If I Wanted to Rank #1 on SEO in 2026, I'd Do This

If you can get these five things right, you're going to rank on Google,

you're going to dominate AI search, and you're going to show up everywhere your customers are looking.

If I knew what I'm about to show you when I first started an SEO,

I would have saved myself years wasting time on tactics that just don't work anymore.

Since focusing on this new approach, we've helped clients rank across Google,

ChatGbT, PerplexD, Gemini, you name it.

Not only have we generated hundreds of millions of visitors just from organic traffic,

we've also generated hundreds of millions in terms of dollars when it comes to SEO.

So today, I'm going to show you exactly what I do if I had to start ranking from scratch in 2026.

Let's get into it.

So the first thing that you have to understand is that traditional SEO isn't dead,

but if you're only doing traditional SEO, you're in trouble.

And here's the mistake that I see everywhere.

People are either going all in on AI SEO and abandoning traditional Google,

or if they're ignoring AI search completely and wondering why traffic is declining.

Both are wrong.

The reality in 2026 is traditional SEO is what I call a cigar butt channel.

It's slowly declining over time, but it's not going away anytime soon.

And here's why.

Google still gets 13.7 billion searches per day.

ChatGbT gets 1 billion per day, and it's growing, but Google is still 13 times bigger.

An AI overview is still pulled from traditional SEO content.

LLM's ground their answers off of Google,

meaning that they pull their answers off of Google.

And it's also important to know what has changed too.

So 95% of AI citations that you see in these LLMs,

they come from content that's less than 10 months old.

So if your content is old, you're basically invisible when it comes to AI search.

SEO in 2026 is traditional Google SEO plus AI SEO.

You can call it genitive engine optimization.

You can call it answer engine optimization.

And you want to have a search everywhere optimization,

multi-platform presence.

You can't just pick one.

You got to have all three that are working together.

And we're seeing companies shift their budgets pretty drastically.

These are multi-trillion dollar companies that are reaching out to us.

And this LLM optimization money is coming from brand budgets,

not just SEO budgets.

And they're measuring mentions how many times they're showing up

versus competitors and more.

So here's what you got to do right now.

You got to stop treating SEO like it's 2020.

If you're only optimizing for Google,

you're leaving anywhere from 50% to 75% of the opportunity on the table.

Set number two, I post everywhere, not just on my website.

So this is a shift that most SEOs are missing.

Search engine optimization was the old way of SEO.

Search everywhere optimization is the new way of SEO.

Because you got to think about it this way.

15 years ago, Google was the only game in town.

But now you've got Instagram.

You have got YouTube.

You have got Reddit.

You've got all these other channels.

And so attention is so disparate now.

And you have to understand how you can optimize for everything.

You can't just write a blog post from 15 years ago.

It's 15 years ago what work was you write a blog post.

You optimize for Google and then you get organic traffic.

Now, I mean, that's like 10-20% of the game.

As I mentioned, this is search everywhere optimization.

And people are looking at, when I mentioned YouTube,

second largest search engine in the world.

Guess what?

Owned by Google, crawled by Gemini.

LinkedIn is actually crawlable as well.

And your Instagram posts are crawlable by Google as well.

And when you look at the LLMs,

what are the top three cited sources?

YouTube Reddit Wikipedia, actually.

You got to think about what is marketing and why not?

What are the first principles of marketing?

Well, what is actually true marketing is you have to find out

where your customers are hanging out.

And then you have to compel them with a message that stands out.

Google used to be where a lot of the attention was

and now the attention is disparate, right?

And so Reddit, you look at Reddit.

Google is prioritizing Reddit results.

And Reddit is somewhat easy to game.

And then you have sites like Coros,

which are still great for ranking for a ton of different questions.

If you're thinking about app store optimization,

that's another way of doing SEO.

If you're optimized for shopping, that's Amazon.

If I'm starting from scratch day,

here is my distribution strategy.

Every piece of content that I create

would go through this specific workflow.

Number one, you got your website.

So publish your pillar content.

Sometimes it might be 2,000 plus words

and making sure that you're optimizing for Google

and AI, but most importantly,

that you're optimizing for humans.

You want to have good content for humans first.

And then you can worry about the Google and the AI side of things, right?

