For the better part of my career, I’ve viewed the internet through a very specific lens: as a massive, infinite library. And my website? That was my own specialised book I was trying to get more people to view.

I was the diligent curator. I filled my room with thousands of documents, and to ensure people could actually find them, I played the game perfectly. I meticulously labelled every folder with exact keywords (our Meta Titles, top quality content, excellent formatting). I organised the shelves by strict, logical categories (Site Structure). I even made sure the lights were always on, the floors were swept, and the heavy oak doors swung open effortlessly to guarantee a seamless “User Experience”.

Down in the main lobby sat the gatekeeper: a clunky desktop computer we called Google.

When a curious student walked in and typed a query, that computer didn’t actually read my books. It couldn’t. It simply scanned a massive digital spreadsheet of every title, label, and keyword in the entire building. When it worked, it was a beautiful system. The computer would spit out a receipt that essentially said, “Go to Aisle 4, Shelf B; I think what you need is in that blue folder.” The student still had to hike up to my book, open it up, and hunt for the specific chapters to find their answers. But I got the foot traffic. I got the “click.”

But recently, everything changed. I walked into the lobby one morning to find the clunky desktop pushed aside. The library had hired an Expert Librarian, an artificial intelligence.

This isn’t just a receptionist; this is an entity that has actually read, processed, and internalised every single page in every single wing of our infinite library. Now, when that same student walks in and asks, “How do I fix a leaky faucet?”, they don’t bother with the computer terminal to find my book. They simply walk right up to the Librarian.

The Librarian doesn’t just hand them a map to the plumbing section. Instead, they stand there and mentally cross-reference the blue folder from my wing, a detailed schematic from a competitor’s wing, and a “Quick Tips” sheet from a hardware store across town.

Then, looking the student dead in the eye, the Librarian synthesises it all: “First, turn off the water valve under the sink. You’ll likely need a 10mm wrench. Most people find that the O-ring is the problem.”

The student nods, satisfied, and leaves. They got their answer without ever setting foot inside my carefully curated book. 

Watching this happen, I realised the paradigm of “Search” has completely fractured. I no longer win simply by having the best-labelled folder on the fastest-loading shelf. I only win, or rather, I only matter…if the Librarian trusts my facts enough to repeat them as part of their spoken answer.

If my document is a mess of corporate jargon or thin fluff, the Librarian skips it entirely and reads my neighbour’s book instead.

If we want to survive this new era of discovery, we have to stop building for the catalogue and start writing for the Librarian. To do that, we need to look under the hood. Here is exactly how this new system works.

Google Recommendations for SEO

We reviewed Google’s recommendations and this is just a summary based on their start guide documentation.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the refined practice of ensuring your website is both easily discoverable by readers and seamlessly understood by search engines. Whilst your site is inherently built for a human audience, search engines act as the essential bridge connecting those users to your content.

How Google Search Works

Google operates as a fully automated engine. It deploys web crawlers to constantly explore the internet, actively seeking new pages to add to its expansive index.

• Discovery – In most instances, you do not need to take any action, as Google discovers the majority of websites automatically.
• Timeframe – SEO is a long-term commitment. Implementing changes can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to reflect in search results. It is best to wait a few weeks to accurately gauge the real impact of your efforts.

Help Google Find Your Content

Before diving into deeper optimisation, it is crucial to confirm whether your site is actually appearing in the index.

• The Test – Search for site:yourwebsite.com on Google. If relevant results populate, your site is indexed.
• Technical Requirements – Ensure your website is not technically blocked by checking your robots.txt file.
• Discovery via Links – Google primarily discovers new pages by following links from existing ones. Naturally promoting your site is a brilliant way to encourage others to link back to you.
• Sitemaps – For more expansive websites, submitting a sitemap file via Google Search Console helps the engine locate every URL you deem important.

Site Organisation and Structure

A logical and clear structure significantly helps both your audience and search engines navigate your published content.

• Descriptive URLs – Rely on human-readable words within your URLs, such as /pets/cats, rather than deploying random string identifiers, like /item/12345.
• Topical Folders – Group topically similar pages into dedicated directories, such as /blog/ or /products/. This straightforward approach helps Google understand the frequency at which certain types of content are updated.
• Handle Duplicates – If identical content exists across multiple URLs, utilise canonical tags or redirects to clearly signal to Google which version serves as the primary source.

