AI search didn’t arrive all at once, but by the end of 2025, there was no denying the shift. Rankings stopped telling the full story and visibility moved upstream, into AI systems deciding what gets cited, summarized, and recommended before a buyer ever reaches your site.

Few SEO and content teams are clear on where the real leverage is heading into 2026.

So we asked a simple question to a group of strategists and leaders shaping the future of search: What’s a high-leverage opportunity in 2026 that most SEO and content teams are overlooking?

Their answers point to a common theme: it’s about doing smarter, more intentional work. From intent monitoring and ICP-specific content to influence optimization, programmatic workflows, and video-first visibility, these perspectives reveal where the next edge is forming and where teams risk falling behind.

Big thanks to Mark Williams-Cook, Steve Toth, Chima Mmeje, George Chasiotis, Niklas Buschner, Lashay Lewis, Jeremy Moser, Tyler Hakes and Lily Ray for their contributions. 

What's a high-leverage opportunity in 2026 that most SEO and content teams are overlooking?

Mark Williams-Cook, Digital Marketing Director at Candour

Automating the monitoring of intent shift over all of your content. PAA data provides the zeitgeist around any search terms, and we now have cheap ways to hook up tools like Screaming Frog, AlsoAsked and ChatGPT to check real-time search intent, versus the questions your content is answering over your entire website.

Learn about Google AI mode and changes in the algorithm from Mark in this AirOps webinar.

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Steve Toth, CEO/Chief Strategy Officer at Notebook Agency

The team at Notebook Agency niches down content at the ICP level in order to leverage the LLM’s user embedding (what each AI knows about us). By focusing content on specific ICPs, we create a closer semantic match between the query plus user context (embedding information) and the content retrieved to support the answer. 

When your content states who it’s for, mirrors the ICP's terminology, addresses common problems, and satisfies the ICP’s deal breakers, the user embedding adds context that prompts the LLM to retrieve ICP-niched content because it’s hyper-relevant (even when the user isn’t explicit about who they are). This increases the likelihood that your content will be retrieved and recommended for high-intent queries that your best customers are searching for.

See more from Steve Toth in this AirOps webinar on changing your SEO strategy for AI search.

Chima Mmeje, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Moz

Influence optimization is going to be a big thing in 2026 and something I'm seeing a lot of the big companies hiring for. Most people are doing this to influence brand mentions in LLMs but I think that's short sighted. The bigger opportunity is in an influence program that includes improving brand sentiments, supporting product launches and promoting events.

Alex Birkett, Co-Founder of Omniscient Digital

The obvious opportunity I see a ton of teams overlooking is video, which even typing it out sounds too obvious for it to be interesting. Everyone knows about "best" and comparison listicles, so competitive saturation is doing it's thing, and there's tons of slop and spam coming out. Everyone knows about Reddit, and even so, it's tough to actually effectuate tactics as a brand there. Video is easy. Especially for B2B brands, in many verticals there's little competition - especially outside of MarTech. It's very influential for AEO for many companies and industries I audit. YouTube itself is a distribution channel. Video shows up on tons of SERPs. If you're unique or charismatic, it plays well on social. Expected value is high from most angles you look at it.

Alex and Allie Konchar from Omniscient discuss how content teams are changing in this AirOps webinar.

George Chasiotis, Founder at Minuttia

The biggest high-leverage opportunity for 2026 is a mindset shift around organic growth. Since ChatGPT’s launch in Nov 2022, SEO has taken a perception hit: budgets moved, fear crept in, and volatility dominated the narrative. 

At the same time, AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) emerged as a new channel with massive overlap with SEO fundamentals. Teams that clearly communicate this overlap and position SEO + AEO as complementary growth engines will unlock more buy-in, budget, and impact than those fighting against the negative reputation SEO has earned over the last three years.

Sara Stella Lattanzio, Chief Strategy Officer at The Workflow

Building an ecosystem of partners, influencers, and SMEs to contribute to and distribute original content constantly. That's the best distribution (coverage & quality) you can get.

