Turn AI from a problem to a partner – with Giulia Panozzo

Victoria Olsina shares that AI can and should be used to automate your processes, ensuring that key tasks are delivered as efficiently as possible.Victoria says: “Define an SEO process and then automate it with custom GPTs or no-code tools like Make.com.”How do you determine the processes to focus on?“Every person who does SEO and has done on-page optimization or an SEO audit 50, 100, or 500 times has found ways to approach this problem.We have checklists, we have protocols, and we have templates for these tasks. Once you have the process, the checklist, and the protocol, it's very easy to give those instructions to AI in the form of custom GPTs or automations.If you define those steps manually, it's very easy to then have AI assist you, or automate the process.”

For Giulia Panozzo, SEOs don’t have to compete with AI – rather, AI should be an effective working partner. Giulia says: “Turn AI into your partner, not your problem.”How do you do that?“The industry as a whole has been panicking a little, ever since the AI revolution started taking over. There's been quite a lot of conversation about AI taking over our jobs and replacing us.I don't think we're there yet. I don't know if we'll ever get there either, because I think we have some aces up our sleeves. The way that you turn AI into your partner is by knowing exactly where to use it versus where not to use it.”

Carla Dobson Elliott shares how to have fun with content formats in 2026. Talking points include: - How to write different content formats - How to produce various content formats - Why and how we should profile audiences by curiosity and not demographic - What to include in content - How to measure the success of content

With all of your competitors using AI in some form, how do you stand out from the crowd? For Rana Abu Quba Chamsi, increasing productivity is key.Rana says: “Increase productivity using AI – not only in SEO, but beyond.”How do you decide what you should and shouldn’t use AI for?“You should look at AI like it’s a real assistant. AI should handle preparing the data, summarising the data, and finding all the information that you need.However, for the creative part, like brainstorming, you can rely on AI a little bit, but it shouldn’t handle all of your creative tasks. Also, for the overall view of everything, the strategy should, of course, stay human-centric.The main focus of AI in SEO is not to give everything away. If you create a piece of content with AI, don’t just copy and paste it and publish it right away. You should read it. You should add your touch to it and add the brand voice.”

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.”