"Search engine optimisation in 2026: what still works and what no longer does"

Search engine optimisation has been the cornerstone of online visibility for years, yet the field has changed significantly in a short space of time. The results page looks different from how it did two years ago; people are more likely to phrase their queries in full sentences – and sometimes no longer ask Google at all – whilst updates are coming thick and fast, outpacing most websites’ ability to keep up. Yet the core principles have remained surprisingly stable. This guide covers the technical aspects, content, authority, how to measure your progress, and what specific steps you can take tomorrow. It includes the figures and sources, and doesn’t pretend that everything is entirely within your control.

What search engine optimisation will mean in 2026

SEO, which stands for search engine optimisation, is the strategic and technical work involved in ensuring that your website ranks highly in the organic results on Google and Bing, and now also in AI-driven platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. The goal remains the same: more relevant traffic and, ultimately, more customers. What has changed is the path to achieving it.

Google adjusts its algorithm thousands of times a year. Most of these adjustments go unnoticed. You do notice the major core updates, though, and the trend is always the same: less prominence for superficial content, and greater rewards for pages that genuinely answer a question. On top of that, the results page itself has changed in layout: an AI summary at the top alters the relationship between a good ranking and the number of visitors you receive.

The main misconception is to view SEO as a collection of isolated measures. Google now assesses entire content systems rather than individual pages. How consistently do you cover a topic, how clearly is your expertise demonstrated, and how logically is your site structured? A strong page within a weak structure is less effective than a well-rounded whole. That insight runs like a thread through everything that follows.

Technology is the prerequisite for everything else to work

Technical SEO is all about whether search engines can access, understand and index your site, and whether visitors can navigate it easily. Without that foundation, even the best content won’t make it onto the first page. It’s rarely spectacular: canonical tags that are correct, 404 errors that are resolved, a robots.txt file that doesn’t accidentally block half the site, and redirect chains that you clear up before they pile up.

Within this framework, Core Web Vitals are the benchmarks that Google publishes. Largest Contentful Paint measures how quickly the main content appears, with 2.5 seconds as the upper limit. Interaction to Next Paint measures how smoothly the page responds to a visitor’s actions, whilst Cumulative Layout Shift measures whether elements shift position whilst the page is loading. Pages in position 1 meet the ‘good’ threshold around 10 per cent more often than pages in position 9. That isn’t the deciding factor, but in a competitive niche it acts as a tiebreaker: where quality is comparable, the faster, more stable site wins.

There is also an argument that goes beyond rankings. A 0.1-second improvement in mobile loading time can increase the conversion rate in the retail sector by over 8%. So speed pays for itself even if your ranking doesn’t budge a millimetre.

The other things you need to bear in mind are limited and straightforward:

• Measure Core Web Vitals on mobile, as Google indexes sites using a ‘mobile-first’ approach and the vast majority of search traffic comes from mobile devices. PageSpeed Insights is the logical starting point for that.
• Implement schema markup in JSON-LD for articles, products, FAQs and reviews. Structured data helps Google and AI systems understand what’s on your page.
• Keep your internal linking structure logical, so that both crawlers and visitors can find their way around and authority is distributed effectively.
• Check your crawl budget, canonicals and indexing for larger sites, and check them again after every redesign or migration.

That last point is worth emphasising. Technical issues can creep in during a redesign, a plugin update or a URL change without a redirect, and each of these moments is a potential breaking point if no one checks the SEO implications. A systematic check prevents you from having to analyse an unexplained dip months later. What a full audit actually delivers is set out in The guide to SEO scans.

Content that matches the search intent

Google is increasingly evaluating content using language models that assess meaning, and less and less using a fixed list of ranking factors. That may sound abstract, but the implications are very practical. Keyword stuffing has been ineffective for years now. Text that is clearly written to appeal to an algorithm is losing ground to text that genuinely helps readers.

The starting point is search intent, not search volume. Broadly speaking, there are four types: informational (gaining knowledge), navigational (reaching a specific site), commercial (comparing and exploring options) and transactional (purchasing or making an enquiry). Each page should cater to exactly one of these. Someone searching for ‘search engine optimisation’ wants to understand how it works and doesn’t want a quote form. Someone searching for ‘SEO agency Amsterdam’ is almost ready to make a decision. These two scenarios call for completely different pages.

