Forget best practices and get curious

Jade says: “Forget best practices. SEO in 2026 is about moving beyond checklists and leveraging your own expertise to build effective, trustworthy, and AI-ready strategies.”

What best practices do we need to forget?

“In the industry, we've become a bit stuck in our checklists. That's often our safe space, as SEOs – especially when you work in an agency setting.

Maybe you have a productised system that you offer your clients. So, your SEO has been limited to, ‘We're going to create X number of blog posts every month. We're going to follow these rules that we see online about what matters and what doesn't.’ You provide your SEO services, whether they're really moving the needle for the client or not.

In 2026, especially with AI search coming out, things with Google are changing so quickly. It's time to take a step back and really trust your own gut on what's going to move the needle forward for your clients.”

Can you ask AI what the best strategy should be?

“That could be a part of trusting your gut. I love to ask AI what it thinks, but we've also noticed that it often just repeats the information that other people are putting out, which may or may not be true.

That creates an echo chamber of what best practices are.”

Does this stem from the Google leak in 2024?

“Totally. That was such a fun, interesting time to be in the SEO space. I feel like it hit a lot of people in this, ‘Santa isn't real!’ way.

We had really been trusting the information we were getting, especially from Google, and it would have been ideal if we could trust all that information. However, through the leak, a lot of the things that we thought were ranking factors actually were, even if the information we were getting was different.

I think we realised we could trust our guts more. Those things that we thought were ranking factors were actually real, even though Google was saying that they weren’t.

Click data was a big one. We always felt like that was legit, but we kept being told that absolutely no one was paying attention to that on Google's side. Also, what you put in the URL slug. Everyone was saying that it wasn’t a ranking factor. Turns out, it is.

We always had this gut feeling that smaller websites were not getting the same credit as larger websites. As it turns out, there was a tag that Google was putting on the back end to make it harder for smaller personal websites to rank. That always felt like the case, and it turns out that was accurate.”

Do you think Google has changed much in their algorithms since then?

“That's a great question. There are some things that seem like they've either self-corrected or made changes on, but with other things, not really.”

You say that curiosity is the new best practice and, instead of blindly following guidelines, you should use your own eyes and data to test, explore, and uncover what's really working.

How do you methodically and strategically use curiosity as part of your ongoing SEO tactics?

“For a little bit of backstory, I quit my full-time job and started my agency in October of 2022. I had been running it as a side hustle up to that point, but I was finally able to quit my job. Then, within three weeks, ChatGPT hit the scene, and it felt like that was going to totally disrupt everything in the entire world, but especially in the SEO realm.

My first instinct was to ignore it as much as I possibly could, but someone finally told me not to be Kodak or Blockbuster. Adapt with the times, stay curious, and see how you can get this to serve you as opposed to ignoring it because it intimidates you, and letting it take over your job. That ended up being the best advice I could have received.

Staying curious is not relying on that checklist. Just because one publisher says that blog posts need to be 500 words long, that shouldn’t automatically become the benchmark that you uphold with your clients.

Pay attention, and get excited about SEO again. A lot of people are feeling very burnt out, especially with all of the changes and the craziness going on with AI. Start having fun with it, get scrappy, and get back to why we got into this field in the first place.”

Do you think that some SEOs are still burying their heads in the sand when it comes to the likely impact of AI on search?

“I know that they are. The ones that I'm following on LinkedIn seem to finally be getting excited about it, or they’re expressing that it's burning them out. The ones I'm following are not particularly burying their heads in the sand.

In the past year, SEO agencies have been selling like hotcakes. A lot of people don't want to adapt; they just want to jump ship and sell this instead.

Some SEOs are saying that they’re getting a lot of their traffic from AI search now, and others are saying it's nothing. The reality is that search behaviour is changing, and the way that content is consumed and the places where content is being consumed are changing as well.”

How do SEOs adapt when it's so hard to track how many people are consuming your content on AI search engines, and the impact that has?

