AI didn’t kill SEO; it exposed what SEO was always supposed to be: a business-growth system that goes beyond “SEO” activities.
In short: Beyond SEO® means optimising for trust, influence, and recommendation across AI-driven search experiences.
Why AI Search Forces a Shift from Rankings to Revenue
The phrase “beyond SEO” gets used a lot, often as shorthand for “AI is changing search.” But in 2026, it has a much more specific meaning.
Search is no longer primarily a traffic channel. It’s a decision channel. Buyers don’t just discover brands through search anymore: they validate, compare, shortlist, and form opinions before they ever click a website.
Search engines and AI assistants increasingly behave like answer engines. They summarise information, recommend vendors, compare options, and surface trusted sources. That fundamentally changes what “winning” looks like.
Kevin Kapezi, Director & SEO Consultant at Growthack.io, via Lumar’s SEO skills for 2026 survey:
“…as we see an increase in C-suite discussions due to SEO being front of mind thanks to the rise in LLMs, the more successful SEOs will think more like CMOs and ensure that they are thinking about the wants and needs of the business as a whole and how organic channels (website, video, socials, email etc) all fit into a broader plan.”
This is the real meaning of “Beyond SEO”. Not more tactics. Not new acronyms. But a broader responsibility: connecting organic visibility to business outcomes.
Key takeaways
- SEO in 2026 is about influence, not clicks. Search visibility now means shaping answers, recommendations, and shortlists across AI systems, not just driving sessions to a website.
- Entities matter more than keywords. Clear positioning, consistent language, and well-defined use cases make brands easier for AI systems to understand, verify, and cite.
- Brand presence has always been a key visibility signal. Mentions across PR, reviews, listicles, and third-party platforms increasingly influence whether a brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- AI search amplifies fundamentals rather than replacing them. Technical quality, authoritative content, and internal structure still underpin visibility — weak foundations are exposed faster in AI-driven results.
- Video is emerging as a key differentiator in AI search. As text becomes easier to generate at scale, human-led video remains harder to fake, more resource-intensive to produce, and increasingly surfaced and cited by AI platforms.
- Beyond SEO means organisational alignment. The strongest results come when SEO connects directly to buyer journeys, commercial goals, and cross-channel strategy rather than operating as an isolated marketing activity.
SEO statistics for 2026
The biggest mistake teams make with AI search is treating it as a novelty. The data tells a different story: search has been moving in this direction for over a decade.
- Google has functioned as an “answer engine” since the launch of the Knowledge Graph in 2012, prioritising direct answers over blue links and the term “answer engine” was already publicly in use.
- Featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice search normalised zero-click behaviour long before AI Overviews existed. In 2024, Sparktoro reported that 59.7% of searches within the EU result in zero clicks.
- Today, AI Overviews and LLM-powered interfaces can account for the majority of informational searches without a click.
- 86% of B2B decision-makers say they are more receptive to sales outreach from companies that produce high-quality thought leadership, according to Edelman research.
The implication is simple: visibility is now earned across many surfaces. These can include AI summaries, comparison lists, video results, review platforms, and expert citations. Not just traditional rankings.
Recent history of SEO and why it outgrew “search engines”
SEO didn’t suddenly “expand” because of AI. It evolved. The scope grew every time search changed what it rewarded: from keywords to links to intent to quality to trust, and now to synthesis.
2011–2012: Quality + link manipulation get punished (Panda & Penguin).
Panda targeted thin/low-quality content at scale (the “content farm” era). Penguin then raised the stakes by targeting manipulative link practices and link spam — a major pivot away from “build links at any cost” SEO. Penguin matters because it forced the industry to treat authority as something you earn, not something you manufacture. Background info: Penguin + Panda.
2012–2015: Entities & intent begin replacing pure keyword matching (Knowledge Graph + Hummingbird).
Knowledge Graph pushed Google toward entity-based understanding. Hummingbird then accelerated “meaning over matching”, improving Google’s ability to interpret conversational queries and intent rather than simply rewarding keyword repetition. Hummingbird overview.
2015–2016: Machine learning and mobile change the baseline (RankBrain + mobile-first expectations).
