The SEO Playbook That Actually Works in 2026

If you can get these 5 things right, you're going to rank on Google, you're going to dominate AI search, and you're going to show up everywhere your customers are looking. If I knew what I'm about to show you when I first started in SEO, I would have saved myself years wasting time on tactics that just don't work anymore. Since focusing on this new approach, we've helped clients rank across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, you name it. Not only have we generated hundreds of millions of visitors just from organic traffic, We've also generated hundreds of millions in terms of dollars when it comes to SEO. So today I'm going to show you exactly what I'd do if I had to start ranking from scratch in 2026. Let's get into it. So the first thing that you have to understand is that traditional SEO isn't dead, but if you're only doing traditional SEO, you're in trouble. And here's the mistake that I see everywhere. People are either going all in on AI SEO and abandoning traditional Google, or they're ignoring AI search completely and wondering why traffic is declining. Both are wrong. The reality in 2026 is traditional SEO is what I call a cigar butt channel. It's slowly declining over time, but it's not going away anytime soon. And here's why. Google still gets 13.7 billion searches per day. ChatGPT gets 1 billion per day, and it's growing, but Google's still 13 times bigger. And AI overviews still pull from traditional SEO content. LLMs ground their answers off of Google, meaning that they pull their answers off of Google. And it's also important to know what has changed too. So 95% of AI citations that you see in these LLMs, they come from content that's less than 10 months old. So if your content is old, you're basically invisible when it comes to AI search. SEO in 2026 is traditional Google SEO plus AI SEO. You can call it generative engine optimization, you can call it answer engine optimization, and you want to have a search everywhere optimization, multi-platform presence. You can't just pick one. You got to have all 3 that are working together. And we're seeing companies shift their budgets pretty drastically. These are multi-trillion dollar companies that are reaching out to us, and this LLM optimization money is coming from brand budgets, not just SEO budgets. And they're measuring mentions, how many times they're showing up versus competitors, and more. So here's what you got to do right now. You got to stop treating SEO like it's 2020. If you're only optimizing for Google, you're leaving anywhere from 50 to 75% of the opportunity on the table. Step number 2, I post everywhere, not just on my website. So this is a shift that most SEOs are missing. Search engine optimization was the old way of SEO. Search everywhere optimization is the new way of SEO, because you got to think about it this way. 15 years ago, Google was the only game in town. But now you've got Instagram, you have got YouTube, you have got Reddit, you've got all these other channels, right? And so attention is so disparate now. And you have to understand how you can optimize for everything. You can't just write a blog post from 15 years ago. It's 15 years ago, what worked was you write a blog post, you optimize for Google, and then you get organic traffic. Now, I mean, that's like 10-20% of the game. As I mentioned, this is search everywhere optimization. And people are looking at— when I mentioned YouTube, second largest search engine in the world, guess what? Owned by Google, crawled by Gemini. LinkedIn is actually crawlable as well. Your Instagram posts are crawlable by Google as well. And when you look at the LLMs, what are the top 3 cited sources? YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, actually. You got to think about what is marketing 101? What are the first principles of marketing? Well, what is actually true in marketing is you have to find out where your customers are hanging out. And then you have to compel them with a message that stands out. Google used to be where a lot of the attention was. And now the attention is disparate, right? And so Reddit, you look at Reddit, Google is prioritizing Reddit results. And Reddit is, you know, somewhat easy to game. And then you have sites like Quora, which are still great for ranking for a ton of different questions. If you're thinking about App Store optimization, that's another way of doing SEO. If you're optimized for shopping, that's Amazon. If I'm starting from scratch today, here is my distribution strategy. Every piece of content that I create would go through this specific workflow. Number 1, you got your website. So publish your pillar content. Sometimes it might be 2,000+ words and making sure that you're optimizing for Google and AI, but most importantly, that you're optimizing for humans. You want to have good content for humans first, and then you can worry about the Google and the AI side of things, right? Number 2, I would turn it into a video. So for example, what