SEO Is Not Dead — It's Just Different Now
Every year someone declares SEO dead. Every year they're wrong. But the way SEO works in 2026 is fundamentally different from five years ago, and most teams haven't caught up. I've been building SEO tools and running content strategies for long enough to see the shift happen in real time. Here's what's actually changed.
AI overviews changed the game, not the rules. Google's AI-generated answers at the top of search results scared a lot of content marketers. Understandably — if Google answers the question directly, why would anyone click through? But the data tells a more nuanced story. Informational queries with simple answers? Yeah, those are getting fewer clicks. But commercial queries, comparison searches, anything where the user needs depth or trust — click-through rates are holding or even improving. The content that suffers is the content that probably shouldn't have existed in the first place: thin, surface-level pages that restate what's in the first paragraph of Wikipedia.
Keyword research is now keyword intelligence. The old model was: find a keyword with volume, write a page targeting it, build some links, rank. That still works in the most basic sense, but the teams winning in SEO now are thinking in clusters, not individual keywords. You don't rank for one term — you build topical authority across a group of related terms. That's why I built Jello SEO: to help teams think about keywords as interconnected clusters mapped to search intent, not isolated targets on a spreadsheet.
Content quality actually matters now. I know that sounds obvious, but for years you could rank mediocre content if you had enough backlinks and the right on-page optimization. That era is genuinely over. Google's systems are better at evaluating whether content actually helps the user, and the sites winning in 2026 are the ones publishing stuff that real people find valuable. Experience signals, original data, genuine expertise — these aren't buzzwords anymore, they're ranking factors.
Technical SEO is table stakes, not a differentiator. Fast site, clean URLs, proper schema markup, mobile-friendly, good Core Web Vitals — if you don't have these, you're handicapping yourself. But having them doesn't give you an edge anymore because everyone has them (or should). The differentiation has moved to content strategy, topical authority, and user experience. I still do technical SEO audits for clients, but the biggest wins almost always come from the content and strategy side.
The playbook for 2026. Build topical authority in your niche. Publish content that demonstrates real expertise and experience. Think in clusters, not individual pages. Make your content better than what currently ranks — not longer, better. Use AI tools to scale your research and analysis, but keep a human voice in the actual content. And measure what matters: not just rankings and traffic, but conversions and revenue from organic search.