RankBrain helped Google interpret query intent using machine learning, especially for unfamiliar or ambiguous searches. In parallel, mobile usability stopped being a nice-to-have and became table stakes, pushing SEO further into UX, performance, and technical hygiene. RankBrain overview.
2016–2020: SERPs become answer-first (Featured Snippets, People Also Ask) and language understanding improves (BERT).
Google increasingly surfaced direct answers inside the SERP, reducing reliance on blue-link clicks. Then BERT improved Google’s ability to understand nuance in natural language queries — especially longer, more conversational searches, pushing SEO further toward clarity, structure, and “answerability”. BERT update.
2018–2023: Trust, authority, and “who said it” become more prominent (E-E-A-T era).
Across broad core “helpful content” updates, Google’s direction of travel made it clear that low-trust content, weak credibility signals, and shallow expertise would be harder to sustain. In practice, this raised the importance of author credibility, brand reputation, reviews, and independent validation. (Not one single “E-E-A-T update”; but a consistent pattern across core changes.)
2021–2022: Experience + review quality get rewarded (Page Experience / Core Web Vitals + Product Reviews + Helpful Content).
The Page Experience rollout combined Core Web Vitals with signals like mobile-friendliness and HTTPS, reinforcing that poor UX is a constraint on performance. Google also introduced Product Reviews updates to reward reviews with depth and original insight. Then, the Helpful Content system introduced a site-wide signal aimed at reducing unhelpful content created primarily to rank.
2023–2024: “Content quality” gets redefined under AI pressure.
As AI text generation became mainstream, the web began to fill with low-effort sameness. This forced Google (and everyone else) to keep raising the bar on originality, experience, and trustworthy sourcing, because the cost of publishing “good enough” content collapsed. Google on AI in Search.
2024–2026: AI synthesis goes mainstream (AI Overviews + ChatGPT + Perplexity).
This is the real inflexion: AI interfaces increasingly synthesise answers rather than send traffic. That moves SEO further “beyond SEO” — toward becoming the brand that is understood, trusted, cited, and recommended across multiple surfaces (search, AI assistants, video, communities, and review ecosystems).
When did SEO become more than just search engines?
The shift didn’t happen overnight but it began in earnest in the early 2010s. Google’s Panda and Penguin updates marked a critical turning point by punishing thin content and manipulative links, forcing SEO to move away from shortcuts and toward earned authority.
From there, developments like the Knowledge Graph, Hummingbird, featured snippets, and later BERT steadily pushed SEO beyond “ranking pages” and closer to structuring knowledge for machines and humans.
The goal quietly shifted from attracting clicks to informing answers. AI-powered search simply made the evolving trend impossible to ignore.
Why we launched the Beyond SEO® podcast
We launched Beyond SEO® (and even registered the trademark!) because the industry conversation was lagging behind reality. Too much focus on tools. Too little focus on systems.
In real businesses, SEO doesn’t sit in isolation. It intersects with positioning, messaging, product, sales, PR, and analytics. But most discussions treat those as “out of scope”.
Beyond SEO® exists to explore what happens when SEO is treated as a growth function rather than a channel.
Our award-winning “Positioning for Buyer-Led Growth” strategy
A strong example of this approach in practice is our work with elementsuite, a B2B SaaS platform operating in a highly competitive enterprise HR market.
Rather than treating SEO as a standalone channel, the project focused on aligning buyer intent, positioning, messaging, content architecture, and technical foundations into a single growth strategy. This included redefining how the product was framed for enterprise buyers, restructuring the website to support decision-stage journeys, and ensuring organic visibility directly supported pipeline and ARR growth.
European Search Awards Judge, 2025:
“This campaign went beyond SEO: it aligned positioning, messaging, content, and design to drive business growth. Real results with direct SEO-attributed revenue and acquisition. Growthack delivered a comprehensive approach, including developing a new website to establish a strong foundation. It was great to see how stakeholders were actively engaged through a workshop, fostering alignment and collaboration. We were particularly impressed by the seamless integration of SEO and business strategy, which drove outstanding results that exceeded targets.”