I'm recording with you right now, I've talked about this content quite a bit on podcasts. We have it as blog posts as well. So how do you take a blog post and then turn it into a video? You can script it. And by the way, you can take your blog post, put it into Gemini, upload the way that you typically write, the way that you typically talk. And then what you can do is you can have Gemini create a script for you. And then what you can do is you can record it, you can go into a studio, or you can record it from home. What happens afterwards is guess what, you're optimizing for search. And a lot more people, even though YouTube is very popular today, still a lot of people, they're not taking advantage of YouTube knowing that it's the second largest search engine in the world. Now the third piece of this is you want to then repurpose your original blog post into a LinkedIn post. The key thing here is that you want to make sure that you're writing natively for LinkedIn. So when I say writing natively, I mean understanding how people are written to on LinkedIn. What are the posts that do well? What do they look like specifically? Is there a certain format that they have? Do they have bullet points in there? Do they have different emojis in there? And do they have a very strong hook in the beginning? And so you have to understand for every single channel, whether it's for blog posts, for YouTube, for LinkedIn, there is a meta way. There's an optimized way of playing for these channels. So you want to make sure that you are writing for LinkedIn's users and they have a certain way of enjoying content. Then what I would do afterwards is I might take that YouTube video, okay, that you made, and I would cut the key moments from it and then take out the little clips. Right? It could be 60-second clips, it could be 4 to 5 minute clips. You can use a tool like Opus for this. And then you can pull those few moments and then write a caption for X, write a caption for Instagram, write a caption for Threads, and then post it to these channels as well. Okay, you're trying to maximize the mileage from the content that you produce. And then what else you would do after this is that you would look at Reddit, you look at Quora. These are other communities that you can post to, and then you would answer related questions and just try to, you know, it's easier said than done, but add value. Don't try to promote yourself all the time, but just you're answering questions in there. And then sometimes you might be linking back to content that you've produced. That way you're not trying to sell yourself or market yourself all the time. Just seek to be a person that's helpful rather than trying to sell your stuff all the time. So the key reminder here is that each platform is its own game. So on LinkedIn, you're more business focused. On X, you can be more unhinged with your thoughts. On YouTube, you're playing the YouTube game with the thumbnails, the retention, and then the headline, the packaging overall. The idea matters a lot. Now for LinkedIn, I'll give you a little tool here. I use a tool called Stanley. So it's stanley.stan.store, I believe, to help repurpose content specifically for each platform. So one example from Stanley is I got a post I literally just cut and pasted the post that it gave me. I put it on LinkedIn and it got 150,000 views. And then on X, it got 50,000 views. So that's 200,000 views that I otherwise wouldn't have gotten. All that matters is that you're reaching the right people. And Stanley, what it does a good job of, it finds posts that have done well on LinkedIn, and then it will look up content that you've put out recently and then give you ideas based on formats that are already working. Now you want to take this idea and then repackage it over into every other platform out there. Well, how can you see what's working already and how can you just repackage it to stuff that you're used to talking about. By the way, if someone can do this for every single channel, I would pay for that. So now let's move over to Google. So when someone's searching for your topic, you want to make sure that you're dominating multiple results. So not just one spot on Google. So if you show up on Google, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, and Reddit for the same query, you look like you're the authority. And Google specifically, they're looking at entities. When I look at Google Search Console, which is their SEO analytics product, here's the thing. It used to just look at search traffic. Now it's looking at other entities such as your YouTube channel. Inverse that you own a certain YouTube channel, and that it's just looking at all these different pieces, right? So now even the LLMs like ChatGPT, they are actually looking at, hey, what are other websites that are citing you, not just your own website that's citing you. So that's how you go about winning in 2026. Step number 3 is that you optimize for freshness. So the content refresh system. Here's the stat that changes