This article covers eight of the most prominent SEO trends right now, from answer engine optimization and E-E-A-T to multi-platform discovery and technical readiness. Each one is backed by data, so SEO teams can gauge how much these developments actually affect their work.
Table of Contents
- Is SEO dead? Here's the truth about search evolution.
- Top SEO Challenges in 2026
- 8 SEO Trends to Master in 2026
Is SEO dead? Here's the truth about search evolution.
SEO is not dead. Search remains relevant today, but it has changed significantly enough that the old playbook needs a bit of a rework. SEO trends just need to shift to reflect the changing landscape.
The fact that SEO is still alive and well is evidenced by a recent update on Google Search Central. The article “Optimizing your website for generative AI features“ is filed under the SEO Fundamentals category. In it, Google takes on the new acronyms directly, addressing whether AEO represents something separate from SEO:
“‘AEO’ stands for ‘answer engine optimization’ … [A term] used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences. From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
Google positions optimization for AI-driven search experiences as an extension of traditional SEO rather than a separate discipline.
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My potentially controversial take: Google’s documentation says AEO is still SEO, but marketers looking ahead shouldn’t accept that as the whole story. Google’s guidance can only reflect its own algorithms, and search no longer happens exclusively on Google. Search now happens across platforms, including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
Modern SEO strategy should prioritize answer engine optimization alongside what has always worked. Visibility, retrieval, citation, and recommendations are an extra layer of consideration needed to appear in answer engines.
How SEO Has Changed
SEO has shifted from a Google-only, click-based discipline to one that spans multiple platforms and AI-driven answers. For years, it meant ranking on Google, building links, targeting keywords, and earning clicks. That model still has value, but the search landscape has fragmented. Users now discover content through:
- AI Overviews on Google
- Conversational answers on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other answer engines
- Video results on YouTube
- Community-driven posts on TikTok and Reddit
- Social search on platforms like LinkedIn and X
Answer engine visibility is the biggest force shaping SEO trends. Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) appear on roughly a quarter of searches, up from earlier in 2025, and nearly all of the keywords that trigger them are informational, according to Ahrefs and Conductor.
This shows up clearly in B2B buying. Generative AI is now a first port of call for buyers researching vendors. A report from Responsive, Inside the Buyer’s Mind, found that buyers discover new vendors through:
- 33% web search.
- 33% peer recommendations.
- 32% generative AI chatbots.
Buyers start with a long list, an average of about eight vendors, then narrow to a shortlist of three or four, often before a single click reaches a website. Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity have become discovery channels, satisfying queries on the spot, which means these zero-click searches lower the value of rankings alone.
Since shortlisting now happens inside AI answers, brands need visibility into how they appear there. HubSpot AEO tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, showing marketers how often their business appears in AI answers and where competitors are winning.
The continued shift from Google-only to multi-platform discovery is one guaranteed SEO trend, and the evolution of search shows how the landscape got here. From answer engine optimization and E-E-A-T to multi-platform discovery, these are the latest SEO trends shaping 2026, and the challenges they bring to search marketers everywhere.
Top SEO Challenges in 2026
The top SEO challenges in 2026 are multi-platform discovery, AI and zero-click search, and the growing difficulty of proving ROI as tracking data becomes less reliable. Each forces SEO managers and marketing leaders to rethink strategies built for a Google-only, click-based search landscape.
Multi-platform Discovery
Multi-platform discovery means buyers now find products and answers across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, other social platforms, and LLMs such as Perplexity — not just Google. For SEO teams, that fragmentation is the challenge: visibility now has to be earned on several platforms at once, each with its own rules.
HubSpot’s Consumer Trends report has found that younger audiences increasingly use social platforms as search and discovery tools.
This doesn’t mean abandoning Google. It still processes roughly 14 billion searches per day, dwarfing every other platform. But it does mean that adapting to the new era of search requires platform-specific content strategies.
Pro tip: Brands that treat each platform as its own discovery channel perform better than those running a “post everywhere” approach from a single content template. Each channel has native content formats, platform-specific SEO, and audience-appropriate tones marketers need to follow.
AI and Zero-click Searches
AI and zero-click searches are reshaping organic search by answering questions on the results page, so users get what they need without clicking through to a website. This is the most immediate pressure on organic search performance today.
A controlled study found that AI Overviews reduced organic clicks by 38% on triggered queries, with zero-click searches rising from 54% to 72% when AIO was present.