Creating Quality Content

Exceptional content remains the single most critical factor for ranking success. Google heavily prioritises content that embodies the following traits:

• Readable and Organised – Employ clear headings, concise paragraphs, and impeccable grammar throughout your writing.
• Unique – Avoid copying and pasting from other sources. Instead, offer your own distinct insights and original data.
• Fresh – Routinely update older content, and do not hesitate to delete pages that are no longer relevant to your audience.
• People-First – Always write for the direct benefit of your reader, rather than attempting to appease a search engine algorithm.
• Natural Keywords – Consider the exact phrasing your audience might type into a search bar, such as “cheese board” versus “charcuterie”, and incorporate these terms naturally. Google is highly adept at understanding synonyms.

Links and Navigation

• Anchor Text – The clickable text of a link should accurately describe its final destination. Avoid using vague instructions like “click here”.
• External Links – Confidently link out to high-quality, relevant sources to substantiate your claims and add value.
• Nofollow Attributes – If you need to link to a site that you do not fully trust, such as within user-generated comments, append a rel="nofollow" tag so your own site is not penalised for their content.

Visuals: Images and Video

• Alt Text – Always attach descriptive alternative text to your images. This vital step assists visually impaired users whilst simultaneously telling Google exactly what the image depicts.
• Proximity – Position your images closely to the relevant text they are meant to support.
• Video Optimisation – Host videos on their own standalone pages, and always provide them with clear, descriptive titles.

Controlling Search Appearance

You possess the ability to influence how your site is visually presented within the search results:

• Title Links – Craft unique, succinct, and compelling titles for every individual page.
• Snippets – Utilise the meta description tag to offer a one or two sentence summary of the page. This text frequently appears as the informative description just beneath your link.

SEO Myths: What Not to Worry About

The digital marketing industry is unfortunately rife with outdated advice. Here is a definitive list of practices that do not significantly impact your search ranking:

• Meta Keywords – Google has completely ignored this specific tag for many years.
• Keyword Stuffing – Endlessly repeating the same words severely damages your readability and can actually result in your site being penalised.
• Keywords in Domains – Forcing a keyword into your domain name, like best-cheap-shoes.com, has virtually no measurable effect on your overall ranking.
• Specific Word Counts – There is absolutely no perfect or magical length for an article. Simply write until the topic is comprehensively covered.
• Heading Order – Whilst maintaining a strict hierarchy is fantastic for accessibility, Google will not penalise your site if a heading two happens to appear before a heading one.

First Steps to Take – According to Google

1. Set up Google Search Console – This remains the absolute best tool for monitoring exactly how Google views your website.
2. Monitor Performance – Keep an eye out for Rich Results, such as review stars and image carousels, by implementing Structured Data.
3. Stay Updated – Subscribe to the Google Search Central blog to receive the latest official news and algorithmic updates.

We decided to put together our own documentation on how search engines work in modern times.

How SEO Works: A Complete Guide for 2026

Search engine optimisation has never been more important, or more complex.

What began as a relatively straightforward discipline, built around keywords and backlinks, has evolved into something that now spans technical infrastructure, content strategy, local search, artificial intelligence and an entirely new field known as generative engine optimisation.

Whether you are a business owner trying to attract more customers online, a marketer looking to sharpen your digital strategy, or simply someone who wants to understand how Google decides what to show at the top of its results, this guide covers everything you need to know.

We will start with the basics, explaining how search engines actually work, before building up through every major pillar of modern SEO. As we go through this section you’ll have a clear picture of not just how SEO works today, but where it is heading and what you need to do to stay ahead.

1. How Search Engines Work

Before you can optimise for search engines, you need to understand what they are actually doing. Search engines like Google, Bing and others are essentially enormous libraries. Their job is to discover content across the web, make sense of it, store it and then retrieve the most relevant results whenever someone types in a query. This process happens in three stages: crawling, indexing and ranking.

Crawling

Search engines use automated programmes called crawlers, spiders or bots to explore the web. Google’s crawler is called Googlebot. It moves from page to page by following links, much like a person browsing the web, discovering new content and revisiting existing pages to check for updates.

