Find a community where you can start showing up for your audience – with Erin Simmons

Erin Simmons shares that, although AI is important, users still rely on communities to assist with the final buying decision. Erin says: “In 2026, we’re already starting to see that AI is where people start their research, and community is where people make up their minds. Therefore, in 2026, the smartest SEO strategies are going to optimize for both.” Is it becoming the norm for people to use AI for search? “People are getting AI more directly in their faces through things like AIO, but I don't think that the average person is going to ChatGPT or Perplexity specifically. If your demographic is my mother's demographic, I know she's not going to ChatGPT. However, she does use Google a lot, so she is experiencing AI Mode.

Richard George shares that content decay, where website content becomes outdated or irrelevant, negatively impacts user engagement, SEO, and brand reputation, and requires practical strategies and tools for identification and management to keep content fresh and effective. Talking points include: How do you identify ineffective content? What metrics do you look at? What has the zero click serp done to identifying this content? What do you do about it? Should you delete old content? How does this feed into content strategy?

Andrew Stubbs suggests that, once you understand your consumers, you should be ensuring that your content is structured appropriately to be featured by AI search engines. Andrew says: “There is a growing need to understand an awful lot more about consumer activity in terms of where they're actually searching. People used to go on about voice search, which is obviously important, but now you should really be trying to own the answer layer. By that, I'm referring to AI citations and references. When I type something into Google, I generally go to two places. I might go to Google to ask a question and get an answer, or to help me on my fact-finding or information-gathering journey. Otherwise, I'll go to ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the other AI engines, and I'll ask them for their recommendation.

Christopher Hofman Laursen shares that once you’ve mapped out your customer journey, it’s time to determine where AI is going to help you. Christopher says: “Take a step back and really try to understand where generated AI platforms will fit into the customer journey.” Do you do that by instinct, or is there research and data you can use to determine where that's likely to be? “First off, it's super important to realise that there's so much noise in the market at the moment. Right now, we're talking about ‘GEO’ as a new SEO discipline, trying to optimize for generative AI engines. There are former SEO consultants now going all-in on GEO. You see future crypto bros trying to get their foot in the door and creating blank canvas agencies competing against the established agencies. There's a lot of noise to declutter at first.

Gianluca Fiorelli advises that, to truly understand and deliver for your customer in 2026, you should be revisiting how you utilise clustering at every touchpoint. Gianluca says: “Rethink the concept of clustering. We usually think of clustering as something that is only for creating content, especially in the informational space. However, we know that we need to be visible along the entire search journey and customer journey. This means we must be visible with our informational content, but also our commercial, navigational, and transactional content – to use the classic definitions for intent. When you cluster, you need to do so for different types of clusters. The first one is still clustering for topics: entity search, and so on. Then, it is also interesting and very effective to start clustering these queries and segments for other things, like the buyer personas that are implied by these queries. You can cluster them by sentiment, in order to understand the urgency and needs that are implied by those searches.

Becky Simms shares that user intent doesn’t stand still, and this is something that you should be continually analysing. Becky says: “We are seeing huge shifts in how people search, and you need to stay on top of that, but not just by looking at what platforms are doing. You need to understand what users are doing, and how their intent is changing where they search.”

Joao Pereira shares the importance of being where your users are. Talking points include: How do you know where your users are? How do you identify who your users are? What tools do you use to help to identify where they interact? What do you do once you know where your users are? How does this fit into your marketing funnel? What measurable SEO benefit does this have?

It’s one thing to understand who your audience is, but how do you get a true sense of what your customers experience? Eli Schwartz advises walking a mile in their shoes. Eli says: “Map out your customer journey and figure out where search fits.” How do you start mapping an actual search journey? “It's very, very simple: you switch chairs. Marketers always have this marketing hat on when they're trying to sell something. Their boss gives them something, or it's their own product, and they put their marketing hat on. ‘What are the things I need to do? How do I package this? How do I promote it? What should the price be for SEO? What should my keywords be? What should my pages look like? How much content do I need? Who am I going to hire to do this?’

Will Slater uses a ’90s analogy to demonstrate the importance of being unique, even though it takes a little bit longer to get done. Will says: “Be more mixtape, specifically when you're writing content. To explain that, I need to take you back in time to the mid-90s. I'm a big music fan, I have been for most of my life, and my formative years with music were in the ‘90s. Back then, there were two main ways to share music: listening to the radio and making mixtapes and sharing those mixtapes with your friends. Now, creating mixtapes was hard work. It was a faff because you had to figure out exactly what tracks were going to be in what order. You had to sit in front of your stereo, picking out your records or your CDs and pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’ on your tape deck. However, that meant that every mixtape that anybody made was special because people put so much thought and effort into it.

Melissa Popp highlights that it’s easy to take the easy route when it comes to creating content in 2026, but this isn’t the way you stand out. Melissa says: “With AI rewriting the rules of search, content that zeroes in on real user intent is the only content that will stand out and survive.” How do you establish the user intent to begin with? “You have to look at the problem you're trying to solve. Every piece of content you create should start from that place. If you can't answer that question, you should not be writing that piece of content – whether the keywords tell you to or not.”