For SEO teams still measuring SEO success primarily through clicks, this creates a major reporting gap, because clicks to websites aren’t everything.
The response isn’t to abandon SEO and content, but to rethink content’s role.
Content that earns citation in AI-generated answers, appears in featured snippets, and shows up in People Also Ask results still builds brand authority, even without a direct click.
For example, a search for “software for small businesses” returns an AI Overview that organizes recommendations into three categories: accounting, productivity, and CRM, and names specific vendors in each: QuickBooks, Xero, and Wave for accounting; Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for productivity; and HubSpot CRM for customer management.
The searcher here is likely looking for information, not necessarily to visit a website and sign up yet. Visibility in this AI Overview could land a listed vendor on the searcher’s shortlist, before they’ve clicked through to any website.
SEO teams must meet the standards required to earn citations as well as the traditional ranking by doing things like:
- Creating content that is clear, well-structured, and citation-worthy.
- Surfacing direct answers immediately and elaborating later
- Measuring success through metrics that look beyond click volume.
Modern SEO strategy should prioritize zero-click visibility as a genuine outcome, weighed alongside traditional metrics like clicks and impressions. Tools built for this gap can help: HubSpot AEO measures brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, showing SEO teams how often their content appears in AI answers, even when those answers don’t generate a click.
Pro tip: In Google Search Console (GSC), watch for queries where position, or even impressions, are rising, but clicks and CTR are falling. That gap is often a sign that an AI Overview is answering the query before users reach your result and a signal that your content needs to be optimized for featured placement, not just ranking position.
Here’s a look at my cycling blog’s GSC data for the past 16 months. It shows a rising average position, but clicks are dropping.
Despite an improvement in the website’s average position (orange line), clicks (blue line) and impressions (purple line) dropped.
A filtered view of the month before the impression drop and the month after shows that informational searches are dropping. Searches include keywords like:
- “Can I …”
- “Bicycle touring for beginners”
- “Quotes”
None of these queries led to revenue. Although the click loss is real and measurable, my blog’s revenue remains pretty stable. Nothing is lost, but without revenue tracking, no one would know, and it would be easy to see the decline as a failure.
Proving ROI in a Cookieless World
Proving SEO ROI in a cookieless world means tying organic search to business outcomes, conversions, leads, revenue, and AI visibility, rather than relying on clicks and third-party tracking. As clicks drop and cookies disappear, SEO teams have to demonstrate value through metrics that connect search to the bottom line.
These metrics have always been business-critical, but SEO teams haven’t always tracked them. If there’s one upside to AI and zero-click search, it’s that the industry has been forced to prove its value, which means measurement frameworks that look beyond isolated clicks and conversions. AI visibility should be measured alongside clicks, conversions, and engagement.
That means placing greater emphasis on:
- First-party data, or information collected through user actions like email signups, account creation, purchases, and CRM records. It proves long-term audience value, captures owned-audience growth, and reduces reliance on increasingly unreliable third-party tracking.
- Assisted conversions, or conversions where SEO contributed to the customer journey without being the final touchpoint. Measuring them shows how organic search influences revenue even when another channel gets last-click credit.
- Branded search growth, or an increase in searches for a company, product, or brand name. Rising branded demand often signals growing awareness and trust built through SEO visibility, content, PR, and AEO exposure.
- Engagement signals, including metrics like scroll depth, time on page, repeat visits, and returning users. Strong engagement and high return rates indicate that organic traffic is qualified and finding value, connecting visibility to business outcomes.
- CRM and revenue attribution, like linking organic traffic and content interactions to leads, opportunities, pipeline, and closed revenue inside platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce. This positions SEO as a measurable growth channel with commercial impact, not just a traffic source.
- Visibility within AI-generated search, or monitoring how often content is cited, summarized, or surfaced in AI Overviews and LLM responses. Even without clicks, this visibility strengthens brand awareness, authority, and future demand.
Tracking these metrics well means working more closely with PPC, CRM, sales, and analytics teams rather than operating in channel silos, which lets SEO analysts tie their work to business goals like revenue. The key is refining reports, working with other marketing teams, filtering data, and looking at AEO and SEO separately, because the two perform differently.
Although answer engine experiences don’t drive the click volume that traditional SEO once did, the conversion rate on that traffic can be significantly higher.
