Rank in the mind, not on the SERP – with Otuto Umeji

Otuto Umeji shares that one of the key elements to building a successful brand in 2026, from an SEO perspective, is to be the go-to, remembered brand for a particular keyword phrase.Otuto says: “Use brand positioning to move from SERP rankings to mind rankings.”What are mind rankings?“Recently, we have seen that SEO is shifting, and AI search is now summarising results. Because of this, it's no longer enough to just chase rankings. The brands that will win are brands that strongly position themselves in people’s minds, to the point where they search for them by name, regardless of where they are on the SERP rankings.For example, if I say ‘best soda’, the brand that automatically comes to mind is Coca-Cola. If I say ‘energy drink’, the brand that comes to mind is Red Bull. If I say ‘SEO audits’ and ‘keyword research’, Ahrefs and Semrush are what come to mind. If we talk about ‘link building analysis’, Majestic comes to mind. That is what brand positioning is: when your brand is the best at delivering a particular value that your customers truly care about.When they care about this, they will remember you, and they will automatically search for you by name. In 2026, what will win is when you are not just found; you are remembered.This might not sound like SEO, but it’s something that we can introduce to SEO to make your SEO processes better. You are focussing on optimizing your brand so that people search for you automatically.”

Charlie Clark shares that as we move towards an AI search-first world, brands should move beyond "links for links’ sake" and focus on semantically relevant brand mentions that align with key topics and entities, helping AI engines better understand, associate, and prioritise them in results.Talking points include:What’s an example of links for links’ sake?How do we focus on semantically relevant brand mentions?How do we measure the success of semantically relevant brand mentions?How do we ensure that semantically relevant brand mentions align with key topics and entities?Why does this help AI?How do we measure success?

Following on from Aleyda’s advice to optimize for citation-worthiness, Sukhjinder Singh shares that brand recognition is key.Sukhjinder says: “Say goodbye to rankings and hello to recognition. It's time to appear everywhere.”Why is it time to say goodbye to rankings?“It's not a complete goodbye, but it’s changing your mindset. We're still comfortable with tracking ranking positions as one of our main metrics, and it should be one of our metrics, but we need to become more comfortable with appearing in different ways and broadening our idea of what it means to be discoverable.We should be focussing on things like brand mentions, entity strength, visual content, and all the different ways that you're surfaced in the SERPs and the more conversational interactions across platforms.It's broadening that idea and getting out of the comfort zone of tracking the top 10 ranking positions. Even now, that has been made more difficult with Google's change to pagination and how tools are picking up information from beyond position 10.It’s not a complete goodbye, but it’s time to open your mind to other ways of tracking brand recognition instead.”

We all know that one of the most effective forms of SEO is to create a resource that garners natural links. A big part of brand SEO is to build a brand that people want to talk about. Aleyda says: “Optimize for citation-worthiness.This is easier said than done. It's about establishing yourself as an authority in your field, but in order to do that, you have to make it very clear what your unique selling proposition is and create and optimize your assets and web presence accordingly – both within your own website and externally as well.We have heard so much regarding how LLMs are getting citations from social media, and all of these features are giving visibility to Reddit, YouTube, etc., so we need to put some content out there. However, a lot of those conversations aren’t thinking about the alignment with your product, your brand, your USP, and what actually matters business-wise.Time and time again, we have seen how Google updates have negatively affected the rankings and the traffic of topics that are too shallow, too broad, and are not aligned with the subject matter expertise and uniqueness of the brand. We have also seen a lot of comments saying, ‘Because of the Crocodile Effect, it's no longer worth targeting broader informational queries,’ which I also think is too simplistic an approach. The truth lies in the middle. What actually matters is the angles, topics, or specific areas that you can cover as a brand. The topics that make sense business-wise won't be fulfilled by generic concepts, and will incentivise the potential customer to learn more about your brand.It's still worth targeting, not only because it will maximise the chances of a click, but even if it doesn't end up generating a click, it will be worth it just to be visible, because that will help the user make their decision later on in the process.”

