Identify searches that need grounding to focus your AI strategy – with Mark Williams-Cook

With the advancement of AI, it’s essential to stay up-to-date with new developments – and for that, Sante Achille believes that it’s essential to revisit learning to learn.Sante says: “Learn how to learn, and use AI to enhance your ability to learn.”Has the way that we learn how to learn changed in the era of AI?“Not yet, but it is going to. The winners are going to be the people who can master the art of learning.If you go back and look at the education system and how we have been educated, it's all been a sort of sausage-making machine. Meat goes in one end, it goes through the grinder, it comes out the other end, and we're a sausage.It’s like factories in the Victorian era, and we are still very much in that era, from an educational point of view, because there is a curriculum and it's very well defined. AI has broken that. The internet disrupted it, but AI is the final blow to a system of predefining what we learn. Now, we have somebody there 24 hours a day who can answer just about any question that we throw at them.This PA is there, and it can be a blessing or a curse. At the moment, a lot of people have embraced the path of least resistance by hogging all kinds of information, harvesting it, and using it without too much thought.There are a lot of people saying, ‘I don't know how to do this. I'm going to ask AI, and AI is going to tell me how to do it.’ That's not what we need. The people who are going to be successful are the ones who say, ‘I need to reach an objective. I need to define something. I need to do something. What do I need to know? What is the threshold that I need to reach so that I can tell AI what to do and get the most out of it?’”

Just because you’ve tidied up the content on your website to cater for the needs of AI, that doesn’t mean that your job is done!Rose says: “Your website casts an AI shadow: a distilled version of your content that AI search systems present to users. It's often this shadow, not your site, that people now meet first.It might look like a two-sentence summary, a list of bullet points, or an AI-curated comparison. It could be on ChatGPT, Perplexity, SGE, or any of the other LLMs or chatbots. Increasingly, though, this is a user's first engagement with your brand, before they ever reach your pages. Sometimes it's the only interaction they have with your brand.This matters because it changes the unit of competition. For years, SEOs have thought in terms of positions and ranks, but in an AI-driven world, the real battleground is representation. How is your brand represented when an AI introduces you to the user? Is it accurate? Is it authoritative? Or (and this is happening more and more), are you simply fueling the answer while a competitor gets the credit?SEO is evolving from being about rankings to being about representation signals. It's not enough to publish content and hope it ranks. You need to actively manage how your content is summarised, how your expertise is attributed, and how your brand shows up in that new AI shadow layer.”

In the past, it didn’t matter so much if old, less relevant content existed on your website and elsewhere. Dani Leitner shares that this isn’t the case anymore.Dani says: “My tip is a really easy one: Clean up your online presence because AI sees everything.”

Kristina Bergwall discusses the importance of translating SEO into a language of tangible business impact in the future AI search landscape, and using that narrative to align all teams such as social, PR, and brand to work together, is what's going to make you win at SEO in 2026. Talking points include: How do you identify the areas of SEO that are likely to result in tangible business impact? What are examples of areas of SEO that don’t tend to deliver tangible business impact? How do you ensure that you don’t shut off SEO activities that take longer to have an impact? How does the future AI search landscape change for different businesses? How do you align different marketing teams to work more effectively together in this changing landscape?

Damien Robert explains the need to move beyond traditional web content, achieved by making content modular, leading with irrefutable evidence. In addition, he recommends managing all assets from a single source of truth to please both humans and AI consumption.Damien says: “Re-order your content to future-proof your search dominance.”

Mark Williams-Cook explains that you also need to consider the type of search that you’re attempting to optimize for, and the way that AI engines deal with different types of searches.Mark says: “Everyone should be determining whether their AI searches need grounding or not.”

Jason Barnard shares that you can’t look at LLMs alone as the standalone way to determine whether or not your AI optimization has been a success.Jason says: “I'm going to explain how any marketer can optimize for AI-assistive engines.People call it generative engine optimization; I call it AI-assistive engine optimization. Whichever name you use, the principle to SEO in the AI era is very simple, and it's called the Algorithmic Trinity.”

Garrett Sussman shares that, even though there is great opportunity in being included in AI search results, results aren’t guaranteed.Garrett says: “Treat AI search as probabilistic, not predictable.Build content strategies rooted in deep audience understanding, because what shows up in search results depends on who's searching and how they search.”

Katie New shares the importance of tracking metrics that actually matter to you in 2026 (not just the default ones that you're used to asking for!) Talking points include: What are the default metrics? How do you determine the metrics that matter to you? How do you know that these are the best metrics to track? How do you know the best way to go about tracking them? How often should you review your metrics? How do you persuade stakeholders to change metrics?

Nik Ranger shares that you shouldn’t necessarily conclude that ranking on Google means ranking well on AI search engines.Nik says: “Stop thinking just about ranking on Google and start focussing on a new discipline: AI visibility engineering. This is where you can systematically probe AI models to measure brand associations, quantify perception, and then use those insights to engineer on-page, off-site, and then use those insights to engineer on-page, off-site, and strategic actions that influence how these machines understand and represent your clients.”