Avoid shiny toy syndrome

Anthony says: “AI/GEO/LLMEO is all the rage, but core fundamental SEO principles still apply.”

What's distracting SEOs at the moment, that isn't worth spending time on?

“A lot of SEOs are just jumping on the bandwagon, which I get. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Manus, and all of these are coming in, and yes, some behaviours are changing. We've got AI Mode coming in. We'll have Web Guide coming in. I get it.

However, from an SEO perspective, but also from a business perspective, core SEO fundamentals still apply. You want to be able to crawl before you can sprint. With shiny toy syndrome, and everyone wanting to be the latest and greatest and wanting to jump on the trends, they're forgetting that those SEO principles still apply.

You want to be at the top, but when you dive a bit deeper, how much impact is AI actually having on the bottom line? How much traffic is coming from AI? We're getting a bit of recency bias there. You get a lead from ChatGPT, so now you feel the need to put all your effort and focus into that.

Take a step back. There are core fundamentals to do while keeping an eye on the changes that are happening here.”

Is AI Mode not going to seriously impact the way that the user interacts with the SERP?

“It will, but those fundamentals are still technical SEO and content. AI Mode just means that the way that information is served is going to be different. Google's still going to have to crawl your website. Google's still going to have to read your content. Google's still going to want to understand your authority and your brand play.

It’s just that those 10 blue links may go away, it’s going to be a bit more conversational, and it's going to be a bit more zero-click.

Web Guide will be an interesting play, and the way they consume and present your information might be different, but you've still got to make it as easy as possible for these platforms to crawl your website, understand your content, and choose you – which is still optimizing for search at the end of the day.”

Are certain industries able to harness the power of AI more than others?

“E-com is where we're seeing AI have a bit of an uptick because people are doing a lot of product reviews, they're trying to find information, or they're trying to understand key features and collate information in a conversational way.

We’re seeing people use ChatGPT for gathering information, product reviews, and product comparisons, to get a niche, tailored answer rather than just putting a keyword into Google. They can go to ChatGPT, AI Mode, or eventually Web Guide to say, ‘X product for Y specific purpose,’ and get a more tailored approach.

There's ChatGPT Shopping now, and no doubt Google will be working on more things to push ads and opportunities to sell. From the little bit that I’ve seen, AI overviews are getting dangerous when it comes to medical and those EEAT topics. For some industries, AI overviews aren’t showing up as much, and you’re still looking at traditional search.

In my experience, it’s mainly e-com, and the intent behind those searches is product comparisons/product reviews. Are people having a good time? Is this product any good? What's its reputation? Is this the right fit for my situation?”

How do you determine whether to spend time and effort understanding AI search?

“Everyone's trying to sell an AI visibility tool right now. Maybe it's a dot-com bubble, and we'll see who actually wins at the end of the day. To be honest, I still like to use the good old tools like Google Search Console and look at the numbers.

What is the data that you've got? If you've got a Shopify site, how much money are you making there? What's currently happening? With a lot of the changes in data over the last 4/5 years, it's not as good as it once was, but we need something.

You can look at user tools to understand the technical health of your site and fix that up. If you’re in e-com, where are the transactions? What’s the average order value? How much are you spending on paid ads? How much are you spending on SEO? How much are you spending on socials? Then, you try to attribute how much is coming from the website versus what you’re spending on that front.

StudioHawk Australia has about 400 clients, and we took a subset of 80 of those (mostly in e-com) to look at how much they are actually making from ChatGPT versus Google and Bing. For those 80, it was about $12,000 Aussie dollars. It wasn't that much.

It's a bit of a battle now, where we can't really track AI that well. GA4 isn't everybody's best friend right now. The hard part for marketers, SEOs, brands, and businesses is to try and get a source of truth on this.”

If people are first interacting with your content on AI platforms, and many of those interactions aren’t trackable, how do you measure the value of those referrals?

“The way the StudioHawk Australia team looked at it was by looking at GA4 and getting the referral traffic, but there wasn't much to go on.

The whole point was: it’s a shiny toy, calm down for a second. You're still getting all of your cash and a lot of your transactions from traditional search engines. Keep an eye on AI. We can try and track it as best we can through Looker Studio and certain tools, but slow your roll. Focus on what's bringing you money. Don't throw everything out and pivot your whole strategy to AI.

Keep an eye on it, keep following, keep reading, keep seeing what Google's coming out with, and keep an eye on what the best in the business are saying, like Aleyda Solis and Mark Williams-Cook.

At the moment, it's hard. It's hard for us as SEOs, and I can't imagine what some of our clients are feeling like. ‘Where do I even go? How do I track it? I don't want to miss out.’ When you get your first lead from ChatGPT, that’s exciting, and you do want to try and get more of that because it's fun and it's new.

You need to come back to the fundamentals of numbers and the fundamentals of what actually impacts the P&L for these businesses. At the moment, it's still traditional search engines.”

What core elements of successful SEO are essential for 2026?

