--- This page is part of [build/create](https://buildcreate.com). For a complete overview of this site's content, entity data, and subject matter expertise, see our [AI Content Index](https://buildcreate.com/llms.txt) or [Full Content Archive](https://buildcreate.com/llms-full.txt). For structured business identity data, see our [Entity Card](https://buildcreate.com/wp-json/bc-geodesic/v1/entity-card). --- # The State of Online Search in 2026: SEO, GEO, and All That Jazz > The rules have changed. We’ve built the answer. By now you know this part of the story by heart: OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in November 2022, and it has been an... **URL:** https://buildcreate.com/the-state-of-online-search-in-2026-seo-geo-and-all-that-jazz/ **Type:** Post **Modified:** 2026-07-28 --- #### **The rules have changed. We’ve built the answer.** By now you know this part of the story by heart: OpenAI dropped ChatGPT in November 2022, and it has been an inescapable part of the conversation since. I’d say that anyone who feels they have fully come to terms with this technology and what it has to offer is deluding themselves. But at the same time, we’ve all collectively sat with generative AI long enough for a few truths to settle in. GEO has emerged as the new industry buzzword, but it hasn’t replaced SEO. In fact, we suspect many businesses are neglecting tried and true SEO best practices either from AI-induced nihilism, or because they’ve outsourced these tasks to… well, AI. Here’s the truth: in an era of AI slop, intentionality matters more than ever. Ian Wilson, our Director of Brand & Digital Experience, has devoted himself over the past several months toward a set of new plugins and tools that are designed to address the critical needs we’ve seen our clients face as they adjust to a changing online landscape. We’ll be doing some deep dives into each of these plugins and what they have to offer in coming articles, but for now, we’d like to set the stage by laying out the state of search as we see it. ##### **SEO in 2026: Band New, Still True, and Old News** Between RankBrain (2015) and BERT (2019), Google became much more adept at using language nuance and context cues to understand searcher intent. This has effectively eliminated short-tail keyword matching as a worthwhile SEO strategy. Specifically, I am skeptical of using keyword research tools that nudge you to chase volume. Especially in hyper-specific industries, the words you use and your customers use are what you should focus on. They may not have volume, but they will have high searcher intent. ###### **Outdated SEO Practices:** - **Exact keyword match.** Back in the day, Google was just matching keywords. A lot of marketers cut their teeth on this kind of keyword strategy, and we’re still hearing it today from people who want to rank for specific short-tail terms. But Google is more advanced now, and your keyword strategy should keep up with it.  - **Stuffing meta titles.** If you’re doing too much, Google will just simplify it—and possibly to your disadvantage. - **Rich snippets.** Some rich snippets still exist (products and shopping, recipes, how-to guides), but they are primarily ecommerce focused, or not relevant to the B2B manufacturing space (exceptions: events and job postings). Unfortunately, FAQs and Q&A snippets are of the past because they are now mostly answered by AI. ###### **Old-school SEO that Still Works:** Sometimes when something we know and understand well becomes irrelevant we start to think that the whole thing no longer matters. But the reality is that a lot of SEO practices are still important. It’s not hot, it’s not sexy, it’s just essential—like brushing your teeth. - **H1 hierarchy.** Headers are still important for accessible navigation, readability, and signaling to the machines what your site is all about. - **Alt tags.** Describe your images, but don’t keyword stuff. - **Meta titles and descriptions.** Do it yourself or Google will do it for you. And to the previous point: do it right, or Google will fix it for you. - **Response time.** Image sizes, file size, and overall site health. Plugins will kills this, especially page builders like Elementor. - **Long live long tail.** This is where your expertise lives. I said it before, but it bears repeating: in manufacturing, you’re not going up against hundreds of other companies all competing for the same two or three terms. Your solutions may be one of a kind. Your keywords will reflect that. The main thrust of SEO right now is to keep it simple.  *“Google knows who you are. They are not looking for you to tell them what you do, they’re looking for you to tell your ****audience**** what you do.” – Ian Wilson, Director of Brand & Digital Experience* ###### **The Cutting Edge of SEO in 2026:** If there is one thing you take away from this article, it should be the importance of E–E–A–T signals for just about everything. E–E–A–T stands for **E**xperience, **E**xpertise, **A**uthoritativeness, and **T**rustworthiness. More than ever, search engines are looking for signs that set your website apart from AI slop, and they look toward a number of known markers to do it. Top E–E–A–T markers include: - **Social Proof.