The results page itself is your best source. Look at what Google ranks highest for your search term: guides, lists, product pages or videos. That will tell you what format is expected. Then add something that the existing results are missing: depth, up-to-date data, a clear point of view. Long-tail keywords are often underestimated in this context, as whilst the search volume is modest, the search intent is highly specific, and visitors from these searches generally convert better.

Furthermore, maintenance continues to be underestimated. An archive that remains untouched for years drags down the average quality of your site. Update pages with new figures, or remove them if they no longer add any value. Out-of-date information is an active risk, not a neutral factor.

Visibility outside the blue link

Google is increasingly displaying images and videos at the top of search results, and people are also searching directly via Google Lens or YouTube. A site consisting solely of text is missing out on visibility in this regard. That doesn’t mean everything has to be on video, but it does mean that images deserve proper alt text, that videos should be embedded with a transcript, and that you should consider where your brand is mentioned outside your own website.

Reddit, specialist forums and YouTube are now sources of data for Google’s AI systems. A discussion in which your brand is mentioned as a good answer influences how you are rated. SEO and PR are therefore converging, and that is precisely the aspect of your visibility that you cannot control on your own website.

You build topical authority as an ecosystem, not through individual articles

The clearest lesson from the recent core updates is that standalone blog posts are finding it increasingly difficult. Google rewards sites that cover a single topic comprehensively, consistently and credibly, even if the domain has historically carried little weight. That’s good news for smaller players with genuine expertise, and bad news for those who publish a collection of articles that are completely unrelated to one another.

You build it up using an architectural framework, not with isolated pieces of text. The approach is simple to describe but difficult to maintain, and that is precisely what makes it valuable.

Start by choosing your core themes: three to five, no more. They must be in line with what you actually sell and with the issues that really matter to your target audience. Covering ten themes superficially is less effective than exploring three themes in depth.

Write one pillar article per theme: a comprehensive main page of 2,000 to 3,000 words that covers the subject in full. The pillar provides a comprehensive overview of each subtopic, ensuring that a reader who only reads this page does not miss anything essential. The article you are reading right now is exactly such a pillar.

Support each pillar with five to ten cluster articles. Each cluster article focuses on a single sub-topic and explores it in much greater depth than the pillar article can. The pillar article covers local SEO in five paragraphs, whilst the cluster article covers it in 1,500 words. This ensures there is no duplicate content, but rather a clear division of roles.

Then ensure you link consistently in both directions. Each cluster article links back to the pillar, and the pillar links to each cluster wherever the topic is mentioned. This isn’t just a cosmetic step. This linking structure is precisely the signal you use to show Google that the pages together form a cohesive whole. Use Search Console to see which search queries you’re already appearing for without having a relevant page: those are the clusters you’re still missing.

Expect it to take six to twelve months before you see a return on your investment. That’s a long time, and it’s precisely why it works: it can’t be speeded up by budget alone.

You build authority through E-E-A-T and links that stand the test of time

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is not a ranking factor that you can simply switch on, but rather the framework Google uses to assess whether your content can be trusted. For topics relating to health, finance and law – the YMYL categories – it is a decisive factor.

In practice, it boils down to making visible what is already there. Credit the actual authors beneath your articles, with a profile that shows why they are qualified to assess the subject matter. Refer to primary sources rather than yet another summary blog. Ensure that contact details, company information and terms and conditions are easy to find. Content from an anonymous ‘content team’ no longer cuts it, and putting an author’s name under a text that person has never read is not a solution.

Backlinks also remain one of the strongest signals, but the bar is set higher than it used to be. The August 2025 spam update took a broad approach to tackling manipulative link profiles. Sites with link farms, paid placements and spam directories were hit faster and harder than was the case with previous spam updates. Anyone still buying links now runs a risk that is out of proportion to the return.

What does work, however, is slower and more tedious. You earn high-quality links by publishing something that others want to link to: your own research, an in-depth guide, a tool, or a data analysis that isn’t available anywhere else. Guest posts on authoritative sites still work, provided the piece is worthwhile in its own right. Digital PR and industry partnerships yield the links that last the longest.

Don’t underestimate mentions without links. Search engines take into account brand names that appear in multiple reputable sources, even without an anchor text. Brand awareness within your niche has therefore become a direct SEO strategy, and this isn’t just stating the obvious but a budgetary decision: ten genuine placements are worth more than a thousand cheap ones.

In local SEO, proximity is the most important factor

For businesses with a physical location or a specific catchment area, local SEO is a distinct arena with its own rules. Research by Search Atlas involving over 3,200 businesses shows that proximity, at 55.2 per cent, is by far the strongest factor in local search results. This is followed by the number of reviews at 19.2% and domain authority at 5.9%. For the top 10, reviews carry even greater weight.

