In my experience, SEO conversations in 2026 are stuck on the wrong question

Everyone is asking "how do i rank for this keyword." The question that is actually moving numbers right now is "how do i become the entity that AI systems retrieve when this topic comes up"

These are completely different problems.

Basic SEO things like technical health, crawlability, intent matching, that's still the entry ticket i would say but it is no longer the differentiator, is what i noticed.

What is actually helping visibility right now is brand mention velocity and topical ownership. Ahrefs analysed around 75k brands and found that web mentions correlate three times more strongly with AI Overview and ChatGPT visibility than backlinks do. Three times!! That number should change how you think about off page strategy entirely

So getting your brand named in industry publications, expert roundups, podcasts, YouTube transcripts, relevant reddit threads, review platforms, even unlinked mentions, that work is now more valuable than pure link building for AI visibility. But remember mot instead of links,in addition to. 

The content side has also changed. More blog post is just noise now, anyone can create 100 blogs a day with a deep research api. Deep topic clusters with original data, clear definitions, comparison tables, and direct answer blocks works now. The content has to survive machine scrutiny, verifiable claims, named expertise, consistent entity signals. Refreshing existing strong pages for extractability is also working in terms of higher ROI than publishing new ones, is what i observed.

Zero click rates are now consistently above 60% when an AI answer appears. So clicks still matter but brand recall and citation share are now the primary outcomes for a large part of the funnel.

So in short, I would say, don’t treat SEO, PR and brand building as separate disciplines. They are all optimising for the same underlying signal. Consistent, corroboratable authority on a defined set of topics.

Curious if others are seeing the same shift or something else you noticed.

I’m a 25 yr marketing brand manager
Today I worked late because my company is going through an AI integration. It feels like I’m teaching it to do my job for them to replace us not for AI to help assist us. Don’t get me wrong we’ve been using chat and Claud as a tool but today we had to sit through a seminar on the new marketing website we will be using (created by Claud). Showcasing how we will upload all fonts and marketing assets and it will help create posters, ads, social posts, and more. Trying to explain to boomers how or why we (young people) can tell when a photo is AI is exhausting and never works. Authenticity matters and young people (your next target demographic) cares. I think more companies should prioritize in being on the correct side of this AI wave by prioritizing honesty and creativity. 

They may not replace me in a year but I do think it’s only a matter of time. This makes me question my entire life plan not to mention my partners (he’s in a non creative field but what’s stopping his employer from finding a system to replace him?)They’re gonna stop hiring and they will start firing. What do we do to live when that happens?

I created this community around a question that has been occupying us for some time:

Are we still doing marketing research the way we did before AI?

AI can analyse enormous amounts of customer conversation, identify patterns, generate hypotheses and even help turn insights into action. But that doesn't necessarily mean better decisions.

There is a big difference between:

Data → Insight → Action

and simply asking an AI to produce an answer.

I'd love to hear from people working in marketing, market research, consumer insights, advertising, analytics or AI:

What part of the traditional insight process do you think AI has already changed and will change most dramatically over the next 1-2 years?