** Think case studies, testimonials, and customer reviews. - **Certifications.** Especially essential in manufacturing. - **Company blog.** Specifically, one *with credited authors. * - **Industry presence.** Awards, speaking credits, trade show attendance, and events. While not necessarily new, the following have gained new significance, and there are some new nuances toward implementation: - **Schema.** With the death of rich snippets’ relevance to B2B companies, what are they good for? Entity disambiguation. Which is a fancy way of saying that it helps connect the authority you build off-site back to you. - **Topical Clusters.** Sometimes referred to as “cornerstone content” or “pillar pages,” the jargon has evolved but the concept has not. A page dedicated to a single topic that goes deep and serves as an hub for interlinking content is a key way to demonstrate expertise to Google and AI. ###### **build/create’s solution: Tessera** As you can see, the SEO game has shifted a lot in the past decade. The problem is that very few SEO tools have kept pace with these developments. Many not only fail to represent the new best practices in their recommendations, they are actively misleading users by pushing them to follow a one-keyword-per-page strategy that awards points based on how well a user is stuffing a specific phrase into meta titles and alt tags. On a practical level, many of these tools were clunky to use. The useful signals were often lost in the noise, making it harder to take action on tasks. So, we built our own plugin that would clear out the clutter, highlight the important actions, and help us align with our clients around the SEO strategies that matter. We have a lot more to share about Tessera in the future, but here’s a taste. During our call, Ian dropped some wisdom about 301 redirects that highlights how our plugin makes it easier for users to tend their sites. *Google crawling your site and getting a ton of 301s is not good—especially if it leads to a chain of 301s. We’ve recently had an issue where a client was using a plugin to automate 301 redirects, only it ended up causing a whole rat’s nest of issues on the back of the site that was a pain to undo and more trouble than it was worth. ****So be a little more gentle with yourself.**** If no one is going to the page, you don’t need to create a 301 for it. Pages move. A 404 isn’t a scarlet letter, it’s not a curse, it’s just a message. Tessera can show backlinks so you can see if anyone is linking to the content. If no one is linking to that page or that blog article, then it’s a good bet you can delete it safely.* ##### **GEO in 2026: Entering the Brave New World of Generative Search** Like everyone else, our team has been talking about AI non-stop. There is no limit to what we could share on this subject, and we expect we’ll get back to it in future posts. (If you can’t wait, you can catch some of our hot takes by following the team on LinkedIn.) So, for the purposes of keeping this article on point, let’s keep our focus on what AI means for search. There’s a lot still emerging in this field, but the following are the lessons and best practices that seem most stable and least likely to change. ###### **1. E–E–A–T (once more for those in the back).** *Blogs are back, baby*. Only this time, you have to be even *more* authoritative, showcase *more* of your expertise, and have it come from real people. One of the biggest recommendations we can offer in this area is to **put your authors on your blog**. Have them attached to people in your company who have profiles on your website. Build credibility by building spokespeople within your organization. ###### **2. AI Bots.** There’s a lot of nuance to the bot picture: Training bots, search bots, and user-triggered bots being the main ones. We’re also following which AI bots are crawling websites, be that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or any of the others. The way each of these AI crawlers sees your site is different than what you see (for example, AI bots cannot “see” javascript), and each are also different from each other. Some delivery mechanisms (Markdown or llms.txt) make it easier for AI to consume content, but there isn’t yet an industry consensus as to what will be the standard.  ###### **3. AI-referred visits: The metric that matters.