Top SEO Predictions For 2026

As we move into 2026, we’ll be leaving behind us a very turbulent year in terms of SEO, where most of my predictions from last year came true. From the roll-out of Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, we’re seeing a complete change in how people look for information and make decisions.

For SEOs, this shift means adapting to a landscape where visibility is influenced not just by algorithms, but by how brands are perceived, cited, and discussed across the web. This leads nicely into my SEO predictions for 2026…

For 2026, the year ahead will bring plenty more new challenges and opportunities. Digital PR and brand sentiment will become even more important for your visibility and presence in organic search. Competing with bigger brands will require smarter investments and stronger reputations. User behavior will keep evolving as AI tools become part of everyday life, changing how people research everything from travel plans to major purchases. And just as importantly, the way we measure success in SEO will need to evolve, moving beyond keyword rankings to capture a fuller picture of visibility, sentiment, and user journeys.

Read on, and we’ll explore my predictions for 2026 in more detail, and outline what we can do in terms of SEO and AI to prepare ourselves for the future.

#1 The Year of Digital PR: Brand Reputation as an Algorithmic Signal

AI-driven search is reshaping how visibility is earned. When LLMs summarise results, they tend to lean heavily on trusted sources and public sentiment to determine which brands to surface.

No longer are we talking about backlinks (although, they’ll still be relevant). Instead, mentions, citations, and the sentiment of coverage all feed into how your brand is represented. Traditional link-building is being replaced by digital PR strategies that build authority through high-quality media coverage and positive reputation management. More and more, we’re seeing SEO campaigns needing to be backed-up by solid Digital PR presence, and I only see this increasing as AI search tools become more involved in peoples’ day-to-day lives.

This growing emphasis on reputation sets the stage for the next big challenge: how to compete in a world where big brands already dominate trust signals.

#2 The Challenge of Bigger Brands

Where LLMs are designed to prioritise credibility and factual accuracy, this often means surfacing large, established brands which are typically more reliable - or, utilising larger publications where fact-checking is more likely to be more prevalent. Where major publishers, review sites, and forums are cited most frequently - these sites typically feature bigger brands or mainstream products - creating a cycle of authority that is hard to disrupt.

For smaller or challenger brands, breaking into new markets will demand far more than SEO best practices such as good content and technical SEO - instead, it will require strong PR investment, local credibility, and creative ways to earn mentions in authoritative spaces.

In practice, this shifts the balance of SEO. It’s no longer just about optimising content on your own website; instead it’s about building a brand that AI can’t ignore, both on-site and off-site. As users grow more comfortable with AI tools in their everyday lives, the importance of being present in those environments only increases.

#2 More Evolution in Search: Meeting Users Where They Are

AI and LLMs are becoming central to how people make decisions. As we know from our SearchPulse survey - from holiday planning to major purchase research, users are increasingly asking AI assistants for recommendations instead of browsing multiple websites. This compresses the customer journey, meaning if your brand isn’t visible at the discovery stage, you may never enter the consideration stage at all.

As AI tools get better, we can expect to see different and more efficient ways of searching for the thing you need. The search landscape is going to constantly evolve as we progress through the AI-led evolution of search. 

Brands need to ensure they are cited in the conversations, reviews, and content sources that AI tools draw from. The evolution of user behaviour also connects directly to how we measure performance. If people no longer click through to your site, how do you know whether you’re visible? That’s where the next prediction comes in: an evolution to the way we report on SEO performance.

However, it’s worth noting that at the time of writing, users of Gemini for example are at 400 million a month. That’s 0.5% of the 85.2b monthly traffic on Google. There’s still a long, long way to go.

#4 The Evolution of SEO Tracking and Reporting

With zero-click results becoming more frequent than ever before, traditional keyword rankings no longer tell the full story. Instead, SEO teams must track how often they’re cited in AI-generated results, how their competitors are framed, and the sentiment attached to their mentions. This requires new reporting frameworks that go beyond visibility in Google SERPs to capture LLM visibility, sentiment analysis, and multi-touch attribution across the total search journey.

In short, the future of SEO is not just about being ranked, it’s about how well you are being represented at every stage of the journey. No longer is ‘Position 1’ the goal, instead it’s going to be about how much (positive sentiment) coverage you have across an entire niche. We’ll therefore need to shift the way we report to better understand a brand’s influence across awareness, consideration, and transactional stages - all of which are being increasingly shaped by AI.

Final Thoughts

In my view, 2026 is set to be a year where digital PR, brand authority, and visibility in AI-driven search become inseparable from SEO strategy. Bigger brands are likely to have a (short term) advantage, but challengers who invest in reputation, presence, and smarter measurement can still carve out a meaningful share of voice in the long term. As always in SEO, it’s about providing good content for your users; so long as you do this, you’ll end up in a good position in the long run.

If you’re looking at the future of SEO as a scary proposition; speak to our SEO experts today to see how we can help better shape your strategy for an AI-led world of search engine optimisation.