It was great to see that the Search Engine Journal did a yearly round-up of all the news in WordPress SEO for 2025.
My message to you was highlighted in their new article again. (command+F for “squirrly” to find). They liked that I don’t want to hype you up about AEO/GEO nonsense.
Just as LLMs txt didn’t bring any “AI SEO” wins to the table (as I’ve told you when we launched the feature thanks to public request), I will let you know that most AI SEO advice you read also has nothing to do with reality.
What Matters in 2026 for SEO are still Keywords and Rankings
Keep in mind that we’re growing sites for our brands and sub-brands PLUS sites for the clients under my 90 Days Growth Program. We see what is going on across multiple industries.
AND YES: we did get traffic from ChatGPT and Gemini to our clients.
But guess what: that was due to keywords and rankings.
Most users of Perplexity, Gemini and ChatGPT use things like “search the web” inside their prompts.
Search the web and find me a nice wooden watch for a casual meeting. Just an example.
If you as a user make the AI search the web, then you get the really good stuff.
If you don’t do this, you get stuck with what was present in the training materials of the AI model you happened to use (only up until the final date of training for that model)… some users got stuck with info from 2024 and 2025.
That’s why prompts that force them to search the web are so powerful.
Also, there will be times where the AIs will show you they began searching the web to retrieve information for whatever you asked it to do.
That is also a web search.
I gave you the recipe for being recommended by AIs in AI search engines here.
All there is to it is keywords and being in the TOP 10 for the keyword. When this doesn’t work, it’s only because the “thinking model” tried a different path, but I’ve given you the exact way to identify that new path so you learn 100% what you need to rank in BING and Google for.
Don’t ignore Bing anymore, because Perplexity and ChatGPT use Bing to know what to recommend.
