Welcome to the first tech SEO update of the year!

I am notoriously famous for adoring all things AI, so I thought I’d make it the focus for the first edition of 2026:

1. So is it: GEO, AIO, AEO, SEO, FEO? Well, it’s all and none of that. Check out Tyler’s post here: https://momenticmarketing.com/blog/geo-aio-aeo-seo. The reality is that it’s chaos out there; there are no standards, there are no unified approaches throughout the tools, everyone is doing their own thing, etc. At best, what we can say is “it depends”, but call me an SEO boomer, I’m staying with the SEO term for now.
2. Unto a tech SEO study we go, and who else has more data than SEMrush (actually, a lot of companies do, but SEMrush really deserves some love). https://www.semrush.com/blog/technical-seo-impact-on-ai-search-study/ This is actually a pretty decent chunk of data, aka 5 million cited URLs across ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode. They do look at very limited signals, using their own tooling; however, a couple of patterns do arise:
   1. Schema is important 
   2. Indexing /crawlability too 
   3. Site structure is on it’s all time high
   4. A bit of a new one was a URL slug length, but for now, I choose to be sceptical about it. Let’s see if any other studies will come out of it.
3. A big one! This is the first time a major search engine has come out with the “AI guide”. It’s very clear what schema types they are using, and we will be implementing the rest of them in 2026. Yes, it’s Microsoft, but most of the ChatGPT is, and it’s like 80% of the market share.
4. And another huge one, but somehow not being shouted from the top of the roofs – Apple has signed a deal to use Google Gemini for their Siri. Not only has the market share skyrocketed, but the access to data has grown insanely. And AI does love itself some data. Not like I’ve ever thought that Google would let someone like OpenAI to win this race, it still leaves me wondering how much it cost them.
5. And I’ll just leave this one for your own thoughts https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that-we-must-do-something-useful-with-ai-or-theyll-lose-social-permission-to-burn-electricity-on-it/

Pretty busy start of the year for all things AI, and we finally have some larger case studies and insights, even though the vast majority of them find the same thing, “we don’t know”, it’s still valuable.