karrot, and we'll see you on the other side. Number 7 is traditional SEO isn't going away anytime soon. I might look at this as a cigar butt channel, meaning that it's slowly declining over time, But traditional SEO isn't going away anytime soon because still you look at ChatGPT, for example, it grounds off of Google quite a bit now. It used to be a lot more on Bing, but Google is being cited more now. And still a lot more people are searching on traditional SEO today, just Google in general. And so even though website traffic is declining, still you think about AI overviews in general, you think about listicles in general, still LLMs pull from these, right? So traditional SEO isn't going away anytime soon. I would just say that website traffic might be dying, but that traffic is going to be diverted somewhere, right? It just doesn't disappear overnight. And Google has still reported that their searches still continue go up. It's like 42-43% of market share still today. And Google has some of the best technology when it comes to AI. They have some of the best platforms out there. They have Android, they have Chrome, they have YouTube, they have Gemini, which is one of the best models. They have V03 Google, uh, Nano Banana, which is within their AI division, right? And so you don't want to sleep on Google. Traditional SEO, they're not just going to let it die. It is their cash cow. You still want to make sure that you continue to optimize for it. We certainly do that for our clients, and it's something that you don't want to let go of. So if you're wondering if SEO is going to die in 2026, the answer is no. But it is slowing down. If you're concerned about how this could affect your business, I'll link a video over here on other marketing strategies that are creating explosive growth in 2026. Or feel free to reach out to us at Single Grain and we'll get you a custom strategy to ensure that your lead volume stays healthy. We'll see you in the next video.
