AI SEO Strategies 2026 (James Dooley Chats With Paul Truscott, Luke Bastin & Mike Lovatt)

James Dooley: AI SEO strategies that are working well in 2026.

Today I'm joined by Mike Lovatt, Paul Truscott and Luke Bastin. Today we're going to talk about getting your brand cited in the AI overviews of Gemini, Claude AI, ChatGPT and Perplexity. I want to start with a simple question. Paul, if you were selling this as a service to a client, and it was not for ranking a website but purely to get cited more in LLMs, what would you call that service? Is it AI SEO, LLM SEO or GEO? What are you calling it?

Paul Truscott: Yeah, I'd probably go with GEO because that seems to be the term everyone is reacting to. From a marketing perspective, it is the buzzword.

Personally, I think it all comes back to semantics. It is just a different way of presenting it. But if you are pitching it to someone, I would go with GEO because that seems to be what people are talking about the most. I don't know what you guys are seeing though.

James Dooley: What about you, Luke? What are you saying?

Luke Bastin: I probably have a disproportionate number of conversations with C-suite people as clients, so I call it visibility.

I probably approach it differently from other people because I try to tie it into KPIs and broader business metrics. For me, it comes down to information retrieval, but they are not going to know what that means. If I had to pick a term, I agree with Paul. I see SEO and GEO as essentially the same thing. But then it depends what people mean by SEO. For some people, SEO is just content plus links. I don't look at it that way, so sometimes we're not even talking the same language.

Paul Truscott: Exactly. You don't always know what people are actually describing.

Luke Bastin: Yeah. I call it visibility and I talk about visibility in different systems where people are searching for information.

I talk about brand equity and visibility in SERPs. Those are the things I think C-suite executives identify with most.

James Dooley: What about you, Mike?

Mike Lovatt: I've always called it AI SEO.

From a tools perspective, if Ahrefs and Semrush are calling it AI visibility or visibility index, then usually whatever becomes the most popular term eventually wins. AEO just feels like too much of a mouthful. AI SEO seems to cover all bases. I think everyone expected AI engines to completely replace traditional search, but people still Google things anyway. So AI SEO works for me.

James Dooley: Paul, let's start with you then.

A company comes along and says they are already ranking well in Bing or Google. They are relatively happy with their website visibility, but they want more visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. What would you actually do differently as a service to improve AI visibility if they are already happy with traditional search rankings?

Paul Truscott: I'd probably be explicit about the fact that it is mostly going to be off-page work, so it should not interfere with their current rankings or website setup.

Their website exists as one single source of data. What we need to do is extract that information, build on it and distribute it everywhere. We want multimodal visibility. We want to spread that information across multiple domains and platforms because these LLMs are consensus engines. At the moment, they do not really care about authority in the same way search engines do. If the platform is visible to the LLM and it can find the information, it will consume it. So we don't need to worry about backlinks in exactly the same way. We just need broad visibility across as many relevant topics as possible.

James Dooley: What about yourself, Luke?

Luke Bastin: I agree with all of that. One thing I have learned the hard way over the last year is that you still need good search engine rankings to get LLM visibility because they work together.

I see companies making changes to improve visibility in Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT, but accidentally damaging their search rankings in the process. One thing I would look at from an on-page perspective is whether the brand signals are strong enough. Sometimes websites have title tags stuffed with keywords rather than branding. That can actually harm LLM visibility. Sometimes the LLMs simply cannot understand clearly enough what the business does. There are niches where categorisation is difficult. For example, one niche I work in is window treatments in the US. You have blinds, shades, shutters and installation services. Some businesses are retail shops and others are consultancy or installation services. LLMs can struggle to understand the distinction. So you need to educate the LLMs very clearly about what you do and what you do not do. That is where having dedicated pages that act as a single source of truth becomes important.

James Dooley: What about you, Mike?

Mike Lovatt: The off-site signals are key.

