SearchDone field guide
SEO in 2026: what changed, what didn’t, and what to do now
People search in new ways, but businesses still win by being useful, clear, original and trustworthy. Here is the practical playbook.
AI search is a new place to be found—not a new set of tricks
Google’s 2026 guidance says its normal SEO foundation still supports AI Overviews, AI Mode and other generative features. Bing says the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation supports Bing, Copilot and grounding results. Neither promises inclusion.
That makes “GEO” useful as a measurement lens, but dangerous as a bag of tricks. Google says there is no special AI schema, no need to build a page for every fan-out query, and no benefit to rewriting everything into artificial “AI chunks”. Google also says it does not use llms.txt. Bing focuses on verifiable, well-structured, current pages and explicitly prohibits prompt-injection content.
Practical rule: help people first, then make that value easy for search tools to find, understand and check. Do not create a second, stranger version of the website “for AI”.
What still wins
Make important pages easy to find
Use stable URLs, crawlable internal links, correct status codes, accurate canonicals and current XML sitemaps. A sitemap is a discovery signal—not an indexing guarantee. Google’s instant-submission route is restricted to qualifying job and livestream pages; any tool promising instant indexing for ordinary pages is crossing a clear boundary.
Use the knowledge competitors cannot copy
Commodity summaries are cheap. First-hand knowledge is scarce. Explain who created the content, how the work was done and why it exists. Include original examples, images, data and decisions where they help. AI can assist research and structure, but mass low-value publishing is scaled content abuse whether a human or model assembled it.
Keep your business facts clear and consistent
Name products, services, people and locations consistently. Put the important answer early. Match structured data to visible, current facts. Never manufacture ratings, authors, stock, prices or experience. Clear pages are easier for people to trust and for grounded systems to cite accurately.
Keep the experience fast and usable
Current “good” Core Web Vitals thresholds at the 75th percentile are LCP at or below 2.5 seconds, INP at or below 200 milliseconds and CLS at or below 0.1. They matter, but perfect scores do not guarantee rankings. Fix performance without sacrificing the content or functionality people came for.
Where automation helps—and where it should stop
- Safe to handle routinely: read-only data collection, monitoring, website health alerts, sitemap checks, validation and rollback preparation.
- Safe when based on approved facts: limited website markup, internal links, image-description drafts and page-summary changes when the source information and rules are clear.
- Needs your approval: important wording, factual claims, bulk publishing, redirects, changes that hide pages, URL removal, Business Profile facts and AI-search participation controls.
- Always blocked: link schemes, fake reviews, spam location pages, cloaking, scraped or spun pages, automated Google-query scraping, instant-submission misuse and fabricated authority.
The safe pattern is: find → propose → save the current version → check → get approval when needed → make a small change → verify → monitor → keep or safely undo. “AI decided” is never a sufficient explanation.
Keep different results separate
SearchDone distinguishes four kinds of information. Search facts come from Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Business results cover visits, enquiries, sales and server logs. AI spot checks record repeatable test prompts or searches, with their provider, place, date and natural variation. Website readiness shows whether search tools can reach and understand the site.
That distinction matters. A crawler visit does not mean a page is listed. A mention is not a click. One AI answer does not prove global visibility. A traffic increase after a change is an observed connection unless a sound experiment supports direct cause.
In 2026, Bing offers the clearest first-party AI publisher reporting: citations, cited pages, grouped grounding queries, topics, intents and Citation Share, with important sampling and completeness caveats. Google introduced a dedicated generative-AI performance report and a separate multimodal search view, while its documented Search Analytics export still does not expose all those dedicated interface reports.