Number two, I would turn it into a video.

So for example, what I'm recording with you right now,

I've talked about this content quite a bit on podcasts.

We have it as blog posts as well.

So how do you take a blog post and then turn it into a video?

You can script it.

And by the way, you can take your blog post,

put it into Gemini, upload the way that you typically write,

the way that you typically talk.

And then what you can do is you can have Gemini create a script for you,

and then what you can do is you can record it.

You can go into a studio or you can record it from home.

What happens afterwards is guess what?

You're optimizing for search.

And a lot more people, even though YouTube is very popular today,

still a lot of people are not taking advantage of YouTube,

knowing that it's a second larger search engine in the world.

Now the third piece of this is you want to then repurpose

your original blog post into a LinkedIn post.

The key thing here is that you want to make sure

that you're writing natively for LinkedIn.

So when I say writing natively,

I mean understanding how people are written to on LinkedIn.

What are the posts that do well?

What do they look like specifically?

Is there a certain format that they have?

Do they have bullet points in there?

Do they have different emojis in there?

And do they have a very strong hook in the beginning?

And so you have to understand for every single channel,

whether it's for blog posts, for YouTube, for LinkedIn,

there is a meta way.

There's an optimized way of playing for these channels.

So you want to make sure that you are writing for LinkedIn's users,

and they have a certain way of enjoying content.

That what I would do afterwards is I might take that YouTube video,

okay, that you made and I would cut the key moments from it

and then take out the little clips, right?

It could be 60 second clips.

It could be four to five minute clips.

You can use a tool like Opus for this.

And then you can pull those key moments

and then write a caption for X,

write a caption for Instagram,

write a caption for threads,

and then post it to these channels as well, okay?

You're trying to maximize the mileage

from the content that you produce.

And then what else you would do after this is that

you would look at Reddit, you look at Cora,

these are other communities that you can post to,

and then you would answer related questions.

And just try to, you know, it's easier said than done,

but add value.

Don't try to promote yourself all the time,

but just your answering questions in there.

And then sometimes you might be linking back

to content that you've produced.

That way you're not trying to sell yourself

or market yourself all the time.

Just seek to be a person that's helpful

rather than trying to sell your stuff all the time.

So the key reminder here is that each platform

is its own game.

So on LinkedIn, you're more business focused.

On X, you can be more unhinged with your thoughts.

On YouTube, you're playing the YouTube game

with the thumbnails, the retention,

and then the headline, the packaging overall,

the idea matters a lot.

Now for LinkedIn, I'll give you a little tool here.

I use a tool called Stanley,

so it's stanley.stand.store, I believe,

to help repurpose content specifically for each platform.

So one example from Stan Lee's, I got a post,

I literally just cut and pasted the post that it gave me.

I put it on LinkedIn and it got a hundred and 50,000 views.

And then on X, it got 50,000 views.

So that's 200,000 views that otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

All that matters is that you're reaching the right people

and Stanley, what it does a good job of,

it finds posts that have done well on LinkedIn,

and then it will look up content that you've put out recently

and then give you ideas based on formats

that are already working.

Now you want to take this idea and then repackage it

over into every other platform out there.

Well, how can you see what's working already

and how can you just repackage it

to stuff that you're used to talking about?

By the way, if someone can do this for every single channel,

I would pay for that.

So now let's move over to Google.

So when someone's searching for your topic,

you want to make sure that you're dominating multiple results.

So not just one spot on Google.

So if you show up on Google, on YouTube, on LinkedIn,

and read it for the same query,

you look like you're the authority.

And Google specifically, they're looking at entities.

When I look at Google Search Console,

which is their SEO analytics product, here's the thing.

It used to just look at search traffic.

Now it's looking at other entities

such as your YouTube channel.

And first that you own a certain YouTube channel

and that it's just looking at all these different pieces, right?

So now, even the LLems, like a chat GPT,

they are actually looking at, hey, what are other websites

that are citing you?

Not just your own website that's citing you.

So that's how you go about winning in 2026.

Step number three is that you optimize for freshness.

So the content refresh system.

Here's the stat that changes everything.

Earlier, I had mentioned already that 95% of all AI citations

come from content less than 10 months old.