The frequency with which Googlebot crawls a page depends on how popular the site is, how often it publishes new content and how well its technical setup allows crawlers to access it.

If your site blocks crawlers through a misconfigured robots.txt file, or if it has pages that are not linked from anywhere else, those pages may never be found at all.

Indexing

Once a page has been crawled, Google analyses its content and stores it in a massive database called the index. This is where Google decides what a page is actually about. It looks at the text, images, videos, structured data and metadata on the page. It considers the language, the topic and the context.

Not every page that is crawled will be indexed. Google may choose to exclude pages it considers thin, duplicate or low quality. If a page is not in the index, it simply cannot appear in search results, no matter how well optimised it is.

Ranking

Ranking is where things get genuinely complex. When someone searches for something, Google does not simply return a list of pages that contain those words. It runs those pages through a sophisticated algorithm that weighs hundreds of different signals to determine which results are most relevant and most trustworthy for that particular query.

These signals include the content of the page, how many other reputable sites link to it, how quickly it loads, whether it is mobile-friendly, and increasingly, how well it satisfies the intent behind the search. Google updates this algorithm thousands of times each year, with major updates occasionally causing significant shifts in rankings across entire industries.

2. What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the practice of improving a website so that it appears higher in organic search results. The word organic is important here. Unlike paid search advertising, where you pay Google to show your page at the top for certain keywords, SEO is about earning those rankings through the quality and relevance of your content, the authority of your site and the technical health of your pages.

SEO sits within the broader discipline of digital marketing, alongside paid search, social media marketing, email marketing and more.

It is often considered one of the most valuable long-term digital marketing investments because organic traffic, once earned, does not stop the moment you turn off a budget.

A well-optimised page can attract visitors consistently for months or even years.

Modern SEO is typically organised around three core pillars: on-page SEO, which covers the content and structure of individual pages; off-page SEO, which relates to your site’s reputation and authority across the web; and technical SEO, which addresses the underlying infrastructure that allows search engines to find, access and understand your site.

Each pillar is equally important, and weaknesses in any one of them can hold back even excellent work in the other two.

3. On-Page SEO and Content

On-page SEO refers to everything you do directly on a page to help it rank well. This starts with understanding what your audience is actually searching for and creating content that genuinely answers those queries better than anything else available.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation of any content strategy. It involves identifying the terms and phrases your target audience uses when searching for information, products or services related to your business. Tools such as Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner allow you to see how many people search for particular terms each month, how difficult it is to rank for them and what kind of content currently occupies the top results. Good keyword research is not simply about finding high-volume terms. It is about understanding the intent behind a search, whether someone is looking to learn something, compare options or make a purchase, and then creating content that matches that intent precisely.

Content Quality and Search Intent

Google’s algorithm has become remarkably good at distinguishing genuinely helpful content from content that merely appears helpful on the surface. Pages that exist primarily to rank, rather than to inform or assist the reader, tend to perform poorly in the long run. The best-performing pages are those that comprehensively cover a topic, answer the most important related questions and provide a better experience than the competition. This means thinking about structure, readability, the use of examples and the accuracy of information, not just keyword placement.

Technical On-Page Elements

Beyond the content itself, several technical elements on each page contribute to SEO performance. Title tags are the clickable headlines that appear in search results, and they should accurately reflect the page’s content while naturally including the target keyword. Meta descriptions, while not a direct ranking factor, influence click-through rates and should be written to entice users to choose your result over others. Heading tags (H1 through H3) provide structure for both readers and crawlers, and they should be used hierarchically to organise content logically. Internal links, which connect one page on your site to another, help crawlers discover new pages and distribute authority across your site. Finally, keeping content up to date signals to Google that a page remains relevant, which can have a positive effect on rankings over time.

4. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is concerned with the infrastructure of your website rather than its content. Even the most brilliantly written page will struggle to rank if the underlying site has technical issues that make it difficult for search engines to crawl, index or understand it.

Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

Page speed has been a ranking factor for some years, and Google has formalised this through a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. These measure how quickly a page loads, how responsive it is to user interaction and how visually stable it is as it loads. Sites that perform poorly on these metrics risk being penalised in rankings, particularly on mobile, where users are less tolerant of slow-loading pages. Improving Core Web Vitals typically involves reducing image file sizes, minimising unnecessary code, using a content delivery network and choosing a reliable hosting provider.

Mobile-Friendliness

Google now uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a site for ranking purposes. If your website does not display correctly on smartphones and tablets, or if the mobile experience is significantly worse than the desktop version, this will negatively affect your rankings regardless of how good your content is. A responsive design that adapts fluidly to any screen size is now the standard expectation.

Sitemaps, Robots.txt and Structured Data

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your site that you want search engines to index. Submitting it to Google Search Console helps ensure your pages are discovered efficiently. The robots.txt file, meanwhile, tells crawlers which parts of your site they should and should not access. Misconfiguring this file is a surprisingly common mistake that can inadvertently block important pages from being crawled. Structured data, sometimes called schema markup, is a way of providing search engines with additional context about your content in a standardised format. It can enable rich results in search, such as star ratings, event dates or FAQ accordions, which can significantly improve click-through rates.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that every website owner should use. It shows you which pages Google has indexed, what search queries are bringing users to your site, whether any pages have technical errors and how your Core Web Vitals are performing. It is the most direct window into how Google sees your website and should be checked regularly as part of any SEO programme.

5. Off-Page SEO and Authority

While on-page and technical SEO are largely within your control, off-page SEO is about how the rest of the web perceives and references your site. The most important off-page signal remains the backlink, which is a link from another website pointing to yours.

Backlinks and Domain Authority

Google treats backlinks as votes of confidence. When a reputable, relevant website links to a page on your site, it signals to Google that your content is trustworthy and worth ranking. Not all backlinks are equal, however. A single link from a highly authoritative news publication or academic institution is worth far more than hundreds of links from low-quality directories. Ahrefs measures site authority through a metric called Domain Rating, which gives a score from 0 to 100 based on the quality and quantity of a site’s backlink profile. Building domain authority takes time, but it is one of the most durable competitive advantages in SEO.

Link Building Strategies

Earning quality backlinks requires creating content that others genuinely want to reference. Long-form guides, original research, unique data sets and genuinely useful tools tend to attract links naturally over time. Digital PR, which involves pitching stories or data to journalists and industry publications, is another effective approach. Guest posting on reputable sites, participating in industry forums and building relationships with other publishers in your sector can all contribute to a healthy backlink profile. What you should avoid is purchasing links or engaging in any form of link scheme, as these violate Google’s guidelines and can result in significant penalties.

6. Local SEO

Local SEO is a specialist area of search optimisation focused on helping businesses appear in results when people search for products or services near their location. It is particularly important for brick-and-mortar businesses, service providers and any organisation that serves customers in a specific geographic area.

Google Business Profile

The most important asset in local SEO is a well-maintained Google Business Profile. This is the listing that appears in Google Maps and in the local pack, which is the block of three local results that often appears above organic results for location-based searches. Your profile should include accurate business information, opening hours, contact details, photos and a description of your services. Encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews is also essential, as both the quantity and quality of reviews influence local rankings significantly.

NAP Consistency and Local Citations

NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number. Google cross-references your business information across the web, and inconsistencies between your website, Google Business Profile and other directories can undermine your local rankings. Local citations, which are mentions of your business on directories such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or local business listings, contribute to your local authority. Ensuring these are consistent and up to date is a fundamental aspect of local SEO hygiene.

7. AI SEO: Optimising for AI-Powered Search

The arrival of AI-generated answers within search results represents one of the most significant shifts in the history of SEO. Google’s AI Overviews, which appear at the top of search results for many queries, synthesise information from across the web and present a direct answer before a user has even scrolled to the traditional organic results. This has fundamentally changed the relationship between ranking and visibility.

How AI Overviews Work

AI Overviews are generated by Google’s large language models, which are trained to synthesise and summarise information from indexed web pages. When a user asks a question, Google’s AI may pull from several sources to construct a summary answer, citing those sources within the overview.

Appearing as a cited source within an AI Overview can drive significant traffic, even if your page does not rank in the traditional top ten results. However, it can also reduce clicks for simpler informational queries where the AI’s answer satisfies the user’s need completely.

