
SEO in 2026 Take it back to the old school – with Gordon Meagher
According to Gordon Meagher, the foundations of AI ranking success lie in traditional marketing activities. Gordon says: “It's time to put your old school digital marketing hat on, as we move forward in this new age.” What does that mean in practice? “We know that search behaviour is changing. ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, have basically given birth to a new way of searching that we never knew before. We were always 10 blue links on a page. LLMs have changed that. With how people want their answers now, I don't think you can put it back in the box. I think the biggest thing is the uncertainty around where Google search itself is going. Will Google search even be a thing once AI Mode comes in and the adoption rates increase for LLMs and these types of answers? I think it's going to go back to how we used to market years ago. For me, once Google released AI Mode, it was the end of SEO – and I don't say that lightly. They also broke an unwritten rule with publishers, which was always: we create the content, we live by your rules, you send us traffic. That paradigm has now shifted.
