Anthony Barone understands the importance and impact of AI, but tempers that with the essential nature of fundamental SEO principles. Anthony says: “AI/GEO/LLMEO is all the rage, but core fundamental SEO principles still apply.” What's distracting SEOs at the moment, that isn't worth spending time on? “A lot of SEOs are just jumping on the bandwagon, which I get. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Manus, and all of these are coming in, and yes, some behaviours are changing. We've got AI Mode coming in. We'll have Web Guide coming in. I get it. However, from an SEO perspective, but also from a business perspective, core SEO fundamentals still apply. You want to be able to crawl before you can sprint. With shiny toy syndrome, and everyone wanting to be the latest and greatest and wanting to jump on the trends, they're forgetting that those SEO principles still apply.

CJ Emson shares that brand is back and it’s bigger than before. If your branded search footprint isn’t strong, you’re going to lose out in AIO and as we see continually seeing and hearing - traditional organic search traffic is down, zero click search is up. The remedy to this is branded search. From there you can determine if your Demand gen engine is really only a demand capture engine…and remedy how brand building in search can fuel demand gen and pipe. Talking points include: What does successful brand SEO look like in 2026? What does success look like? How does brand SEO fuel demand? How has brand SEO changed? How will it continue to change? How do you future-proof brand SEO?

Nitin Manchanda agrees with Simon Cox, encouraging SEOs to concentrate on timeless activities. Nitin says: “Don't get lost in buzzwords and stay focussed on the fundamentals.” What buzzwords do people get lost in? “A lot of them. People talk about AI-first indexing, zero-click optimization, voice search dominance, entity-first strategies, and much more. Now, they're also talking about AEO, GEO, and a lot of other different names. Essentially, though, it’s SEO.”