Every January, my inbox fills up with predictions about what will finally kill SEO. Voice search was supposed to do it. So was AI. And yet here we are.
Kaspar Szymanski’s recent piece on Search Engine Land cuts through the noise with a message that might sound boring but happens to be true: the fundamentals haven’t changed. They’re not going to change. And chasing every shiny new thing is a great way to waste your marketing budget.
The Hype Cycle Is Exhausting
I’ve been in digital marketing long enough to remember when Google Instant was going to revolutionize everything. Then it was AMP. Then Core Web Vitals. Then AI Overviews.
Each time, the same pattern plays out. Industry blogs declare a revolution. Agencies scramble to sell new services. Marketers panic about falling behind. And then… nothing much changes. The revolution becomes a footnote.
Szymanski lists over a dozen of these “game-changers” that barely register anymore. Voice search. RankBrain. Mobile-first indexing. Featured snippets. E-E-A-T. All real developments. None of them the extinction-level events they were sold as.
The latest candidate for SEO-killer is large language models. And look, LLMs are genuinely useful for certain tasks. Coding, content drafts, research assistance. But as a replacement for organic search? The numbers don’t support the panic. Google still owns roughly 90% of the search market. No AI-driven challenger has made a meaningful dent.
Why the Fundamentals Keep Winning
Here’s what actually matters for organic visibility, whether you’re optimizing for Google or AI-powered search tools:
Can bots access your content? If search engines can’t crawl your site, nothing else matters. Server errors, poor site architecture, blocked resources. These basic technical issues still tank rankings in 2026, just like they did a decade ago.
Does your content deliver what users need? People don’t care about your tech stack or whether you’ve adopted the latest innovation. They care about getting answers, solving problems, completing purchases without friction. Meeting those expectations is still the core job of SEO.
Is your site fast and reliable? Speed and uptime aren’t glamorous. They’re not going to get you quoted in a trade publication. But slow, unreliable sites lose users and rankings. Always have, always will.
Szymanski makes a point that deserves repeating: AI search platforms still depend on crawling the web to train their models and answer queries. The signals they use look remarkably similar to traditional SEO signals. Accessibility. Crawlability. Content quality. Trustworthiness.
This means the work you do to rank in Google also helps you show up in AI-generated responses. You’re not choosing between two different strategies. You’re building a foundation that works across platforms.
What This Means for Your 2026 Strategy
At Emarketed, we spend a lot of time talking clients off the ledge when a new trend takes over the conversation. The advice usually comes down to a few key points.
First, resist the FOMO. Adopting new tools because everyone else is adopting them is not a strategy. If a tool makes your work better or your site faster, use it. If you’re just checking a box to feel current, you’re wasting resources.
Second, audit your technical foundation. When was the last time you checked your crawl logs? Do you know which pages are returning errors? Are your most important pages being re-crawled regularly? These aren’t exciting questions. But they’re the questions that separate sites that rank from sites that don’t.
Third, focus on what you do well and make it better. Your competitive advantage isn’t going to come from being first to adopt some new platform. It’s going to come from understanding your customers better than anyone else and delivering content that actually helps them.
Brand recognition, user trust, site performance. These aren’t trends. They’re the constants that underpin everything else.
The Boring Truth
SEO in 2026 is more complex than it was five years ago. More platforms to consider, more content formats, more competition for attention. But the core of the work remains unchanged: make your site accessible, make your content valuable, earn trust over time.
That’s not a prediction. It’s just what the data keeps showing us, year after year, through every hype cycle.
The brands that win aren’t the ones chasing novelty. They’re the ones who got the fundamentals right and kept improving them while everyone else was distracted.
Ready to focus on what actually moves the needle? Let’s talk.
References
- SEO in 2026: What will stay the same - Search Engine Land
- Core Web Vitals - Google Search Central
- Search Engine Market Share - StatCounter