However, not all SEOs understand the key elements of brand marketing – and if you’re fortunate enough to have specialist brand marketers in your organisation, take advantage of that!Joshua says: “Brand marketers should be SEOs’ best friends.”Why is that?“Brand marketing reaches where SEO can't. It drives demand, and it drives search interest.SEO has always been an inbound channel, but lately, inbound is getting harder. With things like zero-click searches and AI overviews, the opportunities for getting the click are increasingly challenging, but brand search has always been very high intent and very high click-through rate, and it's also a ranking signal.Working with our friends over in the brand channel, we should be devising strategies to drive more branded search, and SEO should be doing more to help the brand teams deliver on all of their work and communicate those results.”

One element of SEO that’s more important than ever is Brand SEO. Brand SEO, according to Ashley Liddell, should be the essence of what SEO is nowadays.Ashley says: “Treat SEO as more of a brand-building activity.Look beyond the traditional KPIs of visibility and towards making your brand the preferred choice in any conversation that's relevant to you.That will make you front of mind and grow your brand awareness and brand presence.”

James McLoughlin shares that crawling and indexing management needs to be a corner stone of your SEO strategy in 2026, ensuring crawlers (both traditional search engine crawlers and LLM crawlers) can quickly and easily discover, understand and index any content you want surfaced in search engines and LLMs.Talking points include:What does crawling and indexing management mean in practice in 2026?How do you ensure that crawlers (both traditional search engine crawlers and LLM crawlers) can quickly and easily discover, understand and index any content you want surfaced?What is the difference between crawling and indexing management for traditional search engines versus LLMs?How do you determine the content you want to be surfaced?What do you do with the content you don’t want to be surfaced?How does this feed into your content marketing strategy?

With so many changes in the space, new acronyms have appeared in an attempt to describe the newer activities involved in SEO job roles. However, that’s a distraction, says Charlie Whitworth.Charlie says: “Forget the acronyms, particularly with AI search and SEO.Let's stop focusing on what it's called and focus on what we need to do.”Do acronyms not assist with articulating how SEO has changed?“I don’t think that SEO has ever been a good description of what we do. It's always been a fairly inaccurate acronym, given that we don't actually optimize search engines; we optimize websites.The term SEO has never been particularly accurate, but never more so than now. A lot of time, money, and effort have been spent debating whether or not we're still SEOs, whether SEO is dead, whether we should be called GEOs, LLMEOs, etc. It's a big waste of time.It worries me how much time we're spending talking about these acronyms and not talking about what we should be doing. Who cares what the acronym is? The key is the work.This constant obsession with SEO being dead or being called the right thing always comes back, whether it was after the death of link building or after Penguin and Panda. Obviously, the emergence of AI has exacerbated that. I don't think many other marketing industries are constantly talking about whether or not their acronym is accurate.What we need to be doing is focusing on what's going to drive growth for clients.”

Nikolas Monti-Potsolakis shares that you can take learnings from SEO changes in highly regulated industries like iGaming and apply them to other sectors.Nikolas says: “In regulated sectors, like the iGaming space, companies need to keep SEO relevant and part of their strategy.The iGaming industry is growing across all continents, and SEO shouldn't just be part of your campaign; it should be part of your infrastructure as a company.It will still remain the number one growth factor. Despite all the LLMs, AI, applications, and all these things, SEO is still relevant and should still be relevant if you want to grow your company and succeed in 2026, especially in a very regulated market like iGaming.”

It’s not only SEOs in larger organisations that now have a greater requirement to understand and relate to business leaders. This is becoming increasingly important for independent SEO consultants, too. Adrijana says: “Acquiring high-paying SEO clients requires a different approach that a lot of SEOs are not talking about.”Why does it require a different approach, and what does that approach look like?“When you want to move from full-time SEO to freelancing SEO, or get your own clients on the side, most SEOs are not thinking about the fact that it’s a completely new skill. You already have SEO experience and knowledge, but when you want to get a client, that is a business skill, which you probably haven't developed yet.