Leading on from Ed Ziubrzynski’s tip, Sean Barber muses over what platforms you should consider optimizing for in 2026.

Sean says: “Think beyond Google. The search landscape has gone way further than Google now.”

What do you define as being beyond Google?

“It's two-fold. First, there’s the fact that users aren't just starting their search journey on Google. They're starting it on all different platforms and places. Also, it’s not just at the start of their journey; they're bouncing around. They're going to Google, then they may go to Reddit, Amazon, or large language models.

On the other side, AI models are coming into play a lot more now. They're also using different sources to gather the information they need about a certain query or brand.”