That means something rather awkward: there’s little you can do about the most important factor, because your address is fixed. On the other hand, there’s a great deal you can do about the second factor. A fully optimised Google Business Profile, consistent NAP details (name, address, telephone number) across the web and an active review strategy together form the core of local discoverability. How to set this up for each region and each branch is set out in detail in the Guide to local SEO by region.

What the core updates did and what to do next

Google confirmed three core updates in 2025. The March 2025 update was significant right from the start: SEMrush recorded a peak of 63% SERP fluctuation, higher than during the December 2024 update. The June 2025 update ran from 30 June to 17 July and mainly affected news, health, finance and e-commerce. The December 2025 update began on 11 December and lasted just over eighteen days. In addition, the aforementioned spam update took place in August.

The winners always seemed to have certain things in common: strong topical authority, recent and well-researched content, and a technically sound site. The same went for the losers: thin, outdated or copied content. Google itself says the same thing with every update, namely that there is no specific fix for a drop in rankings and that you should create content for people. That is not an evasive answer; it is an indication of how the system is designed.

Two practical points are worth noting. Firstly, not every fluctuation is a core update. Google continuously adjusts its systems without prior notice, and in May 2025 there was one such unconfirmed shift that mainly affected content-heavy sites and affiliate blogs. The second: recovery takes time. Volatility persists after the official roll-out, and a dip often only recovers around the time of the next major update. Anyone who concludes after two weeks that a change isn’t working is judging too soon. Search Engine Land’s update round-up keeps track of exactly what has been rolled out.

The steps you take after an update should follow a set order. First, check Search Console and GA4 to see which pages have lost traffic; then look at what competitors who have actually seen an increase are doing differently in terms of content; and only then make adjustments. Don’t act on assumptions, and certainly don’t change everything at once.

The figures for AI Overviews and GEO side by side

Anyone wishing to understand the shift that has taken place in recent years cannot ignore AI Overviews. These are the summaries generated by Gemini that appear at the top of the results page, ahead of the organic results, and which often answer the question straight away.

The growth curve is steep. In December 2024, an AI Overview appeared in 6.5 per cent of searches; by March 2025, this figure had risen to 13.1 per cent. In March 2026, Ahrefs found that AI Overviews appeared in 48 per cent of all search queries. These figures come from various measurements using different sample sizes, so you cannot simply add them together to form a single trend line, but the direction is undeniable. The Netherlands is leading the way in this respect: in May 2025, an AI Overview appeared in around 14 to 15 per cent of Dutch desktop searches, compared with around 1 per cent in Germany. Anyone basing their strategy on broader European figures is underestimating what is already happening here.

The impact on click behaviour is very real. Seer Interactive found that the average organic CTR for search queries featuring an AI Overview drops by over 60 per cent. However, there is a figure that is missing from most of the alarmist headlines: the same agency also found in November 2025 that sources which are cited in an AI Overview receive 35% more organic clicks. Being cited is therefore not just a consolation prize; it is a position in its own right.

And now for the most important figure for your strategy. Research by seoClarity shows that 97% of AI Overviews cite at least one source from the top 20 organic results. Good, traditional SEO is therefore the foundation of your visibility in AI answers. In practice, if you’re not in the top 20 anywhere, you won’t feature there either.

That doesn’t mean that SEO and GEO are the same thing. Generative Engine Optimisation requires specific choices: answers that can be quoted independently, a clear heading structure, generous schema markup and attention to how your brand is mentioned outside your own site. What it does not require is a separate file for AI crawlers. Google states in its own documentation on optimise for AI features It has been confirmed that Google Search does not use llms.txt and that a separate Markdown version of your site is not required for AI. Advice suggesting otherwise is out of date compared to the documentation. How you can actually manage and measure your visibility in AI responses is explained in the guide to GEO.

Measuring with Search Console and GA4

Over the past few years, Search Console has evolved from a diagnostic tool into an analytics platform. The Insights dashboard combines data from Search Console and GA4 into a single view: clicks, impressions, emerging search queries and mobile performance all in one place. Notes on fluctuations also help to distinguish between cause and effect.

There are five things that every account should have in order.

