What I shared on SEJ Live

It’s been an eventful start to the year for AI search and AI is advancing quickly, but there’s a lot of hype and panic. If search is truly just doing what it has been doing for the last 30 years, it is constantly updating itself.

At Search Engine Journal, like most other publishers, we experienced a significant decline in organic Google traffic. The last few years have been a challenging time for a business model that publishes information and news.

Although this has reached a peak in recent months, we identified changes and vulnerabilities several years ago and have taken action over the past few years, which puts us in a better position today.

Last week at the first SEJ Live event, I talked about where we are in 2026, what’s working, and what we should leave behind.

As part of the talk, I will share with you the three fundamental things that I think you need to focus on now in 2026. Strategies you can adopt that will help you as AI impacts our industry.

What you have to leave behind

Before I talk about what you should do, let’s make sure you’ve let go of outdated ways of thinking that are holding you back.

If you’re still obsessively checking the leaderboard every day, it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Ranking is 2016; Visibility is 2026.

The foundation of search has always been knowing who your customer is, where they operate, and using content to engage with them and inspire them to take action. This interaction always used to happen in the SERP, and that was our market for attention.

In 2026, our digitally literate audiences will now move fluidly through a multimodal search journey before reaching its conclusion. All with an interwoven AI layer of visibility.

Even if you rank number 1, that doesn’t mean you’ll get a click, because noise in a SERP can affect the visibility of a listing right on the first page.

Advanced Web Ranking found that when you expand an AI overview, the first organic result moves about 1,674 pixels down the page, practically below the fold on most screens. And AI overviews are just one level. Between ads, carousels, map packs, and image results, a top ranking can be virtually invisible.

I’ve seen customer product SERPs change dramatically over the last few years, to the point where we’ve given up chasing vanity and instead focused on being creative to connect with customers.

In 2026, it’s all about intention and action-based strategies.

Let’s do real marketing and find users where they are and give them a reason to engage with you. And I think we’ll all be better marketers for it.

What you need to aim for – a strategy that stands up to AI

Technical excellence in SEO is fundamental to get discovered in LLMs. SEO is far from dead, it has never been more important.

Furthermore, content is still the foundation of online visibility – without it, there is no visibility.

The following three strategies described are core factors that can provide stability as we transition into the new world of AI search.

1. AI-safe content

What I mean here is content that is not cannibalized/synthesized by AI.

The paradox of visibility in LLMs is that you need consensus to gain trust, to attract attention, but you also need quality and difference to enable inclusion. For brands that have already invested in running experiments and collecting data, they are one step ahead.

I spoke to Grant Simmons in my opinion and he described this as “golden knowledge”:
Your data.
Your experience.
Your opinion.

In practice, content that can avoid cannibalization by AI summaries and actually be included in the summary looks like this:

• Video interviews and first-hand experience formats. These gain visibility on social networks, SERPs and LLMs because they contain a human perspective that AI cannot generate from training data alone. They are webinars, in my opinion they are webinars
• Original research and proprietary data. Status of SEO and AI papers
• Opinion commentary and expert analysis. For example, a list of the best contributors offering their lived experiences.

Anyone with an LLM can use a summary of the query “What is SEO?” create.

But to be a brand and a community that offers an experience with the best minds in the industry, live shows, unique data reports, breaking news and our expert opinion on why it matters and what you need to pay attention to. As a curator and hub for everything in the industry, it is a destination and source for supply to LLMs.

Investing in a content strategy at this level can make a brand channel agnostic and reduce your single point of failure due to over-reliance on one channel. And that is our goal at Search Engine Journal.

2. Value-based clicks

Different reports give different numbers, but what is consistent is that LLMs are referring traffic.

According to Chartbeat data from Press Gazette, ChatGPT drives 0.02% of referrals to publishers. The Conductor 2026 benchmark report states that LLM referral traffic accounts for 1.08% of website traffic across 10 industries.

