It's Time To Invite Your SEO To The Adults Table
"Play dumb games, win dumb prizes" -- Taylor Swift aka "SEO Ninja Expert Wizard."
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You might not realize you’ve been training your SEO team to do the impossible.
They come to you with a list of smart, high-impact ideas. The kind that requires actual inputs: budget, engineering time, subject-matter experts, and maybe even PR support.
And the meeting ends the same way. “Not this quarter.” “No headcount.” “We’ll revisit.” Pick the excuse.
But the annual SEO goals stay. Non-negotiable.
For a long time, your SEO team made it work anyway. They found loopholes. They squeezed wins out of scraps. They used shortcuts that appeared to show growth because the dashboard moved in the right direction.
Now it’s 2026. The game changed.
We’re in an AI/LLM-first world. SERP manipulation is table stakes. Measurement is messier. And the shortcuts you tolerated, link schemes, spun content, low-quality scale tactics, are not just less effective.
They’re a business risk.
Yet the expectation is the same: work magic and deliver.
That disconnect is on all of us.
Thank you to this week’s #SEOForLunch sponsor: Semrush Enterprise
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The uncomfortable truth: SEOs created this expectation
The uncomfortable truth is that we built this expectation together.
For years, SEO teams were forced to be scrappy because the inputs that drive durable organic growth, budget, engineering time, SMEs, and PR support, were always the hardest to secure. So we adapted. We hunted for loopholes, squeezed marginal gains from technical fixes and internal linking, and pushed content through whatever bottlenecks existed. Sometimes we leaned on shortcuts that moved metrics fast enough to hit a quarterly target.
And here’s what that trained everyone to believe: SEO is cheap, goals are always figureoutable, and “making it work” is just part of the job.
That belief is the problem in 2026. Those shortcuts aren’t just less effective now. They’re a business risk.
We didn’t just adapt to the constraint. We normalized it.
What changed in 2026
We’re in an AI/LLM-first reality now. The search experience isn’t just “rank a page and win a click.” It’s increasingly an answer layer that summarizes, compares, and recommends before anyone ever reaches your site. That means traditional SERP manipulation is table stakes, not a source of differentiation. The brands that show up consistently are the ones that have real trust signals, real authority, and real brand gravity across the web.
At the same time, the old playbook gets weaker by the month. Link buying, spun content, and thin progromatic “SEO pages” don’t scale (as much) in a world where quality systems are faster to detect patterns and users are faster to bounce. And when shortcuts fail now, they don’t fail quietly. They create volatility, technical debt, reputational risk, and a larger cleanup bill than the original investment would’ve ever covered.
Measurement is also worse. Zero-click behavior is up, attribution is messier, and the wins that matter take longer and look different.
If your expectations are still built around “publish, rank, profit,” you’re going to be disappointed.
The new rule: organic visibility is a business outcome
Here’s the hard reset: organic visibility is no longer something you “do to a website.” It’s a business outcome you earn.
In 2026, the brands that win organic are the ones that are actually worth recommending. That starts with product value and customer experience. If customers bounce, complain, return, or leave bad reviews, the internet records that story everywhere, and the machines read it too. Brand trust and reputation are no longer fluffy marketing concepts. They’re ranking inputs.
Distribution matters more than ever as well. Partnerships, affiliates, communities, PR, and real-world word-of-mouth create signals that algorithms and LLMs use to determine who is credible. And content has to prove expertise, not just target keywords. Anyone can publish a best or top page, but not everyone can publish something that feels like it came from people who actually know what they’re talking about.
This is why SEO’s job is shifting. It’s less “optimize pages” and more “influence decisions” across the business: what you build, how you explain it, how you earn trust, and how you show up everywhere customers research.
If your business isn’t worth trusting, your rankings won’t be either.
The ask: stop demanding magic, fund the inputs
Here’s the ask, and it’s not complicated:
Stop demanding magic and start funding the inputs.
If you want organic growth in 2026, you have to invest in the levers that actually create it. That means content operations that don’t rely on one SEO pushing drafts uphill all week. Real writers, real SMEs, real editorial standards. It means technical resources, not just “submit a ticket and pray.” Dev time, site quality, and the ability to ship improvements without waiting three quarters. It means PR and brand building that earn trust signals rather than rent them: earned media, partnerships, distribution.
But there’s a second layer most leaders ignore: incentives.
SEO is dependent on teams like Product, Engineering, PR, Brand, and Content. If those teams aren’t measured, rewarded, or resourced to support SEO priorities, they won’t. Not because they’re a part of the “mean girls club”, but because they’re rational. You can’t say you want “collaboration” and then reward internal competition.
So here’s the trade: if you want outcomes, give SEO inputs. Because SEO isn’t a vending machine.
Stop treating SEO like the kid who gets handed a coloring book and told to “stay busy.” If organic growth matters, SEO belongs at the adults’ table with a real seat, a real budget, and real authority.
~Nick
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