Similarly, SEO teams may need to upgrade existing tools or discover new ones to support AI analysis. For example, tracking visibility across multiple platforms manually isn’t realistic for most teams.
HubSpot AEO measures brand visibility, citations, sentiment, and share of voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity in a single dashboard. It connects that data directly to the CRM, so AI visibility shifts can be tied to pipeline and revenue without jumping between tools.
Here are the results for one of my clients through 2025, demonstrating the intent-driven clicks behind traffic from AI sources:
I work with a client whose website generated more than 17,000 sessions from traditional organic search, with a solid conversion rate of 2.93% throughout the entire year.
But the really interesting insight came from AI-driven traffic.
While answer engines delivered just 565 sessions, those visitors converted at 8.31%, nearly three times the rate of traditional organic traffic.
Answer engines may reduce overall click volume, but the users who do click through often arrive with far stronger intent. They’re not casually browsing. They’re further along in the decision-making process, more informed, and more invested in finding the right solution.
Our guide to the SEO challenges facing teams right now digs into each of these.
8 SEO Trends to Master in 2026
1. There are more zero-click searches than ever.
In 2026, nearly two-thirds of all Google searches end without the user clicking on any result, and when an AI Overview is involved, that figure climbs higher. Average click-through rate (CTR) drops by 18% when an AIO is present. Ranking well no longer guarantees a click, though it still drives visibility, which holds value but has to be measured differently.
Why It Matters
AI Overviews and other SERP features increasingly answer the query on the results page, so traffic that once came from a top ranking now stays on Google. For content and SEO teams, the risk isn’t losing rankings; it’s ranking well and still seeing clicks fall, with no obvious explanation in traditional reports. Measuring impact now means looking past clicks to visibility, citations, and the business outcomes that follow.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
Surviving in a zero-click landscape comes down to two things: maintaining the tactics that earn visibility, and changing how that visibility is measured.
First, keep meeting SEO and AEO requirements. A zero-click search isn’t a search to avoid; sometimes visibility is the whole point. Content still leads. The pieces that win featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and AIO citations build brand awareness that drives branded search, even when no click happens at the point of discovery. As prospective clients build shortlists through AI-tool research, they’re discovering either a brand or its competitors. Failure to appear in these generative AI answers is a failure to make the shortlist.
Practically, visibility in answer engines means:
- Leading with direct, concise answers before expanding with context and detail.
- Using questions in H2s and H3s that reflect how users phrase searches.
- Apply schema, including FAQ schema, wherever content fits a question-and-answer format.
- Build content around the queries where AIO appears.
Second, change what counts as success. Instead of treating clicks and impressions as the only metrics that matter, track visibility and brand sentiment in answer engines, and double down on conversion tracking that ties SEO and AEO work to business objectives.
Brand visibility has always been part of marketing. Billboards don’t generate clicks, TV ads don’t produce sessions, and radio spots don’t have CTRs. Yet for decades, marketers have accepted that visibility in those channels has real value when it reaches the right audience at the right time. Zero-click SEO and answer engines work on the same logic.
Tools
SEO teams can’t claim a stake in AI visibility on guesswork; the first step is understanding how AI systems actually describe the brand. That’s where HubSpot’s free AEO Grader comes in. The free diagnostic analyzes how leading answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini) currently characterize a brand. A user enters the company name, location, industry, and product or service, and the tool runs that information across all three platforms at once, producing a composite score out of 100 with a written interpretation of the results.
The AEO Grader is free, requires no account, and takes minutes to run. For marketing teams that have never measured their AI visibility before, it provides an immediate baseline and a clear set of dimensions to improve against.
Pro tip: For ongoing monitoring rather than a one-time diagnosis, HubSpot AEO goes deeper. It tracks your brand’s AI characterization across prompts you define, runs them daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, and shows how visibility and sentiment scores shift week over week, with competitor comparison and citation analysis built in.
HubSpot AEO connects that visibility data directly to the CRM, tying AI visibility shifts to content changes and business outcomes in one place (more on this next). For teams already running HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro or Enterprise, AEO is built into the platform with no separate subscription or connectors — so AI visibility data sits alongside campaign metrics from day one. For teams outside the HubSpot ecosystem, HubSpot AEO is available at $50/month, with a free 28-day trial.