Sometimes you Google a brand name and they have a really good website from an old-school SEO perspective with good content and links. But when you remove the website itself, the Facebook page and LinkedIn profile, there is basically nothing else online about them. There are no citations, no directories, nothing. It is becoming more important that there are mentions across the web explaining who you are and what you do. For years, people used to get spammed with things like local business awards and ignore them. Now I actually think there is value in those things because they create legitimate brand mentions.

James Dooley: Right, let's do a quick-fire round.

The podcast topic is AI SEO strategies working in 2026. We've discussed terminology and off-site signals. Paul, give us one strategy that's working well for AI visibility.

Paul Truscott: Listicles, but with caveats.

Don't make it obvious that you're promoting your own business. I would never put my own business at the top of the list. I prefer to lead readers towards that conclusion more subtly by outlining criteria and making sure my business is the one that ticks those boxes. LLMs are starting to become more discerning about obvious promotional material, and I think that will become more important going forward.

Luke Bastin: I would say multihop visibility.

Reverse engineer which brands are already winning in your market and identify where the LLMs are sourcing information about those brands from. Then focus on getting visibility in those same places.

James Dooley: Mike, what about you?

Mike Lovatt: Podcasts. Same as you.

Videos and podcasts are working really well.

James Dooley: I'll throw another one in there. Comparison pages.

Being compared against your competitors and explaining factually why you're better than them. I would go more aggressive than Paul. I would put myself number one, but I would do it factually rather than promotionally.

Paul Truscott: I think that works if you can justify it factually.

James Dooley: I think the problem is that people create listicles without giving reasons why number one is better than number two.

SEOs are often lazy. They create a top 10 list with no information gain, no data, no surveys, no reviews, no awards and no real justification. You need to explain why you are better than the competition. Every business has a USP and a story. You need to shout about why you're brilliant and what makes you different. Comparison pages are another great strategy for that. Paul, another strategy that's working in 2026?

Paul Truscott: Press releases are definitely working well again.

But it depends who you are using because many so-called press release services are basically just PBNs and complete garbage. People use poor services and then conclude that press releases don't work. Brand awareness is now incredibly important. In the past, you could make a lot of money from keyword rankings alone without really existing as a brand. That is not the case anymore. Brand traffic and brand mentions are now critical.

James Dooley: Luke, what other AI strategies are working well?

Luke Bastin: Structuring content properly from an HTML perspective and making it data-rich.

The more objective and evidence-based your content is, the more weight LLMs give it. Case studies are a great example for local businesses. If you complete a successful project, create a detailed case study with materials used, timelines, customer quotes, images and branding. That creates a highly data-backed piece of content that works both for conversions and for LLM visibility.

James Dooley: Mike, any more strategies?

Mike Lovatt: Everything comes back to getting your brand mentioned as much as possible.

Years ago, Google representatives were already saying that businesses should focus on traditional marketing because it creates branded searches. Social media, digital PR, reviews and real human mentions all contribute to that. Then from an SEO perspective, think about how many different mediums you can distribute your expertise across. Image sharing, YouTube videos, Vimeo, podcast platforms, PDF sharing sites, PowerPoint sharing platforms, books, journals and guest appearances all help. Some methods are cheap and easy, like podcasts and PDFs. Others are harder, like publishing journals or appearing at universities. But the more corroborative third-party sources you have, the better.

James Dooley: One thing that Jess Bissan mentioned recently was repurposing content that already performs well.

If an old tweet performed well, rewrite it slightly, repost it and force index it so LLMs can pick it up. The same applies to LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. You can take a Trustpilot review, turn it into an image and repost it on Instagram with the review content. If you have a strong article, you can repurpose individual H2 sections onto LinkedIn or Twitter and then link back to the full article. It is holistic marketing. It drives branded search, branded mentions and traffic back to the site. Everyone can buy links and scale content now, but traffic is the difficult part. If anyone watching has AI SEO strategies we've missed, leave them in the comments section. Mike, Paul and Luke, it's been an absolute pleasure.