In 2026, keep your website fresh, shout about your experience and expertise across as many platforms as possible, and make sure your message is clear.

Happy New Year! Wow – another year done, and another new one beginning. 2025 did certainly shake things up a bit online – the massive increase in people using AI has lead to the biggest changes in SEO that I’ve seen in 20 years.

Although, every time I say that, I stop and question myself… it’s tricky… The changes really are in how people search for answers and how those answers are presented. What you need to do to be top, is still largely the same – or things that we’ve always done for serious SEO clients are now important for everyone, rather than just the big players, such as structured data.

But what are my overall tips for staying current with your website in the year ahead? I had a little think and these are my main “rules” I think, for 2026:

SUMMARY

In 20206, to get the best from your website, make little improvements all the time so you’re moving forward, prove to the world you’re an expert, keep your content fresh, continue to build link backs but also get citations in the press (AI doesn’t need a link), ensure your security is good, keep your site speed fast, make sure everything you write is clear and easy to understand for people in a hurry, and have a mailing list so you’re not reliant on social media.

Show up

I often speak to people who say how their website is neglected, and they know they need to do something about it but they just don’t have the time. I know how hard it can feel not to find time for something – but really try this year not to let your website just be that niggling headache at the back of your mind. Chip away at improving it, little and often. If nothing else, make sure you’re on my mailing list so you’ll get my weekly emails with one tiny little improvement you can make to your website each week.

Prove you’re an expert

EEAT has been a thing in SEO for years – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. ChatGPT and AI wants the same as Google and other search engines – they want you to prove you’re an expert in your industry. AI wants to answer questions with the right answers (it’s often wrong, yes, but it wants to be right!). So it’s looking for reliable sources of information and if you seem to be an expert in your sector – because you blog a lot, you show up on LinkedIn and have conversations, you’re listed on other people’s websites because you’ve been on their podcast or are speaking at their event, then it’ll trust you more. And cite you more.

Keep content fresh

This has always been important for SEO, and it’s not different for GEO (getting found by AI). Write fresh content regularly. Try and blog once a week – even if you have a day a month where you bash out your blog posts and schedule them to be published automatically over the next 4 weeks. And write them yourself – even if AI helps you with the themes or inspiration, try and ensure they have a human voice. Your personal experience is important for AI and SEO. You can read more about how to structure your content in my free “How to get found by AI” guide which you can grab here.

Citations

Google wants other sites to link to you, but AI doesn’t need actual links – it just wants to see your name mentioned around everywhere. This links in with what I said above about showing off your expertise – try and get yourself PR coverage. Whereas in the past for SEO it was always tricky to get a journalist to bother to include the right link to you if you were quoted, and that’s still great for SEO, even just a mention of your name (in context with your area of experience) will help get your recognised by LLMs (large language models – AI, basically).

Links still count

As above, for good ol’ fashioned SEO you still want other sites to link to you. It’s an easy way for Google and search engines to see that you must be useful, if other sites are linking to you.

Do your security upgrades

If you’ve got a platform that needs upgrades, make sure you stay on top of them as technology is moving faster than ever. You don’t want your site to break, or be dangerous for people to visit and get a nasty warning sign on it. Even if a plugin doesn’t need an upgrade, if it’s really old, check if there’s a newer one you could use as older tech can have vulnerabilities.

Structured data

This used to be a SEO “nice to have” that we only really did for big clients, but it’s now super important for AI. It’s basically a way of telling robots exactly what’s what, so nothing is left to interpretation. For SEO it’s allowed Google for years to show data and information in it’s search results without having to guess anything, and now for AI it’s allowing robots to give answers with confidence. This explainer article breaks it down and makes it make sense.

Speed and uptime

Google feels the need, the need for speed. And so does ChatGPT. Your site needs to be snappy because these robots don’t have unlimited time (and resource – have you heard how much it costs to run AI?) to hang around. But also, they know if they send people there, people want it to be snappy because we’re getting more and more impatient. Uptime is also vital – as it’s always been – because no one wants to cite or visit a site which might not even be up. You can set up free uptime monitoring at Site Vitals, and then use the reports there to be alerted if anything on your site is slowing you down.

Clarity

Unfortunately people have less of an attention span than ever before, so save yourself lost leads and tedious customer service answering the same questions time and time again, by making things as clear as you possibly can. On the topic of answering the same question over and over, write yourself some FAQs – we’ve got a free FAQ generator here. And if you can have them as structured data too, that’s even better.

Own your audience

Try and get people on a mailing list, rather than rely on social media which can be taken from you at any time. It takes ages and loads of work to build up an audience on Instagram or YouTube or your platform or choice – and then something can happen which makes the platform just pull the rug out from under you. But if you’ve got email addresses, then at least you can keep in touch with people. I touch on this, and give some examples of mailing list builders I like, in my free guide to getting started on the Internet.