Meaning that if your content, your best content,

is two years old and you haven't touched it,

you're basically invisible to the chat GPT.

So it perplexes these, the clods, the Gemini's, all of them.

The old SEO playbook was that you just,

you publish once, you rank forever.

The new SEO playbook is that you publish constantly

and you update relentlessly.

And so we use a tool called Clickflow internally

that helps us stay on top of our updates.

If I'm starting from scratch,

here's my content freshness system.

So weekly publishing.

So I'm saying, you know, three to five new pieces

of content per week minimum and then mix of pillar content.

So, you know, maybe 2000 word blog posts

and quick hit post, 500 to 800 words.

And then you're always optimizing for both Google

and AI overviews.

And then what you're doing afterwards

is you're doing these quarterly content audits

and I'm looking at pulling my top 20 performing pieces.

I want to update with new stats, new examples, new sections, FAQs,

changed published dates and now I want to repromote potentially

not all the time across all platforms.

And then what you do afterwards is you do monthly trend checks.

And so look at what topics are trending up

but don't have volume yet.

You can look at your Google search console for that.

You can use a trust to see what's trending up and downwards.

You want to look at what's trending up and downwards for search

but also for the LLM surfaces as well.

And then you want to create content

before everyone else catches on, right?

So you want to look for the topics that are exploding.

So an example might be like LLM personalization.

So no volume now, but it might explode in six months.

Ultimately, why this matters?

That AI rewards freshness more than Google ever did.

If you're not updating, you're dying slowly.

Quick break, if you're doing AI SEO or content marketing in general,

you know what the problem is.

The problem is you're spending hours writing yourself

or you're paying agencies lots and lots of money

and you're getting AI slot that sounds just like everyone else.

That's why we built Clickflow.

Clickflow creates production grade content

that actually sounds like you.

Plus, it helps you with other areas

such as building internal links, creating FAQs, and more.

One customer even reported saving 90 plus hours a month

just by using Clickflow.

You can get a 14 day free trial just by going to clickflow.com.

No more AI slot, just production grade content

that drives traffic and conversions back to the show.

Step number four, I would build AI workflows

to 10X my output.

The truth is you can't compete manually anymore.

If you're writing every blog post from scratch,

manually researching keywords and hand crafting every social post,

you're going to lose to someone using AI workflows.

My agency spent the first half of this year

building one I call an AI command center.

So what we use is cursor, cloud code, and MCPs,

which are model context protocols

to build these sub agents that do 80 to 90% of the work.

So if I'm starting from scratch,

here are the three sub agents that I want to build first.

Number one is the sub agent that helps you repurpose content.

And what I do is I feed it my long form content

such as podcasts, YouTube, videos, pillar articles.

So it will output 20 short form clips, 10 social media posts,

and you have platform specific hooks for those,

five email ideas, and then I'll score each concept

one through 100 for virality potential.

And this turns 180 minute podcasts

into 35 plus pieces of content in just a couple of minutes.

The second sub agent I should say

is SEO keyword research agent.

I don't know about you.

I don't want to spend time doing keyword research.

So what this does is it hooks in like a tool

that you're using like Atrefs.

And I'll use the Atrefs MCP.

And what I'll do is I'll find training keywords

that have low volume now,

but actually they have high future potential.

And I'll show you focus B2B transactional keywords.

These are types of keywords I like optimizing for

gaps in my content strategy

and where I rank versus my competitors.

And they'll show me keyword difficulty,

what to optimize for, and what is worth going after.

Now the cool thing about this is that I don't need

to go around clicking into Atrefs or any of these tools.

And in fact, I can merge the Atrefs MCP

with what's happening in my Google Analytics,

my Google Search Console,

and then my HubSpot sales data as well.

And then we can merge everything together

and figure out what we should be going after

in terms of what's trending.

And we just look at the data across the board.

It's not just in one little area, right?

What you're actually doing now

is you're combining different data sources

to make better decisions faster.

Now last but not least,

you got the programmatic page builder sub agent.

So what I do in this case is I just

am looking to make programmatic SEO pages.

And I give it a template for landing page.

And it creates programmatic SEO pages at scale.

So in a example, this might be best digital marketing agency

in Los Angeles, like these best X for Y pages.

