What is SEO in 2026
What is SEO?
Lighthouse Commerce Solutions is a Wisconsin based consultancy specializing in SEO, AIO, e-Commerce growth, and social media marketing. We achieve success through the leveraging of AI technology and usage of cutting edge tools while filling it with real-life human context. This translates to long term success in the ever changing online landscape.
What is SEO?
SEO in 2026 is smarter and more vital to your success than it has ever been before. Using SEO in your business allows you to target your customer base more accurately with effective means to put your products or services directly in the eyes of potential customers. Reading this you might wonder, “what is SEO?” SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the means to which you can help your company, product, or service rank higher in the Google search results.
How Does SEO Work?
With a basic understanding of what SEO is, let’s look at how does SEO work. SEO in 2026 uses many of the same aspects that form the foundation of SEO in previous years however, there has been a shift in how some of these aspects work. Before getting ahead of ourselves, let’s talk about these “aspects”. In simple terms, SEO moves your search position up by using keywords that relate to the product, service, or website you want to rank for. The aforementioned “aspects” are these said keywords, their volume, their ranking difficulty, and content. While the aspects of SEO are the same, how they are being used has changed. With that said, how does SEO work and what changed? This is due to increased AI usage.
SEO and AI
AI technology and AI search is becoming a bigger part of our lives. As of the December 2025, around 95% of Americans still use traditional search engines. Within this percentage, 47% of which use it for simple facts while AI chatbots and AI search only take up around 28% and 23% respectively. What we see here is that the traditional search engine is still extremely vital and important to any online business. With that said, seeing this rise of AI usage, it would seem to be the logical step to simply pivot to AI when doing SEO in 2026, however, the answer is not quite as simple. Feeding your AI with simple prompts asking it generate relevant keywords for your brand or product might churn out relevant data but it lacks context. This is especially dangerous when you combine this with asking AI to then write your brief and create your content. Putting aside the potential of “AI hallucinations”, you run the risk of having your content come off as “soulless” or uninspired, this will negatively affect your ranking and SEO. A second aspect to this is Google’s AI can detect the over usage of AI and down rank you as well, a simple term used is “slop”, Google doesn’t want to promote “AI Slop”. Everything with AI is not all bad, to better understand how does AI work with SEO we have a different blog entry where we explain how SEO works with AI and AIO.
How to Rank in SEO?
Now that we are armed with the right knowledge about how does SEO work and what is SEO, let’s talk about how to get ranked. There are many ways to boost your SEO rankings but let’s start with simplest method, find relevant keywords that could relate to your product or service. Doing this is called “Keyword Research”. Using this research, we will then create content around those SEO keywords. Keywords research is a very important aspect of the SEO process as it gives you insights into search volume, other related topics, and much more. Here is where human context is important to SEO in 2026. Google rewards good content that is created with genuine interest, thoughtfulness, and unique personal insights. Simply prompting an AI to give you this is like cheating on a test. You might get the answers right, but you are not doing yourself a service. Worst case scenario, you get down ranked which will require more work to remedy.
Summarizing SEO in 2026
Two aspects about SEO in 2026 can be true. On one hand, the more things change the more things stay the same. On the other hand, the various means to compete in online business will always evolve and keep changing in the years to come. At Lighthouse Commerce Solutions, we strive to be a constant. Through human passion and understanding we can add context to strategies as well as processes that a machine cannot otherwise do. Our team of experts are well versed in how SEO works and will help you rank in SEO for long term success. The first consultation if free of charge, feel free to reach out to us and lets connect!