Niklas Buschner, Founder at Radyant

Integrating the best of programmatic and editorial SEO into your AI Search optimization strategy. This is especially interesting for niche B2B target groups. Think about your product and all possible integrations. Using an AI-powered and expert-led content workflow based on a platform like AirOps, you can create high quality editorial content at scale, and unlock significant citations.

See how Niklas uses AirOps for content engineering: 

Lashay Lewis, Founder at Bofu.ai

Programmatic content strategy. Instead of just doing it for SEO blog content, use it to support one person content teams that are responsible for more collateral than just blogs.

Use it to produce, one pagers, webinars, FAQ sheets. Programmatic content strategy is the process of taking a converting asset and repurposing it to support adjacent teams. 

Watch Lashay's competitive analysis workflow in AirOps and get the recap from her webinar on bottom funnel content.

Jeremy Moser, CEO at uSERP

The amount of times I see a brand's AEO strategy lacking targeted link building is insane. Truly NGMI (not gonna make it).

This is the number one lever to pull for AEO.

Just like EEAT cannot be entirely controlled by what you say about yourself, neither can sentiment and mention rates in AI.

What other people say about you and your brand and your solution is the single best way to drive increased share of voice right now.

And it will almost certainly always be this way. No brand is going to review themselves fairly without bias, rank themselves 10th in the industry, or say they aren't the right solution and X competitor is beating them on all fronts.

So search and generative engines pull from third-party sentiment for (at least somewhat more) honest recommendations.

Tyler Hakes, Founder of Optimist

Let go of some of the content that doesn’t fit with your strategy anymore.
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Over the last year or 2, the mandate has been “do more with less.” With AI and new tools, many teams have ramped up production and output. They’ve piled on new channels, new tactics, and new campaigns. But most teams have kept dragging along all of their old playbooks, strategies, and tactics too. They’re left with this kind of Frankenstein’s monster strategy that probably doesn’t make sense any more in our new world.
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So the key here is to zoom back out. Look at the big picture—which of those things still make sense? Should you keep them or cut them? Do they actually serve the new strategy?
Can you better integrate things to make the process more cohesive and efficient?
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Even with increased output, it’s still important to be strategic. Ask “why” you’re making stuff and how it actually serves the bigger picture. Chances are you’re spending at least 30-40% of your time and effort on stuff that has little or no value and you could be putting it toward higher impact work.

Lily Ray, VP of Strategy & Research at Amsive

Lily Ray recently appeared on an AirOps webinar and discussed the growing importance of YouTube and it’s a high-leverage play to use going into 2026.

There’s a lot of new data coming out about—first of all, we’ve already seen this in the SEO space—how visible YouTube is in organic search results. How many queries are generating YouTube videos? Sometimes it’s hard to report back on that until you’re using a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush or whatever that tells you the number one result for this is YouTube.

In that sense, it’s an SEO play—you have to be there. And also with AI search, even with AI Overviews, more and more AI Overviews are showing YouTube videos directly embedded into the answer.

And that’s something I think Google is also doing with Gemini and with AI Mode. Especially because it’s Google, they’re elevating their own YouTube products, as they always have, and I think that’s going to be increasingly true. The more tools you can use to talk about all the different places that YouTube is showing up—there’s also Google Discover; they love to show YouTube in Google Discover—it’s everywhere.

Sometimes you can’t always necessarily see that in your own metrics, but you can understand the landscape, the competitive landscape, of what type of content is appearing for the queries that we care about. Video tends to show really prominently.

The takeaway: Leverage beats output

The pattern across these responses is that the real leverage is shifting upstream. It's going into intent signals before rankings drop, into ICP-specific relevance that AI systems actually retrieve, and into influence, sentiment, and third-party validation.

That means cutting what no longer serves the strategy, aligning around how AI search actually works, and investing in work that influences answers and not just clicks.

The leverage in 2026 is from doing the right things, on purpose.

AirOps helps teams build the content engineering foundations they need, automate structured workflows, strengthen AEO readiness and understand how AI systems surface their brand. If you want to modernize your content operations and get ready for what comes next, start with our guide on how a content engineering platform can transform your team.

Next Steps:

- Review our new research report: The State of AI Search in 2026

- Get your complete guide for AI search

- Book your demo to see AirOps in action.

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