Every year, there are fifteen things people call SEO trends and three of them actually matter. The SEO trends talk I give is about finding those three and explaining why they matter — not a parade of tools and tactics that will be outdated before the audience gets home. That selectivity is the point.

The Problem With Most SEO Trends Presentations

Most trends talks are a collection of everything that happened in search over the past year, presented as a list with a lot of confident framing. The audience gets a lot of information and leaves without knowing what to do differently. That is not useful — it is just a lot of words.

The trends I focus on are the ones with structural implications — shifts in how search engines work, how users behave, or how content gets evaluated that require a real change in strategy. Surface-level changes that require a small tactical adjustment are not worth thirty minutes of a room’s attention. I am also explicit about the difference between something that is structural (the direction is set) and something that is a current experiment (the direction is not set and smart people are still figuring it out). That distinction matters for how you should respond.

The Structural Shifts I Cover Right Now

Search in 2025 and 2026 is being shaped by a small number of genuinely significant changes. Here is what I am talking about in this session:

  • AI-generated answers and their effect on click-through rates: the traffic pattern shift is real, it is not uniform across query types, and the response strategy depends on which part of your traffic is affected
  • The knowledge graph and entity-based ranking: search systems are increasingly organizing the web around named entities and their relationships, not keyword co-occurrence — what that means for how you should structure content and claims
  • Schema markup as infrastructure, not an afterthought: structured data is the machine-readable layer that AI systems use to consume and cite content — teams that have not built this layer are at a growing disadvantage
  • E-E-A-T signals and the role of demonstrated experience: the standards for what counts as authoritative content have risen, and the signals that matter are more specific than they were two years ago
  • Search result diversification: the types of results that appear for a given query — forums, video, AI answers, image packs — have changed significantly, and the mix continues to shift in ways that affect traffic distribution

Each of these gets real treatment, not a bullet point and a stock photo. I explain the mechanism, show examples of what it looks like in practice, and describe the specific implication for content strategy and technical setup.

How I Frame Uncertainty

Some things in search right now are genuinely uncertain, and I try to be honest about which those are. I do not know exactly how fast AI search adoption will accelerate, how Google will resolve the tension between AI answer features and its ad revenue model, or how antitrust outcomes will affect the competitive structure of the search market. Presenting speculation as insight is not something I am willing to do, even when audiences might prefer a confident-sounding prediction. I will tell you what I think is likely and why, and I will label it as inference rather than fact.

That honesty about uncertainty tends to make the certain things land harder. When I am clear about what I know versus what I am estimating, audiences give more weight to the stuff I am confident about. That is a better dynamic than false confidence across the board. Related: Book Terry Samuels as an SEO Podcast Guest.

What I Deliberately Do Not Cover

I do not cover tool announcements that do not have clear strategic implications. I do not spend time on Google algorithm updates by name unless they illustrate a structural point. I do not rehash things that were trends two years ago and have now stabilized into baseline practices — those are not trends, they are table stakes, and treating them as news wastes the audience’s time.

This talk is for practitioners who want to understand what is actually happening and make better decisions, not for people who want a confident-sounding forecast to share on LinkedIn. That framing is intentional and I am transparent about it at the start of the session.

How I Update This Talk

Search changes. I run this talk at events throughout the year and I update it before each one. I am not delivering a presentation I built in January to a December audience. The specific examples and data points are current because I am working in this field every day at Salterra Digital Services and seeing what is happening in real client accounts.

I am also co-producing SEOST, which means I am in regular conversation with other practitioners about what they are seeing. This talk reflects a practitioner consensus view, not just my own experience, which makes the trend identification more reliable than a single-perspective take.

Who the Audience Is

This talk works for mixed audiences where some people are SEO specialists and others are generalist marketers, content leads, or product managers who work adjacent to search. Related: Digital Marketing Keynote Speaker. I calibrate the depth to the room — if I am talking to an audience of SEO specialists, I go deeper on the mechanisms. If it is a mixed marketing audience, I spend more time on the business implications and less on the technical specifics.

If your audience is specifically in-house marketing teams, the speaker for marketing teams format is often a better fit than a trends talk because it is scoped to their specific situation rather than the field in general. But as a conference session for a mixed professional audience, the trends talk tends to produce the strongest post-event response because it gives people a framework for making sense of what they are already experiencing.

Format and Length

This session works well at forty-five to sixty minutes with Q and A at the end. Related: SEO Conference Speaker. It can be compressed to thirty minutes if that is what the event schedule requires, but the depth suffers. It also works as a component of a longer workshop, with this section providing context and the following sections going into implementation.

The SEO speaker overview is the right page if you want to see this in the context of my other sessions and decide whether a trends talk or a more specific topic session is the right fit for your event. You might also look at the future of search talk if your audience wants more focus on where search and AI are heading rather than where they are now.