1. Link Search Console to GA4. Search Console shows you how Google sees your site, whilst GA4 shows you what visitors do next. Only when used together do they tell you whether a keyword actually generates revenue.
2. Carry out a content gap analysis. Identify the search queries for which you’re getting impressions but hardly any clicks, and compare them with the topics where you don’t appear at all. That’s where your opportunities for growth lie, and it also highlights the cluster articles you’re still missing.
3. Check the ‘Crawled, currently not indexed’ report. Pages that have been visited but not included are a sign that Google does not consider the content good enough to keep. Refining or merging them is usually the solution.
4. Please bear in mind the ‘num=100’ change. Google removed that parameter in September 2025, meaning that ranking tools collect less data and your impressions in Search Console may be lower than before. This is a data artefact rather than a genuine decline, and without this knowledge, you’ll draw the wrong conclusion when comparing figures year-on-year.
5. Set up seasonal reports. You can only spot recurring patterns by comparing year-on-year figures, and this allows you to respond to them in good time with your content and campaigns.

In addition, there’s a weekly routine that takes very little time but yields great results. Export the top search queries from Search Console, identify the pages with high impressions and a low CTR, and cross-reference these in GA4 with the bounce rate. A low CTR suggests that the title or description isn’t inviting enough. If the bounce rate remains high after that, the problem isn’t with your snippet but with the content: the page promises something it doesn’t deliver. This cross-reference pinpoints exactly where content fails to meet search intent more accurately than any other report.

If you’re also tracking conversions, first check that your tracking setup is correct. The A comprehensive guide to Google Analytics 4 explains how to set up events, conversions and attribution so that your figures hold up.

Incidentally, click volume alone no longer tells the whole story. Visibility in AI responses, brand traffic and returning visitors are now also key metrics.

SEO, SEA and reasonable expectations

SEO is organic: you invest in technology, content and authority, and build rankings that last. SEA is paid, and as soon as you stop paying, the traffic stops. With SEO, expect three to six months for the first measurable improvements on long-tail keywords, and nine to twelve months for substantial growth on competitive terms. If you need results sooner, you can bridge that gap with Google Ads and immediately learn which keywords convert.

There is one development worth noting in this regard. Google is now showing adverts in AI Overviews and AI Mode, but that roll-out began in 2025 in the United States. These placements are not yet available in the Netherlands; Google expects to roll them out more widely later in 2026. There will be no separate campaign type for this: the placements will be served via existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, and via AI Max for Search. Anyone working exclusively with tightly defined, manually configured Search campaigns will miss out on this inventory once it goes live here. How to align both channels rather than having them compete for the same budget is explained in the article on combining SEO and SEA.

And then there’s the honesty that goes with it. SEO is no guarantee. The timeline depends on your starting position, your competition, the pace of Google’s updates and the quality of the implementation. The fact that a thorough clean-up only becomes apparent after several months is not a flaw in the approach, but simply how a search engine that is guided by user signals works. If you’re considering outsourcing it, then the article on choosing an SEO agency to distinguish a serious proposal from an empty package.

What you’ll be starting tomorrow

Search engine optimisation is an ongoing process, but it has to start somewhere. This approach works, moving from the basics to refinement.

1. Carry out a technical audit. Use Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to check your indexing, crawl errors, mobile performance and Core Web Vitals. Start by resolving the issues that Google has specifically identified as problematic.
2. Take stock of your content. Which pages are performing well, which are out of date, and which add no value? Update, merge or remove them. This is almost always the quickest way to see results.
3. Check each key page for search intent. Look at the results page for the keyword and ask yourself whether your page answers the same question in the same way.
4. Choose your core themes and build the architecture. Three to five themes, one pillar per theme, five to ten clusters per pillar, and internal links in both directions.
5. Make E-E-A-T visible. Authors with profiles, primary sources, up-to-date data and transparent company information.
6. Work on your backlink profile. Check the quality of what you have, remove any manipulative elements, and invest in content that others will naturally link to.
7. Monitor performance on an ongoing basis. Link Search Console to GA4, stick to your weekly CTR routine and set up alerts for sudden drops in indexed pages or traffic.

That is the order we follow at SEO Ninja Ongoing: a monthly page-by-page analysis in Search Console linked to conversion data from GA4, plus a quarterly check on technical health and E-E-A-T. Not dashboards for the sake of dashboards, but a fixed cycle of measuring, interpreting and making adjustments.

Whatever changes may occur to the results page in the meantime, the principles remain the same. Build something that genuinely helps people, ensure that Google can technically read it, and demonstrate that you are the expert. Those who stick to this approach will have far less to fear from the next update than those who rely on tricks.