Jade Pruett is keen to highlight that best practices that existed in the past aren’t necessarily best practices for the future.

Jade says: “Forget best practices. SEO in 2026 is about moving beyond checklists and leveraging your own expertise to build effective, trustworthy, and AI-ready strategies.”

What best practices do we need to forget?

“In the industry, we've become a bit stuck in our checklists. That's often our safe space, as SEOs – especially when you work in an agency setting.

Maybe you have a productised system that you offer your clients. So, your SEO has been limited to, ‘We're going to create X number of blog posts every month. We're going to follow these rules that we see online about what matters and what doesn't.’ You provide your SEO services, whether they're really moving the needle for the client or not.

In 2026, especially with AI search coming out, things with Google are changing so quickly. It's time to take a step back and really trust your own gut on what's going to move the needle forward for your clients.”