AI SEO Strategies That Work in 2026 | James Dooley Interviews Panel

James Dooley: AI SEO strategies that are working well in 2026. Today I'm joined by Mike Love, Paul Trusca and Luke Baston. Today we're going to talk about trying to get your brand cited in the AI overview of Gemini, or it could be in Claude AI, ChatGPT or Perplexity. I want to start with this simple question. Paul, if you were to sell this as a service to a client, and it was not for ranking the website, but just to get cited more in the LLMs, what would you call that service? Is it AI SEO, LLM SEO, GEO? What are you calling it? Paul Trusca: I would probably go with GEO because that seems to be the one that is turning everyone on. Purely from a marketing perspective, although personally I just think it all comes back to semantics, but it is just a different way of presenting it. If you're pitching it to someone, I would go with GEO because that seems to be the buzzword. Certainly from the stuff that I'm seeing anyway. I do not know what you guys are seeing. James Dooley: What are you saying, Luke? Luke Baston: I tend to have a disproportionate number of dialogues with C-suite type people as clients, so I call it visibility. I probably do something different from other people because I'm trying to dial it into the KPIs that they might look at in a broader spectrum. For me, it comes down to information retrieval, but they're not going to know what that means. If I was to pick a term, I would say pretty much what you're saying, Paul. I do see SEO and GEO, whatever you want to call it, as the same thing. But then it depends what you call SEO, right? For some people, SEO is content plus links, and I do not look at it that way. So we're not talking the same language. Paul Trusca: Exactly. You do not know what we're actually describing. Luke Baston: Yes. So I call it visibility, and I talk about visibility in different systems that people look on to get that visibility. I talk about brand equity. I talk about visibility in SERPs. These are things which I think C-suite people identify with the most. So yes, that's what I would do. James Dooley: What about you, Mike? Mike Love: I've always said AI SEO, but I was thinking from a tools perspective. If Ahrefs and Semrush are calling it AI visibility or visibility index, usually whatever is the most popular will always win in the end. In the same way that DVDs and previous technology worked, whichever led the way was usually what got mentioned the most, and the others got dropped. AEO just seems like too much of a mouthful. So yes, just saying AI SEO covers all bases. In the end, it will probably be a bit of everything. I think everyone thought that AI engines would steal everything, but you still kind of Google things anyway, don't you? I think just saying AI SEO covers all bases. James Dooley: Paul, the question over to you to start with then. A company comes along and says they are ranking well in Bing or Google on their own website. They are happy with the visibility. Obviously, everyone wants higher rankings or higher traffic volumes, but they are relatively happy with the website rankings. They want more visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. What would you be doing as a service for that client that is different to SEO? What would you do to try to get that AI visibility if they are already happy with their website rankings? Paul Trusca: I would probably just be explicit about the fact that it is going to be mostly off-page work, so it is not going to interfere with their current rankings or their current website. That way, they are not worried about that. Then I would explain that it is about visibility. Their website exists as one single point, one single source of data. What we need to do is extrapolate a lot of the information that is in there, build upon it, and then put that everywhere. We want multimodal. We want to spread that word across multiple domains and platforms because, as we have discussed before, it is a consensus engine. At the moment at least, those LLMs do not really care about authority, only as far as it goes. If the platform or site you put the information on is visible to the LLM, and it can find it, then it will consume it. We do not have to worry about backlinks in the same way that we do. I would be pushing the idea that we need to get you seen as broadly as we possibly can, covering as many different relevant topics as we can. That is how I would describe it. James Dooley: What about yourself, Luke? Luke Baston: I agree with all of that. The one thing I have learned, probably the hard way over the last year, is that you need good search engine rankings to get LLM visibility anyway because they work in tandem. I do see companies sometimes making changes designed to get more visibility in Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT, but then they sacrifice their search engine rankings without realising it. They make it harder for themselves to get what they started trying to achieve. That is one danger. The things I would look at from an on-page perspective are whether their brand is strong enough and whether the brand signals are strong enough. Sometimes you have websites where the title tags are stuffed with search terms rather than the brand. That can harm LLM visibility. So that could be one on-page fix, either different from what Paul said or additional to what Paul said. Sometimes it is as simple as the LLMs not being able to understand well enough what your business is about. Some nuances in niches make it quite hard to categorise. There is one niche I'm in, which is essentially window decorations. In the States, window treatments is the term, but then it includes things like blinds, shades, shutters and other services of that nature. It is quite hard for LLMs to understand exactly what the business is because you have blinds shops, which are actual shops where you go and buy blinds. There is even a Google Business Profile category, window treatment store. But if you're a consultancy that goes out and does custom installations, that is not you. It is not what you do. There