E-E-A-T and Why It Matters More Than Ever

Google’s quality rater guidelines place heavy emphasis on a framework known as E-E-A-T, which stands for:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

This framework matters more than ever. Google’s AI systems are designed to prioritise content from sources that demonstrate genuine expertise and real-world experience.

This means that content written or reviewed by credible, named authors with verifiable credentials tends to perform better than anonymous content, particularly in topics related to health, finance, law and other high-stakes areas.

Demonstrating E-E-A-T involves displaying author biographies, earning coverage in reputable publications, citing credible sources and maintaining a consistent, trustworthy brand presence online.

Structuring Content for AI Discovery

To maximise your chances of being cited in AI Overviews, content needs to be structured in a way that is easy for AI systems to parse and extract.

This means writing clear, direct answers to specific questions, using structured headings to organise information logically and including concise summary statements that could be lifted and cited without losing meaning.

FAQ sections, definition blocks and step-by-step formats all perform well in this context. Structured data markup, particularly FAQ and HowTo schema, can also help signal to Google that your content is suitable for featured and AI-generated placements.

AI SEO Tools

A growing category of AI SEO tools has emerged to help marketers navigate this shifting landscape. These tools use artificial intelligence to assist with keyword research, content briefs, competitive analysis, content optimisation and technical audits.

They can analyse the top-ranking pages for a given keyword and suggest the topics, questions and subtopics your content should cover to be competitive. While they should never replace genuine expertise and editorial judgement, they can significantly accelerate the research and planning stages of content production.

8. GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is an emerging discipline focused on ensuring that your content, brand and expertise are cited and surfaced by AI tools that generate answers rather than returning a list of links. Where traditional SEO is about ranking in search engine results pages, GEO is about becoming a trusted source that AI systems draw upon when constructing their responses.

GEO vs SEO: Understanding the Difference

The distinction between GEO and SEO is worth spelling out clearly, as it is one of the most searched questions in the digital marketing space right now. Traditional SEO is primarily concerned with ranking your pages within a search engine’s list of results. GEO, by contrast, is concerned with influencing the responses generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini and others. In a traditional SEO world, success is measured by rankings and organic traffic. In a GEO world, success is measured by whether your brand, content or expertise is referenced in the AI-generated answers that users increasingly rely upon without ever clicking through to a website. These two disciplines overlap significantly, as quality content, strong authority and good technical SEO all support both, but GEO requires some additional thinking about how AI systems consume and cite information.

Answer Engine Optimisation

Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is a closely related concept that focuses specifically on ensuring your content surfaces within the conversational, question-and-answer format that AI tools use to respond to user queries. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI-powered search are all, in effect, answer engines. They do not return ten blue links; they construct direct, conversational responses. To appear within those responses, content needs to be authoritative, well-structured and clearly relevant to the kinds of questions users are asking. Writing content in a question-and-answer format, covering topics comprehensively and ensuring your site has strong E-E-A-T signals are all central to AEO.

LLM SEO: Getting Your Brand Cited by AI Models

Large language models, or LLMs, are the AI systems that power tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. LLM SEO refers to the practice of optimising your brand’s presence so that these models are aware of it, understand it accurately and cite it appropriately when users ask relevant questions.

Unlike traditional search engines, LLMs are trained on large datasets and may not reflect very recent information unless they have access to live search or retrieval capabilities.

This means that building a strong presence across the broader web, through earned media, reputable citations, Wikipedia entries, industry publications and authoritative directories, is essential. The more your brand is mentioned in high-quality, trustworthy sources across the web, the more likely it is that AI models will recognise and cite it.

Writing Content That AI Cites

There are several practical content strategies that improve your chances of being cited by AI tools. Factual, well-sourced content that takes clear positions tends to be more citable than vague or hedged writing. Including original data, research or proprietary insights gives AI tools a compelling reason to reference you specifically, rather than relying on more generic sources. Writing in a way that is quotable, with precise, self-contained statements that retain meaning out of context, makes it easier for AI systems to extract and cite your content accurately. Ensuring your content is indexed, accessible and free from technical barriers is also essential, as AI tools that use live web retrieval cannot cite what they cannot access.

