2026 SEO Trends to Follow

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that search is no longer a tidy funnel — it’s a sprawling ecosystem. People still rely on Google, sure, but they also turn to AI assistants, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and a dozen other discovery channels depending on what they need.

The result?

Businesses can’t optimize for a single platform anymore. They need holistic visibility across a growing mix of human and AI-mediated search environments. And before you ask, this doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. On the contrary; these SEO trends in 2026 are exciting, and represent real opportunities for businesses to stay ahead of the curve.

There’s more opportunity than ever to show up at the exact moment someone needs a solution. Sound overwhelming? That’s the exact sort of challenge Baal & Spots helps businesses turn into momentum. After you dive into the trends below, feel free to schedule a conversation with us to explore what these changes mean for your brand specifically.

How AI search trends are changing SEO strategies

For most users, search used to feel predictable:

Enter a query
Browse a page of blue links
Click something that looks promising
Repeat (yawn)

Today, the journey feels more like a choose-your-own-adventure. People ask AI tools for summaries, hop onto Reddit for lived experiences, browse TikTok for fast answers, check Google for credibility, and ultimately return to brand websites when they’re closer to a decision. Discovery isn’t linear anymore; it’s layered, experimental, and deeply personalized.

Like most things it touches, AI search is accelerating this fragmentation.

While Google still holds the majority of global market share (hovering around the high-80s globally in late 2025) it’s losing more of the “high-intent question” space:

Users rely on AI platforms for comparisons, recommendations, troubleshooting, and learning.
They’re turning to conversational engines not just for data, but for clarity.
Many even report that AI search helps them avoid clicking through content that says a lot without saying anything at all.

That frustration alone has pushed the SEO industry into a quality-over-quantity mindset. For brands, this shift means you must be visible in more places than ever — but also relevant in ways you may not have needed to be before.

AI engines don’t reward keyword stuffing or formulas. They reward authenticity, clarity, and depth. And if your brand isn’t showing up where your audience now asks questions, you’re not just missing traffic; you’re missing entire stages of the modern customer journey.

How to optimize for AI search engines

Optimizing for AI search requires a pivot in mindset. AI models don’t “rank” content like Google. They interpret it. They learn from it. They assess whether it feels credible, human, helpful, and worth including in an answer.

You are what you E-E-A-T

That’s why E-E-A-T — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness — has become the foundation of AI visibility (more on this in a second). First-hand stories, industry insights, practitioner perspectives, and real examples matter more today than at any other point in SEO’s history. Generic content is not just ignored by users; it’s ignored by the AI engines that shape their answers.

Get real (really)

One of the biggest opportunities for 2026 is leaning into language AI can’t replicate. AI can summarize the internet, but it can’t recreate your lived experience, your process, your stories, your examples, or your proprietary frameworks. This is where human authorship becomes a competitive advantage rather than a checkbox.

Social proof also plays a growing role in whether AI surfaces your brand. Reviews, testimonials, third-party mentions, interviews, and case studies create a broader credibility footprint that AI engines use to determine whether your content feels trustworthy.

Review your SEO best practices

Finally, don’t overlook the technical basics. Many of the best practices in your SEO handbook still apply in 2026. Like traditional search engines, AI performs best with fresh, well-organized, frequently updated, easily crawlable content. Clear headings, indexable sitemaps, fast load times, and updated pages reduce friction — for both people and AI systems trained to mimic how people search.

How to increase brand visibility in AI

Because AI platforms often generate answers without sending traffic anywhere, brands must rethink what “visibility” even means. We’re officially in a zero-click search era. But zero-click doesn’t mean zero-impact. When AI tools summarize your content, mention your brand, or use your page as a reference, they’re influencing buyers long before someone reaches your website. They rely on things like llms.txt files to know how best to present brands to their users, and what content is the right match for the users’ query — and now, it’s all being monitored.

In 2026, emerging AI visibility tools will help brands understand how often AI systems recommend them, how they’re being described, and where their content appears in AI-generated answers. These metrics are still new, but their importance will grow quickly because they help marketers measure influence, not just pageviews.

This shift also requires new expectations. A business might see fewer traditional clicks but far more AI-mediated exposure. A user may not land on your site during research, but AI may cite your content so convincingly that the user chooses you anyway. Success is no longer defined only by where you rank; it’s defined by how often you shape the conversation.

Nerd corner: what is an llms.txt file, and how can it increase AI visibility?

As AI crawlers became more common, the SEO world needed a simple way to communicate with them — just as robots.txt did for traditional web crawlers. That’s where llms.txt comes in. It’s a plain-text file that tells AI engines:

What they can crawl
What they should avoid
And how you want your content used in training or retrieval

Unlike many technical SEO tools, llms.txt is refreshingly approachable. It doesn’t require complex markup or advanced configuration. But it does offer a way for brands to protect their proprietary information, highlight their highest-value pages, and give AI systems cleaner instructions for discovering truly relevant content.

In 2026, llms.txt isn’t just a technical nice-to-have. It’s becoming a standard component of AI-first SEO strategy — one that signals transparency and helps AI engines understand where your brand wants to be part of the conversation.

Benefits of Reddit for SEO in 2026

Reddit has become one of the most influential training sources for AI models, largely because it captures real, unfiltered human dialogue. People ask honest questions there. They debate solutions. They share frustrations and success stories. They troubleshoot with nuance. It’s a goldmine of insight that AI tools — along with savvy marketers — use to understand how real people speak, think, and make decisions.

For brands, this doesn’t mean rushing onto Reddit to promote yourself. In fact, over-promotion is one of the fastest ways to get downvoted or banned (“Dude, you legally HAVE to tell me if you’re promoting your own business.”).

Instead, Reddit should serve as a research laboratory.

It shows how your audience phrases their concerns, which problems feel most urgent, what kind of advice earns trust, and how people react when a brand genuinely adds value. Studying Reddit threads is one of the easiest ways to create content that mirrors how people actually talk, and that resonance is exactly what AI search engines reward.

Reddit is also useful for identifying content gaps. If you notice the same question being asked repeatedly in your niche, that’s a signal that a clear, helpful answer doesn’t exist yet. Creating useful content — on your site, not on Reddit — positions you as a subject-matter resource in both traditional and AI search.

In short: write for people; not robots.

If there’s one overarching rule that ties these trends together, it’s this: the brands that succeed in 2026 will write for humans first. Google’s evolution, AI’s rise, and the shift toward hybridized discovery all point in the same direction. People want clarity. They want answers. And their BS detectors are at an all-time high! They want guidance from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. And AI engines have gotten very good at recognizing which content feels authentic and which content feels manufactured.

This means your brand’s unique perspective matters. Your experiences matter. Your storytelling matters. The more your content reflects real-world insight rather than generic industry filler, the more likely it is to be surfaced by both AI systems and human searchers.

Brands that embrace this shift — those who speak naturally, offer depth, and truly educate — will outperform competitors who cling to old playbooks built around keyword density and formulaic blog structures.

Now that we have your attention, do you have AI’s?

Choosing the right SEO agency in 2026 goes beyond technical audits or keyword reports. You need a partner that understands how fragmented the modern search journey has become, how AI engines interpret content, and how people actually look for solutions across different platforms. Knowing how to choose the right SEO agency in Houston — or anywhere else, for that matter — should help you blend traditional search principles with the latest SEO trends: AI-era visibility strategies, data-driven content planning, and an understanding of human behavior.

That’s exactly what Baal & Spots does. If you want 2026 to be the year your brand becomes more discoverable, more helpful, and more competitive across search, we’d love to talk.

2026 SEO Trends to Follow: Expert Tips & Insights