Why your SEO playbook needs a second half in 2026

Last week at Google I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai opened the keynote with a number.

"AI Mode has been a revelation, our biggest upgrade to Search ever. People love it, and in just a year, it's already surpassed 1 billion monthly active users."

The size of the number is not the news. What it means for marketing is.

Search used to give you ten links and ask you to click one. Now it reads across pages, picks the parts that answer your question, and writes the answer back to you. The sources show up at the bottom of the answer. But you mostly read the answer and stop there.

This is how Search works now. The question is: how does your brand stay visible?

For two decades, marketing teams optimised for one thing: rank on a Google results page so a human clicks through to a brand site. The metric was traffic, the approach was SEO, and the competitive edge was rank.

Three shifts changed this.

The first one is what Pichai described on stage when he said Search "feels more like an ongoing conversation, giving you deeper insights and connecting you with the vastness of the web." In practice, that means AI Mode reads pages and writes a single answer instead of listing them. Your brand is no longer competing for a click. It is competing to become a source the model decides to cite. The model looks for clear authorship by named humans, structured headers, explicit claims, and sources that can be verified.

The second shift is the information agents Google announced for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers later this summer. These run in the background, read across blogs, news sites, and social media, and share what they think is worth telling the user. If your brand does not appear in the model's reasoning, the user never sees it.

The third shift is agentic booking. Search now books local experiences and services directly inside the result, with pricing, availability, and a direct booking link. The middle of the funnel, the part where a human used to land on your site and decide, is being embedded into the search agent. For travel, services, and e-commerce, the click-to-site-to-convert path is shortening.

The 2026 GEO Benchmark Study from ConvertMate, which analysed 12,500 queries across 8,000 domains, found that 83% of AI Overview citations come from pages outside the organic top 10. Similarweb data from last July showed that almost 69% of Google searches ended without any click to a website.

What to do in the next four weeks.

Week 1: Run a citation audit.

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews the ten questions your customers actually ask. Note down your baseline: when you are cited, when a competitor is, and where the gap is.

Week 2: Restructure your top ten assets for agent reasoning.

The ConvertMate benchmark found that content structure matters more than domain authority for citation. Make sure the answer is in the first paragraph, break the rest of the text into short, scannable sections with descriptive headers, and use FAQ for AI crawlers.

Week 3: Build the expert layer.

Pick the three topics your brand most needs to own, assign a named subject-matter expert to each, and publish under their name. Move away from generic content added by "Admin". Tie content to real humans with verifiable digital footprints (like LinkedIn profiles) to bypass the expertise and trustworthiness thresholds LLMs look for.

Week 4: Reset the measurement dashboard.

Add a citation tracker or an "AI Share of Voice" metric to your monthly reporting and brief your leadership before declining click metrics lead the conversation.

The SEO playbook still works. It just needs a second half alongside it. The teams that win the next two years are the ones building citations alongside clicks.

Share with one marketer who is still optimising for clicks.

← All insights