The Future: Will GEO Replace SEO?

The honest answer is that GEO will not replace SEO, but it will reshape it significantly. Traditional search is not disappearing, and organic rankings remain enormously valuable. However, the proportion of searches that result in a user clicking through to a website is declining as AI-generated answers satisfy more queries directly.

This means that SEO strategies need to evolve to account for a world in which visibility and authority matter as much as, if not more than, rankings alone.

The businesses that will thrive in this environment are those that invest in genuine expertise, build trusted brands and create content that is so authoritative and well-structured that both search algorithms and AI models consistently choose to reference it.

9. How to Measure SEO Success

One of the most common frustrations with SEO is that it takes time to show results. Unlike paid advertising, where you can see immediate returns the moment a campaign goes live, organic SEO typically takes several months to gain traction, and competitive keywords can take a year or more. Understanding what to measure and how to interpret the data is therefore essential for maintaining confidence in your strategy and making informed decisions along the way.

Key Metrics

The most important metrics to track are organic traffic, which is the number of visitors arriving at your site through unpaid search results; keyword rankings, which show where your pages appear for specific search terms; impressions, which indicate how often your pages appear in search results; and click-through rate, which measures how often users click on your result when it appears.

Google Search Console provides all of these metrics for free and should be the starting point for any SEO reporting.

Ahrefs and similar tools provide additional depth, including backlink analysis, competitor benchmarking and keyword opportunity identification.

Setting Realistic Expectations

A newly published page on a site with modest authority may take three to six months to rank meaningfully, even for less competitive keywords. Pages targeting highly competitive terms may take considerably longer, and some may require significant link building before they break into the top ten results. This is not a reason to avoid SEO; it is simply a reason to start sooner and to view it as a long-term investment rather than a short-term tactic. The compounding nature of SEO, where well-established pages continue to attract traffic with minimal ongoing investment, is precisely what makes it so valuable.

10. How to Start with SEO: A Step-by-Step Approach

For those new to SEO, the volume of information can feel overwhelming. The good news is that you do not need to tackle everything at once. A structured, prioritised approach will deliver results far more efficiently than trying to do everything simultaneously.

Begin with the technical foundations. Ensure your site is accessible to crawlers, loads quickly on mobile devices, has been submitted to Google Search Console and has no significant indexing issues. These are the prerequisites for everything else. Next, conduct keyword research to identify the terms your audience is searching for and map those terms to the pages on your site. Create or improve content to address those queries comprehensively, with clear structure and genuine depth. Once your on-page content is strong, begin building your authority through link earning, digital PR and ensuring your brand is consistently represented across the web.

As your SEO programme matures, layer in more advanced work: local SEO if relevant to your business, AI SEO to ensure your content is structured for AI-powered results and GEO strategies to build your brand’s presence across the AI tools your audience is increasingly turning to. Review your performance regularly, adjust based on what the data tells you and be patient. SEO rewards consistency and quality above all else.

The question of whether to manage SEO in-house or work with an agency or consultant depends on your resources, expertise and the competitiveness of your market. Many businesses find a hybrid approach works well: building internal capability for content and on-page optimisation while engaging specialists for technical audits, link building or strategic direction. Whatever approach you take, ensure that anyone involved understands both the fundamentals and the rapidly evolving landscape of modern search.

Conclusion

SEO in 2026 is not the same discipline it was even three years ago. The arrival of AI-powered search results, the rise of answer engines and the emergence of generative engine optimisation have collectively transformed what it means to be visible online. And yet, the fundamentals remain as relevant as ever. Fast, well-structured websites with genuinely helpful content, strong authority and consistent, trustworthy brand signals will always perform well, because those are exactly the qualities that both search algorithms and AI systems are designed to reward.

The businesses and creators who will thrive in this environment are not those who chase algorithm updates or look for shortcuts. They are those who invest in truly understanding their audience, who create content with genuine expertise and depth, and who build a brand that earns trust across every channel, including the AI tools that are increasingly shaping how people discover information online. SEO has always been, at its core, about being the best answer to the questions your audience is asking. That mission has not changed. The places those answers need to appear most certainly has.