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How can your company adapt to an ever-changing SEO landscape? Also, Facebook influencers get a raise and a continued focus on authenticity. See what’s new in this month’s edition of Strategic Shifts.
Search is Evolving
As the internet continues to grow and change, so does search trends. In an age where artificial intelligence and social media dominate search, new types of SEO abound. SEO in all forms helps people discover your business or campaign. Social search, AIO, and voice search are on the rise in 2026. Let’s talk about it.
Social Search
Social search is not about the all-knowing algorithm. It’s about what people are specifically looking up on social media in the search bar. While algorithms target casual scrollers, search is for users actively hunting for something specific. Younger generations are using more non-traditional search methods, with Generation Z 30 percent less likely than baby boomers to use traditional search engines to discover brands and information.
By optimizing your company’s profile, you help others find it on social media platforms. Your company benefits from this anyway because having a stronger social media presence drives more traffic to your brand’s page and increases its visibility in algorithms as well as search.
AIO
Half of consumers now use AI search as their top search type, and this number is only growing. The key to navigating this shift is gaining a deeper understanding of AIO. While SEO applies to search engines, AIO applies to large language models (LLMs), like Copilot and ChatGPT. While SEO is about your company’s website links showing up towards the top in searches, AIO is about LLMs selecting your content as a source or recommendation for the AI’s answer and linking your content as a result.
As large AI language models become more advanced and widespread, people are using them to get more in-depth answers to search queries. In the current search landscape, AI is directly competing with Google, Bing, and other search engines, while these engines continue to add AI facets.
To adapt to this shift, write content for your company’s website and its social platforms as if your company is answering a question. AI sums up material and makes it easily digestible, so make content structured and straight to the point. AI favors descriptions over keyword stuffing. Relevant, concise page titles win over verbose titles. These changes can help your company keep up with the shift to AI search.
Voice Search
Siri and Alexa: those names are likely familiar to you. Often, the most convenient way to get a quick answer is to ask Siri about the weather or to tell Alexa to play your favorite song. This ties directly into SEO. It’s essential to ensure your brand’s website and social media profiles are optimized for voice search to increase awareness.
How do you optimize? Tailor to longer questions: people talk to it as if they were asking a friend. Think, “where can I find the nearest convenience store?” rather than a typical text search of “convenience store.” Use long-tail, intentional keywords.
Voice search is most often used for “what”, “where”, and “how” types of questions. Often, voice search users are looking for the best way to do something. Cater your website to this mindset. To make changes, look at your website through the lens of answering long-tailed questions.
Wrap-Up
As search continues to expand into various categories, it is essential that your organization keeps up. With background knowledge in AIO, voice search, and social search, you will be set up for success.
Winning the Influencer Race
Meta is now paying Facebook content creators more than ever. Through its new Creator Fast Track program, new content creators can now earn at an accelerated pace.
After hearing feedback from content creators that it was difficult to get started on Facebook, Meta decided to implement its Creator Fast Track program. Through this program, Facebook aims to give new content creators more opportunities and help them succeed. It’s not just about increasing these creators’ income. Through this initiative, Meta also hopes to improve engagement for new content creators.
Continued Push for Authenticity
As LinkedIn continues to focus on fostering authentic content, the platform added the option to filter explore pages by whether users are verified. On LinkedIn, verified is distinct from Premium. Verified means a user has confirmed their identity and information. Premium specifically means that users are paying for a version of LinkedIn with more analytics and opportunities. Users can be both at once.
The decision to add the option to filter by verified plays a role in LinkedIn’s ongoing effort to boost authentic content. As a result of these efforts to improve its platform by zeroing in on authenticity, LinkedIn has significantly increased its AIO.
Make the Timeline Your Own
X recently launched a new Custom Timelines feature that allows users to curate their home page. This feature gives X users the ability to add additional, topic-specific feeds to their home page. This move will improve engagement with specific topics and expand the range of posts shown to users.
This feature runs on Grok, X’s AI model. Grok filters posts into custom timelines and analyzes every post to better personalize these feeds to users. There will be 75 different timelines for X’s most popular topics.
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What type of search do you think will be most dominant in 2026?
Strategic Elements is a full-service public affairs, marketing, and media consulting firm based in Iowa. Our team of political operatives, marketing experts, and media strategists helps businesses, organizations, and causes shape public opinion, influence policy, and drive meaningful change.
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