As Head of SEO and AI Search, in 2025 I had to position us as an agency for GEO, develop services, develop and build tools, and motivate and train the team on how optimization for AI search works. That was very challenging and took a lot of energy.
I have written many guides and articles and given lectures on the subject of GEO. Here, I was able to draw on my knowledge from over two years of deep research into LLMs, generative AI, and testing.
We had a few customers who we couldn’t convince with our newly developed services. That hurt, but we used the critical feedback to improve our services.
We have learned a lot this year about how AI search works. Through patents and research papers, we can learn a lot about how AI systems and LLMs work. This has been my focus in recent years, and I hope that I have been able to contribute my share to this area with my grounding work for the people like Dan Petrovic have done a lot of testing and made valuable contributions with their own models to understand how optimization for AI search can work.
David Konitzny and Metehan Yeşilyurt have done a lot of work with source code and generated valuable insights that help us in our optimization efforts.
Hanns Kronenberg and I had many intense discussions this year on topics where we did not always agree. It is important to discuss these issues at this stage because no one is omniscient, and only by exchanging perspectives can we gain new insights. Hanns has made a valuable contribution to developing approaches to getting a handle on black box prompt research.
I never tire of referencing these pioneers, as their work lays the foundation for the further development of our industry. Everything else is just replication of this knowledge mining.
With my team at Aufgesang.
I believe that AI search will come of age in 2026. With Gemini, Google will gain more and more market share from ChatGPT and Perplexity. Claude and Gemini will become the two dominant AI assistants. Google will become the most important platform for AI searches. Users will increasingly rely on prompts as well as term-based search queries.
I believe that in e-commerce, we will see market-ready products from Google and ChatGPT in 2026. However, I don’t think that Amazon or Google will lose significant market share in product searches. In the future, it will become increasingly difficult for shops to sell products directly through their own online stores.
SEO is increasingly becoming an interface discipline that will depend on collaboration with brand departments, PR, and IT. Its direct operational influence continues to decline. This requires fewer implementation skills but more communication skills, openness, and empathy for the goals and tasks of other departments.
You should be open to disruptive developments and not identify too closely with the term SEO. From an outside perspective, the focus of SEO on search engines will not change. Terms such as GEO have become established, and if you continue to say “it’s just SEO,” you will not get any attention.
Be open to other perspectives. Don’t argue to prove you’re right, but to openly exchange perspectives. Don’t let your ego control you—control your ego!
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