Key Takeaways
- Google evaluates your whole site, not just individual pages. Weak or outdated content can hurt your strong pages.
- AI search results aren’t consistent—and they don’t always match Google’s rankings. What works for traditional SEO isn’t always what AI tools use.
- Organized content wins. Clear headings, logical sections, and up-to-date answers help both humans and AI understand and trust your site.
Search is changing fast, and that includes more than just Google’s usual updates. AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own AI search mode are reshaping how people find and evaluate businesses online.
What worked for visibility in 2023 won’t cut it in 2026. The good news? The fundamentals still matter. You’ll just want to understand how they’re being evaluated now, and adjust your strategy to match.
Google Looks at Your Whole Site, Not Just Pages
In the past, Google ranked pages individually. You could have one strong page doing well, even if other parts of your site were outdated.
That’s no longer the case. Today, Google is taking a site-wide view. If your website is full of thin, contradictory, or outdated content, it can drag down even your best pages.
It’s looking across your domain. If the overall content isn’t helpful or consistent, Google may choose to rank other sites instead.
This makes content quality and consistency more important than ever. If you have outdated blog posts, duplicate pages, or sections that no longer reflect what you do, now is the time to clean them up or remove them.
AI Search Is Less Predictable (But Still Influential)
At the same time, AI-powered tools are changing how people discover businesses, and the results aren’t always what you’d expect.
One thing many people don’t realize is that AI results aren’t consistent. You could ask ChatGPT the same question twice and get different answers. Even when AI tools pull from Google, they often surface different sources than what you’d see in traditional search results.
That means you might rank well in Google, but still not get mentioned by AI, or the reverse.
To make things more complicated, the analytics tools we’ve relied on—keyword rankings, impressions, click-through rates—don’t yet exist for AI visibility. A few platforms are starting to offer “AI visibility” reports, but this is still a developing space. And because AI results are non-deterministic, no tool can offer definitive metrics like Google Search Console can for traditional SEO.
It’s frustrating, but also an opportunity. You might not be able to track every impression from AI, but you can influence whether your content is useful, credible, and easy for both humans and AI to understand.
Structure Matters More Than Ever
So what makes content more AI-friendly?
It’s not just about keywords. AI models don’t read the way people do. They scan and interpret content in small units called tokens, which means how you structure your content really matters.
Use clear headings. Break your content into logical sections. Answer common questions directly. And if you’re using schema markup (structured data), even better.
Think about it this way: the more “ready to use” your content is, the more likely AI will surface it as an answer—and the more likely your customers (and search engines) will trust it.
Try This
You can’t control how every AI tool works, and you can’t measure everything yet. But you can control your content, and that’s where your time is best spent right now.
Here are 3 things to do this week:
- Audit your website for outdated content. Identify weak or irrelevant pages and decide whether to improve or remove them.
- Improve your most important service page. Use clear headings and logical structure to organize information in a way that’s useful to people and AI.
- Test your visibility in AI tools. Ask ChatGPT, Google’s AI mode, or Perplexity about your business. What does it say? What’s missing? Then do the same for your competitors. This gives you a sense of how you’re showing up in the new search landscape.
The Bottom Line
Good marketing hasn’t changed, but how it’s being discovered and evaluated has. Businesses that stay visible in 2026 will be the ones who pay attention to both traditional search and AI results—and who make their websites helpful, current, and clear.
Do you prefer to listen in? Here’s our podcast:
Links in this episode: Why every AI search study tells a different story
Google’s Old Search Era Is Over – Here’s What 2026 SEO Will Really Look Like