** There’s been a lot of angst vented about the catastrophic drop in site traffic, and for marketers who have lived and died by this metric for over two decades, we’re all taking some time to adjust. But we’re also finding some light in the darkness. Namely, while AI and generative search results are siphoning off huge percentages of traffic, a lot of that traffic was low-value. Google can’t sell the custom integration your company specializes in. It can’t sign the contract for a run of a million parts designed to spec. It can’t provide the highly technical consulting services at the level your engineers do. Demand for these solutions hasn’t changed. It’s just that a lot of the traffic you used to see on your site never came from these kind of visitors to begin with. AI is effectively vetting a huge portion of traffic to your site. And as it filters out the traffic that *didn’t* matter, the traffic it *does* refer is becoming ever more qualified. ###### **build/create’s solution: Geodesic** OK, so what else are we doing with our new plugin? For one, we’re trying to make the link between AI search and AI referred visits. While plenty of GEO tools claim to do this, we suspect that some of this data is slipping through the cracks. For customers using Cloudflare, we’ve built an integration with Geodesic to grab AI bot traffic information at the DNS level, so that none of it gets missed due to caching or other reasons. That gives us a clear picture of a site’s AI bot traffic, including the purpose of each bot visiting your site: training, search indexing, or user-query. When we see training bots, it signals to us that your site is being treated as a credible source for answers—and this means that your content is part of the AI’s training corpus for faster responses. Search crawlers are similar, but rather than including your content in the training data, it’s creating an index for faster searching of your content. Last and most exciting: user-query traffic tells us when AI visits your site as the result of a user asking a question. We’re also gathering data on the different ways AI can consume content on your site, ie the Markdown and llms.txt endpoints we mentioned earlier, so we can see in the aggregate what bots are actually using, which can be a signal about which standards will be accepted as the industry matures. In some cases, this ties back to SEO best practices, which is part of why this plugin co-evolved with Tessera. Finally, AI-referred visits. Over time, we expect to be able to build out a longer-term vision of conversion stats so we can better understand how GEO optimization translates to actual user visits to your site. ##### **The AI Secret Sauce Paradox** Whenever we bring on a new client, we conduct onboarding interviews to learn more about them: their business model, their products and services, their clients, their employees, their values, their culture. What we’re trying to tease out from them is the recipe for their secret sauce. What sets them apart? What differentiates them from the competition. Time and again, we hear the same answer: *People* are their secret sauce. They are the holders of institutional wisdom, the subject matter experts who will guide customers through their most thorny challenges, the fervent pulsing heart that keeps their organization from being just another soulless corporate hell. Our customers believe this. They are passionate about it. And we believe them. That’s why they’re our customers. And yet, some of these same organizations believe they can outsource all communication about their company to generative AI, a technology built on word prediction, that does not know you, your people, or any of the secret sauce that actually sets you apart. You see the contradiction? Everyone else sees it, too. In fact, *generative search* sees it. That’s why, in an effort not to cannibalize itself, it favors content created *by* people, *for* people. I find a lot of hope in this. We’ve always argued passionately against cynical SEO and marketing tactics that are all about exploiting short-term weaknesses in the digital ecosystem for temporary victories at the expense of consumer (and therefore brand) trust. We saw companies chase these tactics in the early days of black hat SEO, and felt vindicated every time the algorithm updated and tanked those sites to oblivion. We’re seeing some of those same strategies at play now, and we expect the lessons to repeat. You can bet that any dodgy tactic being hawked today about how to game the system is one Google and all the other big companies out there are actively working to remedy. That’s why we advocate for tactics that stand the test of time. Ones that contribute to the secret sauce. That help it ferment. That make it funky. That age well. So it’s with great pleasure that we find ourselves returning to one of our oldest SEO mantras because it’s just as true today as it ever was: **Write for people, not machines.** Write for *people*. Not machines. ## Site Description We are build/create, we do B2B Marketing, Web Design, and Brand Positioning for Manufacturing & Technology Clients. We're a small, nimble team: the people you meet at the kickoff meeting are the people you'll be working with for years to come. We understand long, consultative sales cycles, and translating engineer into engaging, authoritative content. --- **About this site:** build/create — We are build/create, we do B2B Marketing, Web Design, and Brand Positioning for Manufacturing & Technology Clients. We're a small, nimble team: the people you meet at the kickoff meeting are the people you'll be working with for years to come. We understand long, consultative sales cycles, and translating engineer into engaging, authoritative content.. 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