“It depends on every single website and who your users are. There are so many things we don't know about AI search. There's no clear keyword research tool or anything comparable within AI just yet.

It really is time to experiment and see what's going to work, and some of the metrics that we're tracking need to pivot a little bit.”

You say that bold experimentation can yield massive results, so what results can you achieve by adapting and experimenting, and what metrics should you focus on?

“One example of very exciting results that I've had was for a niche travel service client in Alaska. Their primary target was older people travelling on cruise ships who were finding them on Google (and a little bit on Bing, which is always fun), or they were just seeing advertisements on the cruise ship and booking an excursion with them.

However, they were super intrigued by AI. At the time, the narrative was that AI was primarily going to work for B2B, SaaS, and other things in the tech world. We decided to do some optimization anyway. We use Scrunch at my agency, which is a lot of fun, and we saw incredible results for them. They're currently getting at least 50% of their organic bookings directly from ChatGPT now, as the referral source, which is a result that we did not expect at all.

That's unexpected because a lot of people's behaviour right now is to see a brand name in an LLM and then go Google it. They might even be getting even more traffic than we're aware of from the LLMs.”

What's a metric that used to be effective but isn't as relevant nowadays, and what do you tend to focus on more?

“This is where we have to get away from best practices again. For every single client, the metrics are going to look different. For the particular client that I just mentioned, they used to get a tonne of traffic from their blog, and now they just aren't. However, their revenue is going up, and they're now ranking in both Google and the LLMs, and getting more people in the door.

It's fine that their blogs aren't functioning as well for them anymore. We're still cranking them out, and we're seeing their visibility within AI, but they're not quite serving the same purpose they used to. At the end of the day, if we're getting the conversions, everybody's happy.

If the content is being consumed on ChatGPT, it's harder to measure, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the blog isn't as effective as it used to be.

Another thing that we're seeing, outside of AI search, is that keyword rankings within our SEO tools are feeling a bit less reliable. Google searches are getting much more bespoke to the user, so the idea that you're ranking in position number two this month is just inaccurate. It'll be different for what I Google versus what someone else does.

So, we pay a lot more attention to clicks for those particular keywords that we can see in Search Console and other tools. Also, we'll just look at the organic traffic going into those individual service pages to track what's working and what's not working, as opposed to looking at the ranking and calling it a day.”

Are stakeholders more interested in other marketing channels nowadays, because SEO is not as measurable as it used to be?

“Yes, and I feel like that's incorrect information. Typically, I try to change their minds when they come to me and say those things.

I see it a lot with professional services on a local level. They really want to see the payoff of every single investment that they're making. They get wary when things get nuanced and you're telling them, ‘Maybe you're showing up in AI search, but that looks as though it's coming in from Google, and that makes it harder to track.’

That’s another instance where getting away from best practices comes into play, in terms of how we're educating our clients, what we're showing them, and how we're helping them prioritise what really matters.”

If an SEO is just starting in their career and they don't have an established gut, where do they look online to help them make that decision?

“For the first five years of my career, I remember thinking, ‘I don't think I've ever had an original thought. I'm just going to Google or reading a blog to decide how to make every single choice.’ That's fine. Following SOPs and trusting best practices in the early days of your career, just to build that foundation, will help you become creative and develop that gut that you can trust.

Find a few people to follow that you can really get behind and trust, as opposed to reading all of the information online and trusting too many different sources, because you will 100% get confused.

One thing I've noticed is that it's really important to understand the motive of the person who's creating the content. If they're not practising SEO anymore, and they've just become a content creator, they might have different priorities.

My LinkedIn feed is hundreds of different people in the industry. If I were just trusting the last thing I had read, it would be a wild time.”

Jade, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Stay curious, get scrappy, and trust your gut.

If you don't have a gut just yet, follow your best practices and then start having your own original ideas.”

Jade Pruett is Founder at HelloSEO. Find out more over at HelloSEO.com.