is this confusion. I think really unambiguously educating LLMs about what you do and what you do not do is key as well. James, I know you and I have discussed recently this whole page for LLMs and educating them on a single source of truth with all these parameters, making it clear. That is another really good thing you can do as well. So yes, that would be my advice. James Dooley: What about you, Mike? Mike Love: I think, as has already been said, the off-site signals are key. It is surprising sometimes when you Google a brand name. They might have a really good website, so SEO-wise, in terms of old-school SEO like content and links, it might be really good. All the links might be quite keyword or phrase match-based. Nothing is really mentioning the brand, and there is no digital PR. If you take away their website, their Facebook page and their LinkedIn, sometimes there is literally nothing else on the web. There will be ZoomInfo type pages, or scam report type pages, where it says how many visitors a website gets or whether it has a security certificate installed. But there will be no directory links. They might not even have a Yelp listing. Sometimes there are no citations and nothing else. I think more and more it is becoming really important that there is at least a sentence or two somewhere saying who you are and what you do. For years, you have probably had the same thing where you get bombarded with emails saying you have been nominated for the Birmingham Small Business Awards. You think, what is this all about? They kind of want you to pay and go and get an award. Now I'm thinking it is probably worth £500 or whatever to get that award mentioned in the local press. James Dooley: Yes. Dad, I'm there. Tuxedo. Yes, we've won. Right, let's have a quick-fire round. Let's go around and just do a strategy. The podcast topic is about AI SEO strategies that are working in 2026. We have spoken about what we call it, the importance of it and off-site signals. Paul, let's start with you. Give us one thing that's working to help you get better AI visibility. Paul Trusca: Listicles, but with a few caveats in mind. One is do not make it obvious that you're promoting your business. I would never put mine, the one that I'm trying to promote, right at the top of the list. I would use other ways to lead the person reading it to that conclusion. One of those things could be using a series of questions where you're saying, always make sure that whoever you use ticks these boxes, and then make sure you're the only one that does. Things like that make it a little bit more subtle. I have noticed that a lot of the LLMs now are starting to become more discerning about obvious promotional material. I think that is probably only going to become more of an issue as we go forward because they are going to get cleverer. They are still quite dumb at the moment, but we can assume they are going to get cleverer. James Dooley: Yes. I would say multihop visibility. If you can reverse engineer who the brands are that are winning in your market right now, and where the LLMs have gone to define those brands as the winning brands, you can get visibility in those spaces. Great strategy, Mike. Mike, are you there? Mike Love: Yes, sorry. James Dooley: What is one strategy that is working for you? Mike Love: Podcasts. Same as you. James Dooley: Podcasts. Oh, is it mine? You dirty dog. Yes, videos and podcasts are working great. I will throw another one in there, and then we will go back and do another round. Comparison pages. You mentioned listicles, so being compared against your biggest competitors and saying why you're better than them. I would have a slightly different nuance to your view, Paul, where I would say I would go aggressive with why I'm better than my competition. I would put myself number one. I would not do it promotionally. I would just do it very factually. Paul Trusca: I think if you can justify it factually, that probably makes sense. James Dooley: It is not me writing it. It is on a third-party corroborative source, not from me. I want them to say why I am better. I want them to feed the LLM why I am better. Paul Trusca: I am just concerned that, at some point, they are going to work out the pattern. I am starting to see that maybe it is happening, but it is hard to know whether that is actually what's happening or whether I'm just not doing it very well, to be honest. James Dooley: I do not think there is a problem. I think what is happening is people are doing listicles and saying, here are the top 10, from one to 10, and giving no reason why number one is better than number two, or why number two is better than number three. They are just putting the listicles in. This has always been the case with SEOs. Generally speaking, SEOs are lazy. They use a single prompt saying, can you list this top 10? Then they create a top 10 with no reasons why, no information gain, no surveys, no data, no USPs, no awards and no reviews. All of this needs to be corroborated together to explain why you are better. You need to understand why you are better than the competition and shout and scream about it everywhere, so the LLMs can pick it up. If you're not better, you need to have a good look at yourself and ask, how can I be better? Everyone has a USP. Everyone has a story. Just paint that picture of who you are, what you do and why you're brilliant. If you cannot be brilliant at something, you need to go and find another brand where you can be, because you need that USP to be the best. That can then show how you are better, or slightly different, from your competition. Comparison pages are another way of being able to compare. Anyway, back to you, Paul. Let's have another one. Give us another AI SEO strategy that's working great in 2026. Paul Trusca: Is this for local or just generally? James Dooley: In general, for anything. Paul Trusca: Press releases definitely are working well again. But again, it comes down to who you are using because a lot of the time, a lot of what people call press releases are not really press releases. They are essentially just a PBN and they