Visibility metrics matter, but they can’t carry the business case for SEO alone. Alongside AI visibility and brand sentiment tracking, maintain conversion tracking tied to organic and AEO efforts, including:
- Form completions
- Demo requests
- Trial sign-ups
- Revenue influence from organic sources
- Assisted conversions
- Contact form fills
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2. Answer engines are becoming a discovery channel you can’t ignore.
Answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity aren’t replacing Google, but they are carving out a meaningful share of the discovery journey — particularly for research-heavy, comparison-based, and complex queries where users want summaries rather than a list of links.
Why It Matters
According to Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Brand Visibility Index, 35% of US consumers now use AI to discover products, compared to 13.6% who use traditional search instead. That’s a fundamental change in the upper funnel, and it should have major implications for how brands think about content strategy.
Answer engines don’t replace SEO; they extend it. The same content that earns organic rankings is what answer engines pull from, so showing up well in AI answers complements strong SEO, not a separate discipline that competes with it.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
The content most likely to be cited in AI-generated answers shares a consistent set of characteristics:
- Answers a specific question directly and early
- Cites credible sources and data (ideally primary data)
- Demonstrates expertise rather than surface-level summaries
- Structures sections so they’re easy to extract and reference
Marketers should also think carefully about the specific questions ideal audiences ask AI tools. These tend to be longer, more conversational, and more complex than traditional keyword targets, which means keyword research alone no longer cuts it. Marketing teams need to really know their audience, not just guess at it.
Getting to know a target audience starts with a buyer persona — a detailed, research-backed profile of a brand’s ideal customer that captures their goals, challenges, and how they make decisions. Without one, content strategy defaults to what ranks rather than what the buyer actually needs to know.
Tools
HubSpot’s Make My Persona is a free, AI-powered tool that builds detailed buyer personas in seconds. The updated tool has two modes:
- AI-powered mode: Describe the ideal customer in plain language (job title, industry, challenges, goals), and the AI populates every field, demographics, motivations, pain points, and communication preferences — no manual template-filling.
- Classic step-by-step flow (labeled “Legacy App”): A guided series of questions that builds the same profile at a slower, more deliberate pace.
The output in both cases is a professional, shareable persona document that the entire marketing, sales, and content team can reference and act on.
Buyer personas are key to the latest SEO developments because they help brands understand their audience’s needs and earn visibility in answer engines.
3. E-E-A-T is non-negotiable.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) is now non-negotiable because the same credibility signals that earn Google rankings also decide which content answer engines cite. Google added the “E” for Experience to E-A-T shortly after ChatGPT launched, and that timing wasn’t a coincidence.
Why It Matters
E-E-A-T signals strengthen content credibility. Generic content farms saw steep traffic declines after the December 2025 Core Update, while sites demonstrating experience and expertise saw a 23% gain. In a Wellows analysis of AI Overview citations, pages ranking #6–#10 with strong E-E-A-T signals were cited 2.3 times more often than #1-ranked pages with weak authority signals, evidence that demonstrated expertise can outweigh raw ranking position.
Experience is the hardest signal to fake because AI tools have none, which makes it the most valuable to demonstrate.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
Good content marketing means creating pages that demonstrate real experience by:
- Including real-life experience and findings
- Documenting real results and specific data from actual projects
- Adding original data, screenshots, case studies, or before-and-after comparisons that only first-hand involvement can produce
- Giving every piece a named human author with a credible bio, verifiable credentials, and an internal link to an author page
Pro tip: Content writers can still use AI to write content, but it must be edited and approved by a human writer who can inject personality and experience.
4. Video SEO continues to expand.
Video SEO is expanding because video now surfaces across far more of the search experience than it used to, in traditional SERPs, video carousels, People Also Ask, and AI Overviews, not just on YouTube.
Why It Matters
After Google, YouTube is the second most visited website, but it’s no longer the only place video ranks. Google now pulls video results from across the web.
The most efficient starting point for most teams is repurposing top-performing written content into video. A comprehensive blog post on a high-intent topic already has the structure, keyword research, and audience validation in place. Turning it into a video adds a new indexable asset, opens a discovery channel, and gives the original post an embedded video that improves dwell time and reduces bounce rate.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
Here are a few ways to optimize YouTube videos for ranking success:
Add chapters. Chapters create individually searchable segments within a video and increase the likelihood of appearing in Google’s AI Overview video carousels, which surface the most relevant portion of a video for a query. They give viewers and Google a clear map of the video’s contents, and make it easy for Google to pull different clips into AI Overviews. Per the image below, the recommended video begins partway through, starting from the section most relevant to the query.
