The Search Landscape in February 2026

The Changing Search Landscape 2026

The search landscape in 2026 is changing. Fast. At least it feels that way. So what’s been happening recently? And importantly what do we need to do to remain discoverable?

SERP volatility

SERP volatility is when we see lots of changes in the search rankings in a short period. So many SEO forums have been full of chat about how search engine rankings have been bouncing about all over the place recently. To the point that people were convinced there had been a core Google update. But John Mueller of Google has confirmed that there have been no major updates.

So if you’ve seen lots of ups and downs in your search results over the past month, you’re not alone. Yet, my advice would be to chill.

Google may have pushed out some smaller updates without announcing them which may be causing search results to jump about a bit. That’s normal.

Your positions may have changed if competitors have pushed out new content. That’s normal.

We’re likely also seeing search intent evolve. This means Google has to rebalance it’s rankings to match the new intent. Which means results jump about.

Try not to fixate on the numbers. They will go up and down. It’s the longer term trends that you need to pay attention to. You only need to worry if you see a dramatic and sustained drop, a consistent downward trend, or pages dropping off completely.

Why am I even still banging on about Google in our AI dominated world? Because Google still sends 345x more traffic than Chat GPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined.

Could that be about to change? Maybe.

Yahoo! has launched ‘Scout’

Scout is an AI powered answer engine. I know, they’re all jumping on the band wagon aren’t they!? But this one piqued my interest. Unlike many AI tools that give answers without sending users anywhere, Scout shows up to nine links to real websites alongside its AI-generated summary.

It’s interesting because other LLMs give websites visibility through citations. But they don’t generate huge volumes of traffic (because users can get their answers without visiting the websites). So I’m interested to see whether Yahoo! Scout generates more traffic in the way that traditional search engines do. Time will tell.

Search visibility

Whilst search engines are still driving traffic, LLMs are driving visibility. How to get your website cited still seems to be a mystery for many and a welcome surprise for a few. The truth, that many SEO experts aren’t telling you yet, is that you don’t actually have to do anything dramatically different to what you are (or should) already be doing.

SEO in it’s simplest terms is just the creation of good content that answers your audience’s questions. (By writing content that is good for humans, you’re probably ticking a lot of SEO boxes without even realising it). And it’s the same for LLMs. In its simplest terms, those who provide the best answers to the questions are more likely to get cited.

The only other thing you really need to understand is that both search engines and AI “read” content differently to humans. This means that how you structure your content is super important.

Indeed, LinkedIn recently tested what drives AI search visibility and shared the results. They found that:

1. Headings, information hierarchy, and semantic HTML markup affected whether LLMs could surface content.

2. Content authored by named experts performed better than anonymous content.

You can read more about their research here. 

View from the Den

As Inna Meklin (Director of Marketing at LinkedIn) states in the above article,  

“As discovery shifts into AI-driven experiences, tracking impact becomes more complex”. It’s no longer good enough to simply measure website traffic, we also need to track influence as generative discovery evolves.

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