“You still want to focus on the fundamentals. You're obviously going to focus on traffic. I know clicks will go down, but impressions are going up because of AI Mode and all the other tools. You want to look at plain visibility (or Search Everywhere Optimization, as Gerry White's referring to it). Be omnipresent.

This is typically more of an e-com concept because they have to be everywhere all at once. There are so many ways for people to consume content and try and find their product: on social, on paid ads, out-of-home, and all of that. For e-com, it should be revenue, transactions, traffic, and overall visibility.

With overall visibility, let's throw in traffic, let's throw in impressions, and let's throw in brand mentions/branded traffic. That's why I always defer to Google Search Console from a search perspective.

It is a holistic marketing approach now. SEO is not in a silo. You're looking at social, you're looking at email marketing, you're looking at how it can all work together. From an e-com perspective, it’s money/revenue. From a B2B perspective, it's usually going to be a contact form, an email, or booking a demo for a SaaS company. Is the website doing its job to book those demos? How are you going to get the website to do that? SEO. Those fundamental things should still apply because they directly correlate to business goals.

If you've got a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and you just want to spend cash on vanity metrics, good luck to you. In the real world, people need outcomes. People want to improve their P&L. People want to have their website, their socials, their email marketing tied back to either money or building up to a bigger thing, which is brand awareness – knowing that, as they build their brand and their reputation, they can then do even more.”

How do you establish the initial source of brand awareness for a customer?

“I'm still relying on Google, but I'm sure somebody out there is creating brand visibility tools and things like that.

When we're dealing with clients, we try and understand what they're doing for other channels. For e-commerce, for example, have they done any out-of-home? Are they dealing with influencers? Are they doing socials? They might have done a massive TV ad, and then organic spikes. I can't really claim that. They've built a brand on other channels, which also feeds into SEO and their website.

I'm sure there are some tools out there, but how we do it for our clients is by being close to them, having constant communication, and trying to understand what they're doing for other channels and what they're doing for their brand. Then, from an SEO perspective, how can we help them take advantage of that?

If they’re doing press releases and all of these other cool things, and we see branded impressions going up in GA4 or Search Console, we can talk to the client and say, ‘This is an interesting spike, what happened here?’ Ideally, they will tell you about it beforehand, because they're prepared, and you’ll know that they got X celebrity in and did a photoshoot at the Super Bowl, so brand awareness and visibility have gone up.

As an agency, we’re trying to build stronger communication to understand what brand stuff they’re doing, and then where SEO can fit into that.”

Is there any SEO activity that worked well five years ago but you now wouldn't recommend in 2026?

“Stop pumping out useless content. People still do that because, with AI, it's easy. I'm of the white hat variety. I don’t think you should be doing the black hat stuff of creating fake author bios and other fake things like that. That's just me. If you ask other people, I’m sure they have different opinions on that front.

There are little bits and pieces, like meta descriptions, that still really move the needle. Some of the stuff we did five years ago that you shouldn’t be doing in 2026 is just the vanity technical SEO stuff.

That’s stuff that won’t really move the needle. Clients won’t really understand it, and it either shouldn’t be done at all, because it’s not relevant, or would only be done when you’ve got nothing else to do. It’s the things that you only find when you really dive deep into a site audit. People used to exaggerate these issues because clients didn’t understand what they were and would think it was really bad, when in actual fact, it’s nothing.

Don’t exaggerate and waste time on niche technical SEO, and don’t pump out a bunch of article spun content. I'm boring on that front. We've always tried to do things the right way.”

If you're producing fake information, are you reducing the chances of ranking because it will lower the trust these different platforms have in your content?

“100%. It goes back to EEAT from around seven years ago. Now, with so much stuff just getting spun out, these search engines are dying to find more truth because they want to serve their users the best answer.

We've already seen AI overviews making mistakes. Google and these search engines still want to provide the best answer to someone's query. You should be showcasing your authority, shouting out about how good you are, shouting out about why someone should use you, just like you would in real life when you're going out networking and talking to people about XYZ. Google's trying to find that same information.

It probably has worked in the past, and if you ask some of the black hats, that dodgy stuff might still work. I'm always of the opinion that you should do it right from the start, and you're giving yourself less chance of problems happening. By building that author bio, building that content, and building that authority, regardless of SEO, you're making yourself a trusted source.

A t-shirt is just a t-shirt, but there's a reason why it’s worth a hundred quid once the brand name is put on it. It's that brand, that authority, that story, and that impression and thought that people have about your brand. Google's just trying to get that same impression of who you are, what you do, and what your business is all about.”

Anthony, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Shiny toy syndrome is bad. Focus on core fundamentals that will make an impact on your bottom line, but still keep an eye on the future.

Keep an eye on what is changing, and stay up to date so that you are ready for changes to be made, but make sure your fundamentals are there that help grow and impact your P&L, your bottom line, and your business goals.”

Anthony Barone is Co-Founder and Managing Director at StudioHawk. Find out more over at StudioHawk.co.uk.