The standard advice that worked for search engine optimisation in 2022 has, in most categories, stopped working.
Keyword density is no longer a meaningful signal. Backlink quantity, divorced from context, is a liability rather than an asset. Blog-post-a-week content strategies, the staple of agency retainers for most of the last decade, now produce diminishing returns inside the first ninety days. The model that built the SEO industry, which assumed a Google search results page with ten blue links and predictable ranking factors, is in active retreat.
Nishit Paul, account manager and head of the search engine optimisation practice at Bhopal-headquartered digital marketing agency Opus Momentum, sees the shift up close. As the person responsible for the agency’s SEO clients across multiple markets, Paul is in the unusual position of watching the discipline get rewritten in real time, on accounts where the budget and the outcomes are both real.
“The SEO that I started doing in 2022 is not the SEO I do now,” Paul says. “The playbooks that worked even eighteen months ago are no longer reliable. There is a class of practitioner who is still selling the 2022 version of this discipline. The clients are figuring out that it no longer delivers.”
Paul came to SEO an unusual route, during the advent of peak COVID-19 lockdown he experienced the fruit of organic traffic on his personal legal blog where he used to write on legal topics, that pushed him into pursuing postgraduate diploma in marketing management from IGNOU during the transition, and worked across SEO and content roles at multiple agencies before joining Opus Momentum. He brings, by his own description, a litigator’s habit of testing whether the evidence supports the claim.
That habit, he says, is what made him take the changes in 2025 and 2026 seriously while other practitioners were still treating them as marginal updates.
The first change, and the one most discussed in the industry, is the rise of AI-powered search. Google’s AI Overviews, which now sit above the traditional ten-link results page for a meaningful share of commercial queries, are absorbing user attention that previously went to ranked websites. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are answering questions directly without ever sending users to a brand’s site. The discipline of getting cited inside those AI-generated answers, generative engine optimisation or GEO, has gone from a niche curiosity to a billable service in twenty-four months.
“The mistake practitioners are making is treating GEO as a separate problem from SEO,” Nishit says. “It is not. The signals that get a brand cited inside an AI answer overlap heavily with the signals that get a page ranked in classic search. Structured content, declarative writing, schema markup, authoritative sourcing, mentions across high-trust properties. These are not new disciplines. They are the unfashionable basics that the industry deprioritised when it was easier to chase backlink volume.”
The Opus Momentum SEO methodology, which Nishit has been refining over the last year, treats SEO and GEO as a single integrated practice rather than two separate service lines. The agency’s audits, now include a section on AI visibility, where the team checks how often a client’s brand appears in ChatGPT and Perplexity responses to commercial queries in their category, and what the gap looks like against competitors.
“For most clients in our first audit, the answer is that they do not appear at all,” he says. “Their competitors do. The brand has been investing in SEO for years and is still invisible in the AI surface. The conversation that follows is uncomfortable but useful.”
What still works in 2026, he argues, is a smaller set of practices than the industry has historically emphasised.
Technical SEO matters more than it did, not less, because the AI systems pulling from a brand’s site need clean, well-structured pages they can quote from. Content depth matters more than it did, because the era of thin five-hundred-word blog posts ranking for competitive queries is over. Schema markup matters more than it did, because both Google and the LLMs use it to parse meaning. Internal linking and topical clustering matter more than they did, because authority in 2026 is increasingly built around demonstrated expertise on a topic rather than against individual keywords.
What works less, Nishit says, is the high-volume, low-quality content strategy that built much of the Indian SEO industry. Agencies that are still selling thirty blog posts a month for a flat monthly fee are, in his assessment, selling a service that produces less than half the result it would have produced two years ago.
“You can publish thirty mediocre blog posts a month and watch your traffic decline,” Nishit says. “The work that moves rankings now is a smaller volume of substantially better content, with proper internal linking, schema, and topical depth. The economics of running an SEO retainer have changed because of this.”
Saurabh Tripathi, founder of Opus Momentum, says the agency restructured its SEO offering around the new reality in early 2026, treating GEO and classic SEO as a single discipline rather than separate billable lines.
“Most agencies are going to spend the next eighteen months figuring out whether to call this SEO or GEO and how to price it,” Tripathi says. “We made the call to integrate it. Nishit and the team have been running on the integrated methodology for two quarters now. The results are clearer than the old approach was producing.”
Nishit is more cautious about predictions for the rest of 2026.
“Six months from now, the AI search surface will look different from how it looks today,” he says. “What I am confident about is that the practitioners who stay close to the fundamentals, technical hygiene, content depth, authority signals, are the ones who will continue to deliver. Everything else is a moving target.”