everything. Earlier, I had mentioned already that 95% of all AI citations come from content less than 10 months old, meaning that if your content, your best content is 2 years old, and you haven't touched it, you're basically invisible to the ChatGPTs, the Perplexities, the Clods, the Geminis, all of them. The old SEO playbook was that you just, you publish once, you rank forever. The new SEO playbook is that you publish constantly, and you update relentlessly. And so we use a tool called ClickFlow internally that helps us stay on top of our updates. If I'm starting from scratch, here's my content freshness system. So weekly publishing. So I'm saying, you know, 3 to 5 new pieces of content per week minimum, and then mix of pillar content. So, you know, maybe 2,000-word blog posts and quick-hit posts, 500 to 800 words. And then you're always optimizing for both Google and AI overviews. And then what you're doing afterwards is you're doing these quarterly content audits. And I'm looking at pulling my top 20 performing pieces I want to update with new stats, new examples, new sections, FAQs, change publish dates, and then I want to repromote potentially, not all the time, across all platforms. And then what you do afterwards is you do monthly trend checks. And so look at what topics are trending up but don't have volume yet. You can look at your Google Search Console for that. You can use Ahrefs to see what's trending up and downwards. You want to look at what's trending up and downwards for search, but also for the LLM surfaces as well. And then you want to create content before everyone else catches on, right? So you want to look for the topics that are exploding. So an example might be like LLM personalization. So no volume now, but it might explode in 6 months. Ultimately, why this matters is that AI rewards freshness more than Google ever did. If you're not updating, you're dying slowly. Quick break. If you're doing AI SEO or content marketing in general, You know what the problem is. The problem is you're spending hours writing yourself, or you're paying agencies lots and lots of money, and you're getting AI slop that sounds just like everyone else. That's why we built ClickFlow. ClickFlow creates production-grade content that actually sounds like you. Plus, it helps you with other areas such as building internal links, creating FAQs, and more. One customer even reported saving 90+ hours a month just by using ClickFlow. You can get a 14-day free trial just by going to clickflow.com. No more AI slop, just production-grade content that drives traffic and conversions. Back to the show. Step number 4, I would build AI workflows to 10x my output. The truth is you can't compete manually anymore. If you're writing every blog post from scratch, manually researching keywords and handcrafting every social post, you're going to lose to someone using AI workflows. My agency spent the first half of this year building what I call an AI command center. So what we use is Cursor, Claude Code, and MCPs, which are model context protocols, to build these subagents that do 80 to 90% of the work. So if I'm starting from scratch, here are the 3 subagents that I would build first. Number 1 is the subagent that helps you repurpose content. And what I do is I feed it my long-form content, such as podcasts, YouTube videos, pillar articles. So it will output 20 short-form clips, 10 social media posts, and you got platform-specific hooks for those, 5 email ideas, and then it'll score each concept 1 through 100 for virality potential. And this turns one 80-minute podcast into 35+ pieces of content in just a couple minutes. The second sub-agent, I should say, is the SEO keyword research agent. I don't know about you, I don't want to spend time doing keyword research. So what this does is it hooks in like a tool that you're using, like Ahrefs, and it'll use the Ahrefs MCP. And what it'll do is it'll find trending keywords that have low volume now, but actually they have high future potential. And I'll show you focused B2B transactional keywords. These are the types of keywords I like optimizing for, gaps in my content strategy, and where I rank versus my competitors. And they'll show me keyword difficulty, what to optimize for, and what's is worth going after. Now the cool thing about this is that I don't need to go around clicking into Ahrefs or any of these tools. And in fact, I can merge the Ahrefs MCP with what's happening in my Google Analytics, my Google Search Console, and then my HubSpot sales data as well. And then we can merge everything together and figure out what we should be going after in terms of what's trending. And we just look at the data across the board. It's not just in one little area, right? What you're actually doing now is you're combining different data sources to make better decisions faster. Now last but not least, you got the Programmatic Page Builder sub-agent. So what I do in this case is I just am looking to make programmatic SEO pages, and I give it a template for landing