Include closed captions (CC). Captions help YouTube and Google understand every word in a video. YouTube can auto-generate them, but automatic captions aren’t always accurate, so adding them manually is better.
Optimize the title, tags, and description. Videos work like webpages: they have titles, descriptions (like meta descriptions), and tags (like meta tags). Front-load the primary keyword in the title within the first 60 characters, and write descriptions of 200 words or more with natural keyword placement in the opening sentences.
Add video schema markup. VideoObject schema tells search engines the title, description, duration, thumbnail, and upload date of a video, improving eligibility for rich results and AI Overview inclusion.
Pro tip: Embedding videos into website pages and blog posts can improve bounce rates.
Video reach also extends beyond YouTube: TikTok, Instagram Reels, and LinkedIn video are all growing as discovery surfaces for different audience segments.
Which Platforms to Prioritize
YouTube is the most influential platform for rankings in Google Search. To understand which video platforms Google actually prioritizes, I ran a small-scale experiment across 15 search terms spanning informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational intent, across both B2B and B2C audiences.
YouTube dominates video SEO across almost every query type, appearing most frequently in traditional SERPs, video tabs, and short video carousels alike.
After YouTube, Instagram ranked second, followed by TikTok. The one notable exception was transactional intent — searches like “buy standing desk online” — where Instagram and TikTok outperformed YouTube, which suggests product-focused video benefits from a multi-platform publishing approach.
Beyond being Google’s own platform, YouTube offers more technical and semantic optimization options than any competing platform:
- Longer descriptions
- Timestamps and chapters
- Playlists for topical clustering
- Closed captions
- Thumbnail images that can earn placement in Google’s image pack
Embedding YouTube videos on web pages adds even more: page context, structured data, and entity associations that help Google understand not just what a video covers, but how it connects to broader topics and queries.
5. Conversational and voice search are reshaping query patterns.
Conversational and voice search are reshaping query patterns by pushing searches toward natural, spoken-style language, the way people actually talk, rather than the clipped keyword phrases SEO was built around. Today, voice search accounts for 27% of all queries, and that share is growing as use of smart speakers and AI assistants expands.
Why It Matters
The gap between how people type and how they speak (or prompt an AI) is significant. When someone asks ChatGPT a question, they phrase it the way they’d say it aloud, and Google’s AI Mode works the same way. Voice search was long predicted in the SEO world, and in 2026 it has finally found its place. Content that relies on formal, keyword-dense phrasing is increasingly misaligned with how people actually search.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
Start with question-based keyword research. Tools like AnswerThePublic, Google’s People Also Ask data, and a site’s own Search Console queries reveal the actual questions an audience asks in their own words. These conversational targets tend to be more specific, higher-intent, and less competitive than short-tail keywords.
Then structure content around those questions explicitly:
- Use question-based H2 and H3 headings (“How does X work?” or “What is the best way to Y?”)
- Follow each question with a concise, direct answer before expanding.
This structure serves both voice search, where only one answer gets read aloud, and AI-generated answers, where the system needs a clear, extractable response.
6. Multi-platform search optimization is now essential.
Multi-platform search optimization is now essential because the buyer journey spans multiple platforms rather than being concentrated on Google. Consumers bounce between 3.6 platforms before making a purchase, completing journeys that can take up to 10 weeks and involve as many as 97 interactions, according to Rise at Seven. A strategy that optimizes for Google alone leaves most of those interactions unaddressed.
Why It Matters
Per Sprout Social’s 2026 data, 49% of Gen Z use TikTok specifically for product discovery. Search increasingly starts in the feed, not the browser, and the path from discovery to conversion is rarely linear, which is why a single-platform strategy misses so much of it. (More on integrating search and social media marketing.)
How to Apply This SEO Trend
Platform-specific optimization is the key distinction between a multi-platform strategy and simply posting everywhere. Each platform has its own algorithm and ranking signals, as well as content formatting requirements. A holistic search strategy optimizes for each one on its own terms:
- On YouTube, optimize titles, descriptions, chapters, and thumbnails for discoverability.
- On TikTok, the first three seconds determine algorithmic reach; lead with the hook, use text overlays and captions, and optimize video descriptions with relevant keywords and hashtags.
- On Reddit, participate authentically in communities relevant to the category. Earned mentions and organic recommendations in threads carry significant trust weight and can influence both direct traffic and the likelihood of AI citations.
