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June 16, 2026
Author: Jason Faber
I recently joined The Booth for an episode of their podcast, Creative Tangent. We covered a lot of ground: what SEO actually looks like in 2026, how AI is changing search behavior, and why traffic is no longer the metric most teams should be optimizing for. Below is a recap of what we talked about.
The old playbook was clean: pick a keyword, publish a page, rank, watch traffic go up. That was the north star for a long time. It's not anymore.
Between Google AI Overviews, LLM-driven research, and zero-click results, the way people find and evaluate brands has changed significantly. Someone might first encounter a company through an AI-generated answer — never clicking a search result at all. If that's where discovery is happening, then SEO's job extends well past whether a page ranks. Your content has to be clear. Your site has to make sense. Your product has to be easy to understand. The path from first visit to action has to feel credible.
What that means in practice: the teams winning right now aren't just optimizing pages — they're building businesses that search engines, AI tools, and buyers can understand from multiple angles.
A lot of teams still treat traffic as the headline metric. I pushed back on that in the episode.
AI Overviews now answer a lot of simple informational queries right in the results. For some clients, top-of-funnel traffic is down. But if demo requests are up, or pricing-page visits are climbing, or branded search is stronger — that's the more important signal. If traffic drops 30% and conversions hold or improve, the traffic that disappeared probably wasn't doing much work anyway.
This also maps to how people actually buy now. Someone starts in Claude or ChatGPT, narrows a shortlist there, then comes back through branded search when they're ready to act. The top of the funnel looks softer. The bottom can look stronger. The challenge is that the path in between is harder to see — which makes measurement more important, not less.
The answer to changing search behavior isn't panic. It's better interpretation and a clearer view of what's actually driving results.
One thing I talked about in the episode is the difference between chasing a keyword and building authority around a topic. They sound similar. They're not.
I used an emergency vet client as an example. Yes, there's a core commercial keyword we care about. But that page performs well because it's supported by a much wider body of content — symptoms, use cases, pet types, related emergencies, common questions. The site doesn't look like one page trying to rank. It looks like a source that genuinely owns the space. That's what earns trust from both search engines and the LLMs that are increasingly doing the research for people.
The right question for content strategy isn't what keyword should we chase next. It's what else would someone need to know if they were seriously trying to solve this problem? The next ten questions. The adjacent use cases. The specifics that separate useful content from generic content.
Less "best project management software." More "best software for a product manager in fintech." Less volume chasing. More clarity about who you're actually talking to.
This one comes up a lot in client work, and I talked about it in the episode because it's one of the highest-leverage things most teams still ignore.
Internal linking doesn't require a developer, a rebuild, or months of planning. It's one of the clearest ways to help Google move through a site, discover pages, and understand what matters. The useful distinction I try to make is between linking out from a new page and linking into it from pages Google already knows about. That second part is where most teams drop the ball. They publish something, share it on LinkedIn, and move on — meanwhile, there are dozens of existing pages that could be pointing to it and helping it get found faster.
It's not glamorous work. But it's one of the most consistent ways to make a site more connected, more legible, and more discoverable. High impact. Low effort. Massive bang for your buck.
I get into this distinction in the episode because it comes up often when I'm talking to founders and marketing leaders about what fractional actually means.
A freelancer is typically there to execute a list. An agency is often operating at a distance, running deliverables against a scope. A fractional leader is different because they're embedded enough to shape decisions, work across functions, and own outcomes. The way I put it in the episode: a freelancer is outside the room. A fractional person has a seat at the table.
That matters more now because SEO touches so much of the business — product, engineering, messaging, content, growth. If the person leading it is too removed from the real conversations, strategy tends to fall apart in execution. Being close to the work means influencing priorities earlier, staying accountable for outcomes, and making sure SEO decisions aren't made in isolation from everything else that affects them.
I'm not anti-AI. I use it. It speeds things up. It helps with drafting, organizing, and moving faster through parts of the process that used to take longer.
But where I push back is at the strategy layer. Does it understand the context of a specific business? Does it know the tradeoffs? Does it recognize when a recommendation contradicts the company's actual positioning or goals? In my experience, it often doesn't — and confident-sounding output can be the wrong call wrapped in good formatting.
The tools are genuinely useful. But strong strategy still depends on human judgment, context, and the ability to tell when the answer that sounds right is actually wrong for this situation.
This post is based on my conversation with The Booth on their podcast Creative Tangent. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or read The Booth's own recap here.