Right now it may feel like a fraction of what we’re used to from Google, but don’t forget that 1% of trillion searches is still a sizable market full of opportunity.

To capitalize on this, we need to consider what we can offer to drive clicks from the LLM to our brand page. Ask yourself:

• Why does someone click on a link in an LLM?
• Why would anyone want to read more than the AI ​​summary?
• Or why would anyone want to know more about my brand/product or service?

Before carousels, featured snippets, and AI summaries, it was much easier to get a click by ranking high in a SERP. If you are one of only 10 options, you will receive a test click that checks if you are the site you are looking for.

But just as retaining that click was a far more difficult task, if you have something valuable that connects with the user, you can still get the click via a quote or card in LLMs or SERP AI summaries.

Featured snippets may have reduced click-through rate, but they didn’t destroy it. Visibility levels can present opportunities, and SEOs worked hard to reach No. 0 because it was a way to get to the top of the SERP.

What can trigger a click in an AI search environment:

• Depth that the summary cannot containCase studies, implementation details, nuances that provide a reason to want more.
• Credibility and trustAccording to Amsive, brand queries with AI overviews actually see an 18% increase in CTR.
• Actionable assetsProviding resources where the intent cannot be satisfied through a summary.

If you can tell the difference between immediate response traffic and creating content for people who don’t want a summary or quick response, your brand can become valuable to users.

3. SERP opportunities that are resistant to AI

Despite fears that AI will kill Google, the search engine isn’t leading.

Google’s advantage in the race with LLMs is that Google has been understanding its users for years and knows how to provide answers to queries to satisfy the consumer. They have an established audience and technology infrastructure. And lots of data.

Despite the rush for LLMs and the AI ​​hype cycle, the search engine still offers plenty of opportunity.

Brightedge data states that just over half of searches have AIOs, and Conductor reports that just over a quarter of searches analyzed triggered an AIO (21.9 million unique Google searches).

This suggests that between half and three-quarters of SERPs do not have an AI overview. And that means there are a lot of searches where the intent is satisfied by clicking on a page. Content that targets these queries and triggers a specific action completely bypasses the AIO problem.

Consider what is resistant to LLMs:

• News – current news that happens too quickly for LLMs.
• Brand-focused – build on trust and build a community that actively searches for you.
• Downloads – my favorite conversion tool that has been working for years.

I believe AIO could reduce traffic volume, but not traffic of value.

Build consensus with your website as a hub

Finally, if there was one tip I would give to anyone that could have the most impact, it would be “consensus.”

LLMs generate answers based on statistical patterns in their training and grounding data. So if a brand or message appears consistent across many sources, it is more likely to show up in AI responses. Ahrefs found that brand-related web mentions had the strongest association with appearing in AI conversations, stronger than any other factor tested. If you can maintain consistent messaging across multiple channels, you’ll be in the best position to get featured.

Additionally, a University of Toronto study found that LLMs prefer earned media from trusted sources that can provide more authority than posts on their own website.

Posting and layering your content across channels such as Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, or other industry publications relevant to your industry will help build messaging associated with your brand and support inclusion in LLMs.

Make your website the hub that connects to all the online channels you are active and contribute to, and don’t be afraid to post some of your best content on other channels to gain visibility.

The 3 changes we made to Search Engine Journal

The biggest mistake publishers made in the first quarter wasn’t AI. It treated AI as something that happens to them, rather than something they can strategically deal with.

In response, we’ve made three specific changes to Search Engine Journal:

1. We have switched the editorial team to experience-oriented formats with interviews, analyzes and original research.
2. We moved from programmatic revenue to asset-based sponsorship.
3. We have made building a direct audience our top priority, so we own our own audience.

If you’re still using the same tactics you’ve been applying to SEO since 2020, you need to reconsider what your audience wants, where they operate, and who your competitors are.

SEO in 2026 includes visibility across all discovery engines. To stay relevant, make sure you are part of the conversation.

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Featured Image: Shelley Walsh/Search Engine Journal