SEO in 2026

SEO in 2026 is an interview series built around one fixed question. It comes near the top of each conversation: what is your number one SEO tip for 2026? Before that, the guest states their takeaway in their own words, so the core idea comes first and the discussion explains it afterwards. Host David Bain asks for the tip, then presses on how it works in practice: whether to benchmark competitors, how a business should explain itself, how to be memorable. The subject stays the same across these conversations. AI search is changing how visibility works, and guests are asked what still holds. Their answers lean heavily toward fundamentals. Pieter Serraris, SEO lead at OM Collective, tells colleagues not to let ChatGPT pull focus from the larger strategy, and says a smaller company has to find a niche and an angle rather than try to win every topic. Tom Winter draws a line between genuine EEAT and the fake version, where an author bio gets pasted on and the work stops. His point is that Google has spent years learning what users value, so no checklist gets around it. Tom Vaughton offers the most quotable image in the set, likening old SEO to drugs in sport, all shortcuts and no knowledge of the market, and the host promptly calls it a T-shirt quote. His alternative is to build the best product or service possible and write genuinely helpful content about it instead of chasing informational traffic. Other guests move the conversation away from rankings entirely. Sara Fernández Carmona argues that traffic is wasted if a homepage cannot say, before any scrolling, what a business does, who it is for and why someone should choose it over the alternatives. Anna Bravington frames the question as one of ethical SEO: the content does not have to be written by humans, but people need to keep checks and balances on AI output because it picks up biases. Greg Gifford, chief operating officer at Search Lab Digital, compares AI trained on AI-written content to copying VCR tapes, and argues that customers shop by symptom, an idea he traces to working with doctors and plastic surgeons. The appeal is breadth through repetition, as one question asked many times becomes a map of current thinking in the field. A listener who wants a concrete place to start could try 'Make your value clear and undeniable as soon as your page is opened – with Sara Fernández Carmona', which turns the tip into three questions a homepage should answer. Several episodes close by restating the takeaway and pointing to a companion book of the same name.