GEO / SEO in 2026

   By Chris Byrne (updated 4.26)

SEO work in 2026 still includes reporting competitors' violations of search engine guidelines e.g.  paid & sponsored links for "ten blue link" results and Google My Business name spam / ineligible listings to GOOG , Bing etc . In 2026 we can also use the LLM Claude from Anthropic to analyse the backlinks to a website for signs that the linking websites are part of a Private Blog Network (PBN).

   The above is all part of a holistic SEO strategy aimed at knocking down competitors as well as efforts to boost a website's own rankings. In 2026 I argue we also need to think about the following as LLMs are integrated into search engines and may be considered "answer engines" in their own right:

   SEO  / "negative GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)" work in 2026 may also include reporting the following to GOOG and Bing:

1. competitors' "low quality content"  (e.g. self serving review "listicles" (list articles e.g. a digital marketing agency listing themselves as first on a list of the "top digital marketing agencies in London" on an article on their own website) - reporting issues such as this is done via the Search Quality User report. See https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a .

2. competitors' paid links to (spam) citations used in Google & Bing's AI Overviews and Google Knowledge Graph

3. parasite hosted spam citations "from sources around the web" created by competitors (or their SEO agency) used in some Google Knowledge Graph list results e.g. on blog hosts such as medium .com .

4. other legal forms of "negative SEO" including reporting of Google Partner status misrepresentation & spammy use of schema markup to get product review star ratings (for businesses that don't sell products) in Google SERPs.

5. Use the LLM Claude to analyse the authenticity / likelihood of incentivisation of competitors' reviews (including responses to the reviews) on e.g. Trustpil0t / Google Business Profile. Fake and undisclosed incentivised reviews are now illegal practices under UK law: https://lnkd.in/epU2SH7u and you can report this activity (anonymously) to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. 

6. reporting paid links to websites used in RAG in LLMs (e.g. those websites used to generate AI Overviews which you can see in the citations). It has been reported that Chatgpt uses Google and Bing for RAG.