Is SEO Still Worth It in 2026 and Beyond?

Short answer: yes. Of course it is. Because AI has to get its answers from somewhere, and that somewhere is still built on the same foundations SEO has always optimised for.

SEO as a Foundation for AI

Large language models and AI Overviews don't invent facts about your business out of thin air. They pull from indexed, crawlable, well-structured content. This is the same content that ranks in traditional search. Clear site architecture, authoritative backlinks, fast pages, and content that actually answers the question someone typed in: these are exactly the signals AI systems use to decide what to cite, summarise, or recommend.

Put simply, you don't get chosen by an AI Overview if you were never visible to search in the first place. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), making sure AI tools surface and cite your brand, is built on top of SEO, not instead of it. Skip the foundation and there's nothing for the new layer to stand on.

There's also a simpler, more human reason SEO still matters: most buying journeys don't end in a chat window. People still type questions into Google, still click through to compare options, and still expect to land on a site that loads fast, reads well, and answers what they came for. AI has changed some of that behaviour. It hasn't replaced it.

SEO is Still Moving the Needle

Scepticism about SEO usually comes from agencies that can't show their working. Ours can.

GT Vision, a B2B scientific instruments brand, combined SEO with PPC into a single bid-and-rank strategy. The result: a 400% increase in leads, with cost per click down by two-thirds.

North East Escapes, a hospitality brand losing bookings to Airbnb because Google simply didn't see them, gained 70+ top-3 rankings in six months of focused SEO, resetting their entire channel mix in the process.

The Qualis Collection ran a channel-spanning strategy that folded SEO in alongside paid social, email, and GEO for AI search. Total sales rose 177% year-on-year, with orders and sessions roughly doubling.

None of these results came from chasing rankings for their own sake. They came from SEO doing what it's always done well: putting the right brand in front of the right person at the exact moment they're looking to buy. That mechanism hasn't gone anywhere, it's just gained a new layer on top of it.

How Mira is adapting SEO for an AI-first search landscape

We're not pretending the search landscape looks the same as it did five years ago, and we've changed how we work because of it.

We treat GEO as a natural extension of SEO, not a replacement for it. Alongside our SEO retainers, we now run GEO specifically for AI search ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews so clients are positioned to be found and cited wherever the search happens.

We're structuring content for extraction, not just ranking. That means clearer answers higher up the page, stronger use of schema markup, and content built around the direct questions your customers are actually asking because that's what both traditional rankings and AI citations reward.

We're protecting technical foundations harder than ever. Site speed, crawlability, and clean structure matter more, not less, when both Google's algorithm and an AI model are trying to parse your site quickly and confidently.

We keep it honest. No inflated keyword counts, no vanity metrics. Every SEO retainer we run is judged on the same thing: it always has been. Leads, rankings that matter, and revenue, with GEO visibility tracked alongside it rather than treated as a separate, disconnected channel.

The Bottom Line

SEO isn't competing with AI search, rather, it's the raw material AI search runs on. Brands that keep investing in strong, structured, genuinely useful content are the ones showing up in both the traditional results and the AI answers, while brands that wrote SEO off are quietly becoming invisible in both.

If you want to know exactly where your site stands and what a combined SEO and GEO strategy could do for your traffic and leads, get in touch today for a straight-talking audit.