Our SEO work with a high-growth SaaS company didn’t succeed due to isolated optimisations. It succeeded because SEO was used as the connective tissue between buyer intent, positioning, content, and commercial outcomes.
We began with a two-day, on-site stakeholder workshop involving Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and the C-Suite. From this, we built a strategic foundation for a full website rebuild and a search-led growth strategy.
We segmented their audiences into two key buying groups:
- Renewal buyers (switching from legacy HR systems)
- First-time buyers (digitising for the first time)
Each group has specific information needs and commercial concerns. Our strategy was to match content structure and messaging to their decision-making journeys, turning the site into a qualification, differentiation and conversion tool.
Fundamental SEO vs AI-era SEO: what’s the difference?
AI hasn’t replaced SEO fundamentals. It has evolved the fundamentals into broader concepts.
- Fundamental SEO: rankings, keywords, pages, sessions
- AI-era SEO: entities, concepts, citations, influence
- Then: optimise for clicks
- Now: optimise for trust and recommendation
The strongest brands win because they are easy to understand, easy to verify, and easy to cite.
Does GEO deserve its own distinct discipline?
Short answer: No.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is a divisive label, and a dangerous one if misunderstood.
GEO is not a replacement for SEO. It’s a distribution layer.
Without technical quality, authoritative content, brand presence, and consistent positioning, GEO tactics collapse quickly. AI systems still rely on the same signals; they just consume them differently.
10 practical SEO strategies that will work in 2026 and beyond
- Create content as knowledge assets, not disposable blog posts.
- Design pages around entities and use cases, not isolated keywords.
- Invest in original research and proprietary data every quarter.
- Align PR and SEO to drive brand mentions, not just links.
- Use video as a citable resource with transcripts and structure.
- Fix technical debt ruthlessly: AI crawlers are unforgiving.
- Build internal linking that reinforces topical depth and flow.
- Optimise content for buyer stages, not generic funnels.
- Track visibility beyond GA4 and Search Console reporting.
- Treat SEO as a company-wide system, not a marketing task.
My top AI Search pick for 2026: video
If I had to make one clear bet for AI search in 2026, it would be video.
Not because video is new, but because it remains the most rigid surface for machines to fake at scale.
AI-generated text has become trivial to produce. With a few prompts, anyone can publish content that looks “good enough”. That has flattened quality, flooded the web with near-identical material, and made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between original thinking and automated output.
Video is different.
High-quality video remains resource-intensive, opinionated, and human-led. It requires subject-matter expertise, narrative clarity, on-camera confidence, and production intent. Those constraints create friction, and friction is exactly what reduces spam.
There’s also a behavioural shift underway. As AI-generated content becomes more pervasive, audiences are becoming more sceptical. Over time, I believe people will actively seek out signals of authenticity and treat obvious AI-driven content as a turn-off, not a shortcut.
From a search perspective, this matters. AI platforms increasingly surface and cite video content.
When it’s well-structured, transcribed, and clearly attributed to credible experts, video bridges the gap between scepticism and trust. Video doesn’t just explain ideas; it demonstrates conviction.
In a world where text is cheap, presence becomes the differentiator. That’s why video represents one of the last meaningful frontiers in the race against the machine.
How can we ensure our videos are cited?
If LLMs can read, verify, and connect videos to trusted entities, they’ll cite them.
- Videos need to look like structured knowledge assets not just visual content.
- Include clear titles, transcripts, captions, and structured data (VideoObject schema).
- Prioritise YouTube (Google-owned) and your own domain for discoverability.
- Upload keyword-rich, human-reviewed transcripts (avoid auto-generated errors).
- Include clear, quotable takeaways (statistics, definitions, steps).
- Link from the video page to supporting research, reports, or articles.
- Feature recognised speakers or subject-matter experts (LinkedIn bios, author schema).
Final thoughts
Beyond SEO isn’t a rebrand. It’s the unavoidable result of search evolving from discovery to decision support.
The teams that win in 2026 and beyond won’t chase algorithms. They’ll build systems that align SEO with how buyers actually research, decide, and trust.
That’s what “Beyond SEO” really means.