Location-based pages, like best food

to eat in Japan.

And when you do these programmatic SEO pages,

they're basically 89% of the way there.

You still need a human in the loop,

but it's doing most of the heavy lifting.

And here's what's crazy.

These sub agents spin up in two to three minutes.

You don't have to be technical at all.

You could just dictate what you want

using tools like super whisperer.

So I literally just press the key

and I just tell it what I want.

And then cloud regenerate the agent for you.

And one more thing,

this is the critical part that everyone misses.

You need to have a human in the loop.

AI will not fully automate SEO in 2026.

LLMs hallucinate, meaning that they make stuff up.

Second part is AI without human review means AI slop.

And Google knows what AI slop looks like.

All these LLMs know.

You got a fact check, you got to add personality,

you got to optimize for user intent.

So what my human loop workflow looks like

is that number one, AI will generate the first draft.

So you got 89% done.

Two, human fact checks.

So ARD stats actually real.

Three, human ads internal links,

critical for algorithm signals.

Four, human optimizes for AI overviews.

Five, you got human ads personality,

unique insights, contrarian takes.

And in six, you got human publishes and promotes.

And so why this matters is that most people

are defaulting to 100% AI generated slop.

And if you just go the extra mile with human review,

you're going to dominate

because most people aren't willing to do this.

And step five is I'd play the long game.

So I measure what actually matters.

And this is where 99% of people fail.

They start strong, they publish for two weeks.

And then what happens is they see no results

and then they give up.

SEO is not a two week game.

And if you're lucky, it's a six to 12 month game.

But it's an ongoing game that you're constantly playing.

And if I'm starting from scratch, here's my commitment.

Months one through three, you got your foundation set up.

So you're going to publish three times per week minimum.

You're going to build 10 to 15 pillar pieces.

You're going to set up these AI workflows

that I talked about.

You're going to post everywhere.

You're going to play to search everywhere optimization game.

YouTube LinkedIn, Reddit, wherever your people

are hanging out.

Months four through six, scale.

So you're going to run it to five times per week.

Maybe even more, start constantly refresh cycle.

You're going to see first results.

You're going to double down on what's working.

And then months seven through 12, you're going to come pound.

So you're going to publish daily if possible.

And that's when your rankings kick in.

The AI cetaceans increase traffic compounds.

And what I would say is this.

I haven't taken a day off of posting for, I don't know,

maybe close to a decade.

And that's why our content performs.

So the person who shows up every day for 12 months

beats the person who goes all in for two weeks and burns out.

So here's what's changed.

What you're measuring.

So the old metrics would be like organic traffic,

backlinks, keyword rankings.

The new metrics that you're looking at would be AI mentions.

So how often you're cited in chat.

Cheapity, perplexity, clod, sentiment analysis.

Our mentions positive or negative.

And brands versus competitors.

Are you mentioned more than them?

And what we're seeing is companies are shifting

budget from SEO teams to brand teams

because LLM optimization or AEO is brand awareness,

not just traffic.

So here's an idea of the different tools that we use.

One, we use click flow.

That's our internal tool to produce content,

help with internal links and things like that.

We use atress.

We use sem rush as well.

We also use from our rank tracking standpoint,

we use amplitude.

Okay, so amplitude is great for looking at LLM service ranking.

So as atress, atress says brand radar.

And you can also, there's a handful of other tools

that you can use out there.

And here's what I track if I'm starting from scratch.

One, traditional Google.

So traffic and conversions still matter to an extent,

especially conversions.

Number two, AI platforms mentions across chat.

Cheapity, perplexity, clod, and Gemini.

Number three, you got sentiment.

Positive, neutral, negative.

Four, how competitive are you versus your competitors?

So the bottom line here is that you're for only measuring

Google rankings, you're playing half the game.

So you got to commit to six to 12 months,

measure the full picture and show up every single day.

And that's how you win.

So that's exactly what I do if I wanted to rank number one

on Google in 2026 starting from scratch.

You got to accept a new reality, post everywhere,

optimize refreshness, build AI workflows with humans in the loop,

play the long game and measure what actually matters.

And if you want to understand the AEO playbook for 2026,

you can watch this video over here.