- On LinkedIn, thought leadership posts and data-driven content earn disproportionate reach with professional audiences.
7. Technical SEO supports AI readability and performance.
Technical SEO supports AI readability by making sure both search engines and AI crawlers can reach, render, and interpret a page, which now determines whether content can be indexed, cited, or surfaced in AI-generated answers. In 2026, its role has expanded beyond traditional crawling and indexing to include how machine-readable a page is for AI systems.
Why It Matters
Technical SEO has always been the backbone of organic search. The difference now is that it determines not just whether search engines can crawl and index content, but whether AI systems can read, understand, and confidently cite it.
Most well-built websites pose no problem for AI crawlers. The exception is JavaScript: when important content, navigation, or internal links rely on client-side rendering that loads too slowly, fails to render, or requires user interaction before appearing. Unlike Google’s crawlers, some AI crawlers can’t render JavaScript at all, so they may struggle to access or interpret the page, reducing the chance that content gets indexed, cited, or surfaced in AI answers.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
- Schema markup improves machine understanding of content. It helps Google, and because AI crawlers can read the contents of schema, it also makes content easier for answer engines to understand.
- Prioritize Core Web Vitals. Fast, stable, responsive pages are easier for both search engines and AI crawlers to process, and they support the user experience signals Google rewards.
- Keep critical content server-rendered. Anything essential to understanding the page, main content, navigation, and internal links should not depend on client-side JavaScript.
- Use intentional internal linking. Clear, descriptive internal links help crawlers discover content and understand how pages relate, reinforcing topical authority.
8. Brand authority is becoming a stronger ranking advantage.
Brand authority is becoming a stronger ranking advantage because Google increasingly rewards brands that audiences recognize and search for by name, not just pages that match keywords. Among the new SEO technology and SEO innovations shaping organic search in 2026, this shift toward authority as a ranking signal is one of the most significant.
Why It Matters
SEO has always rewarded authority, but the signals Google uses to assess it have evolved. Branded search volume is emerging as one of the clearest. A brand that people search for by name, rather than finding incidentally through generic keywords, sends a strong quality signal to Google’s ranking systems. Building the kind of brand recognition that generates direct searches is now an SEO strategy, not just a marketing objective.
How to Apply This SEO Trend
Build brand authority through:
- Thought leadership content. Detailed perspectives on industry developments, forward-looking analysis, and strong editorial points of view build authority in ways that generic informational content can’t. When a brand is consistently cited and referenced in industry conversations, it signals to both Google and AI systems that the brand is a trusted, recognized source in its category.
- Original research and earned media. Backlinks from universities, government sites, and leading industry publications pass trust directly to a domain and associate a site with entities that Google already trusts. Pitch original data and expert perspectives to publications that carry domain authority.
- Branded search tracking. Monitor branded search volume in Google Search Console as an ongoing signal of brand equity. Rising branded queries indicate that content, thought leadership, and broader marketing are building recognition that compounds into a ranking advantage over time.
Pair these brand-authority tactics with post-SEO marketing thinking to see how brand-building and organic visibility reinforce each other.
Your SEO Action Plan
SEO isn’t disappearing. SEO trends just look different than they did in the past. Yet, the goal hasn’t changed: get discovered by the right people at the right moment, wherever they’re searching. New SEO trends all point toward content that answers questions, brands that demonstrate real authority, and strategies that meet buyers where they are.
Here’s where to start:
- Find the gap. In Google Search Console, look for the split between rising impressions and falling clicks, and then restructure that content to improve zero-click visibility.
- Get a baseline. Run your brand through HubSpot’s free AEO Grader for an instant read on how answer engines describe you today. It takes minutes, and most competitors haven’t done it.
- Monitor over time. For ongoing tracking, HubSpot AEO measures visibility, sentiment, and competitor share of voice across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity daily, with recommendations connected to your content tools so insight turns into action in one workflow.
- Ground strategy in the audience. If content still revolves around keywords rather than a real understanding of the audience, HubSpot’s Make My Persona is the fastest way to close that gap.
Once they understand the SEO trends, content teams can adapt and improve their marketing initiatives. Bring AI visibility, branded search trends, and assisted conversions into your dashboards alongside traditional metrics, and help the leadership team see that visibility in a zero-click world still builds pipeline.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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- Plan your keyword strategy.
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- Build a blog strategy.
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