page, and it creates programmatic SEO pages at scale. So an example, this might be best digital marketing agency in Los Angeles, like these best X for Y pages, location-based pages, like best food to eat in Japan. And when you do these programmatic SEO pages, they're basically 80-90% of the way there. You still need a human in the loop, but it's doing most of the heavy lifting. And here's what's crazy. These sub-agents spin up in 2 to 3 minutes. You don't have to be technical at all. You could just dictate what you want using tools like Super Whisper. So I literally just press a key and I just tell it what I want, and then Claude will generate the agent for you. And one more thing, this is the critical part that everyone misses. You need to have a human in the loop. AI will not fully automate SEO in 2026. LLMs hallucinate, meaning that they make stuff up. Second part is AI without human review means AI slop, and Google knows what AI slop looks like. All these LLMs know you got to fact-check, you got to add personality, you got to optimize for user intent. So what my human-in-the-loop workflow looks like is that number 1, AI will generate the first draft. So you got 80 to 90% done. 2, human fact checks. So are these stats actually real? 3, human adds internal links, critical for algorithm signals. 4, human optimizes for AI overviews. 5, you got human adds personality, unique insights, contrarian takes. And then 6, you got human publishes and promotes. And so why this matters is that most people are defaulting to 100% AI-generated stuff. And if you just go the extra mile, with human review, you're going to dominate because most people aren't willing to do this. And step 5 is I'd play the long game. So I measure what actually matters. And this is where 99% of people fail. They start strong, they publish for 2 weeks. And then what happens is they see no results, and then they give up. SEO is not a 2-week game. And if you're lucky, it's a 6 to 12 month game, but it's an ongoing game that you're constantly playing. And if I'm starting from scratch, here's my commitment. Months 1 through 3, you got your foundation set up. So you're going to publish 3 times per week minimum, you're going to build 10 to 15 pillar pieces, you're going to set up these AI workflows that I talked about, you're going to post everywhere, you're gonna play the search everywhere optimization game. YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, wherever your people are hanging out. Months 4 through 6, scale. So you're going to ramp to 5 times per week, maybe even more. Start content refresh cycle. You're going to see first results, you're going to double down on what's working. And then months 7 through 12, you're going to compound. So you're going to publish daily if possible. And that's when your rankings kick in, AI citations increase, traffic compounds. And what I would say is this, I haven't taken a day off of posting for, I don't know, maybe close to a decade. And that's why our content performs. So the person who shows up every day for 12 months beats the person who goes all in for 2 weeks and burns out. So here's what's changed, what you're measuring. So the old metrics would be like organic traffic, backlinks, keyword rankings. The new metrics that you're looking at would be AI mentions. So how often you're cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, sentiment analysis, are mentions positive or negative, and brands versus competitors. Are you mentioned more than them? And what we're seeing is companies are shifting budget from SEO teams to brand teams because LLM optimization or AEO is brand awareness, not just traffic. So here's an idea of the different tools that we use. One, we use ClickFlow. That's our internal tool to produce content, help with internal links and things like that. We use Ahrefs, we use Semrush as well. We also use, from a rank tracking standpoint, we use Amplitude. Okay, so Amplitude is great for looking at LLM surface rankings. So is Ahrefs. Ahrefs has Brand Radar. And you can also— there's a handful of other tools that you can use out there. And here's what I track if I'm starting from scratch. One, traditional Google. So traffic and conversions still matter to an extent, especially conversions. Number 2, AI platforms, mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Number 3, you got sentiment, positive, neutral, negative. 4, how competitive are you versus your competitors? So the bottom line here is that if you're only measuring Google rankings, you're playing half the game. So you got to commit to 6 to 12 months, measure the full picture, and show up every single day. And that's how you win. So that's exactly what I'd do if I wanted to rank number 1 on Google in 2026, starting from scratch. You got to accept a new reality, Post everywhere, optimize for freshness, build AI workflows with humans in the loop, play the long game, and measure what actually matters. And if you want to understand the AEO playbook for 2026, you can watch this video over here.