can be absolute garbage. A lot of people will use that kind of service and then draw the conclusion that press releases do not work. That is an important thing. I have had a fair bit of advice from you on that side of things because I never used to do any. It is becoming so important now because, going back to what Mike touched on, brand awareness is so important. Before, just being discovered by keyword could make you a lot of money. You could be very successful and be 100% reliant on that alone, without really existing as a brand. That was not a problem back then, but it is definitely a problem now. So people need to focus on the brand. You need to start getting brand traffic and brand mentions. It is absolutely critical. James Dooley: For sure. Luke, what other AI strategies are working well? I know you have a load up your sleeve. Luke Baston: I would say a big thing is that the more you can structure the content from an HTML perspective, and the more data-rich you can make it, the more ammunition that gives you for a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about. That includes press releases and shouting about how great you are. The more LLMs can see that it is not subjective but objective and data-backed, the more weight they generally give it. The lens I look through is largely a local lens, and it comes down to case studies. When you have done a really good job for someone as a local home services business, can you get a case study on your website summarising that job? Can you include the materials you used, how long it took, the process, a quote from the customer, and lots of images and visuals where you can include your logo and your brand? That suddenly becomes a huge data-backed piece of content that you can structure around really data-rich HTML. It works for conversion because it makes people call you instead of the generic blog post-rich competitor, and it works for LLMs as well. So it is a win-win. James Dooley: Yes, for sure. Mike, are there any more AI SEO strategies that are working well? Mike Love: I think it is what we have already touched on, getting the brand out there as much as possible. John Mueller and some of the guys at Google said years ago, when they were asked for SEO advice, just do traditional marketing. If you went and did offline marketing, people are going to search for your brand name. If you did social media, it is going to help with direct traffic, reviews and real human mentions on the web. Digital PR, mentions and brand mentions that actually involve the CEO of the company, the founder, or whoever it may be, help get all those important facts mentioned across the web. If there is no paper trail of your brand whatsoever, then from an SEO point of view, we as SEOs are good at manipulating things. How many different places and how many different mediums can you get your brand mentioned in? That might be image sharing, videos on YouTube and Vimeo, or podcast distribution that goes onto YouTube, Amazon Music and all the podcast sharing sites. There are PDF sharing sites and PowerPoint slideshow sharing sites that you can use. Then there is more complicated stuff, like writing a book or journals. There are all these different ideas. Any way that you can distribute your knowledge and expertise across different platforms helps, and some of those carry a lot more weight. It is easy to buy a guest post and have someone slap it on a blog, but it is not so easy to write a journal and get it on Google Scholar, or to have a guest appearance at a university and have that recorded and published on their YouTube channel. The more things you can do within the budget of a client, the better. Some of them are cheap and easy, like podcasts and PDFs, and some of them are going to be much harder. It depends on the client as well, because sometimes it takes a long time to get client approval depending on the size of the company, the directors and their brand reputation. James Dooley: I think you touched on brand mentions and brand search volume there, Mike, which is key. You also touched on trying to get it into as many third-party corroborative sources as possible. I just came off the back of a few podcast episodes with Jess Bissan. He was talking about repurposing a lot of content that you already have. If an old tweet used to do well, could you reword that tweet with the same context around what you are, then force index it to get Google to pick up the tweets you want the LLMs to pick up? I thought that was quite genius. You can go into the analytics to get that information. You can also share similar statuses on LinkedIn and force index those URLs. You can do the same on Facebook and Instagram. If you have reviews, you can take that Trustpilot review, put it into an image, put it onto Instagram, and include the content of the five-star review on Instagram before force indexing it. It is about repurposing content. If Jess does a really decent article that he likes, there might be five or six different entity attributes or things covered, like cost and benefits of using them. He will take one section and put it onto LinkedIn to try to rank it for the question in the H2, then say, by the way, if you want to see the full article, check it out through the first link in the description. That gets people back to the site from social media. It is doing exactly what you're talking about, Mike. It is almost like traditional marketing, but you can do it with social media now. It is free, easy and cheap to do. You can get one H2 on LinkedIn, one on Twitter, one image-based section on Pinterest, and one on Instagram. It is about being a good holistic marketer who can drive more branded search, branded mentions and traffic back to the site. That is the differentiator nowadays. Everyone can buy links now, and everyone can scale content, but the traffic element is difficult to get. That is where you need to work in those ways. For anyone watching this, are there any AI SEO strategies that we have missed? Leave a comment in the comment section. Mike, Paul, Luke, it has been an absolute pleasure. Mike Love: Thanks for having us.