Who is Pieter Verschueren?
Pieter is an experienced search marketeer with a passion for tech and innovation. He is the co-founder of both Depends SEO Agency and Rankshift, an AI visibility monitoring tool that shows how visible brands are in AI responses and which sources those answers draw from. He gained invaluable experience at several leading international Belgian companies, such as TVH and Renson. By working in both international B2B and B2C environments, Pieter developed a strong understanding of how to adapt marketing strategies to different markets and audiences. He’s known for his analytical mindset, clear communication, and ability to bridge the gap between marketing, data, and technology.

Search as we used to know it, is changing drastically. It is no longer about “finding websites”. It’s about being (in) the answer. In 2026, the most important shift in marketing is the mainstream adoption of AI-first discovery, where large-language-model (LLM)-driven assistants like Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Claude Search have become default gateways to information.

This change forces digital marketers to rethink visibility from rankings to retrievability. Four macro-trends define the field:

From SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)

Traditional ranking factors still matter, but the new goal is to be cited inside generative answers. That means optimising not just for keywords but for how LLMs retrieve, interpret, and synthesize information. Passage structure, semantic clarity, schema markup, and entity consistency now determine whether a model selects your content. This shift already started this year, but will accelerate in 2026 as more companies see the value of optimising for LLMs.

Measurement & attribution

In AI search, visibility now happens inside black-box systems. A user might see your insights within an AI Overview without sending a single click to a brand’s website. This shift pushes brands to adopt new measurement systems and tools. As a business, you need to know how visible your content is in AI-generated responses, how often your website is cited as a source, and which AI bots are crawling your site. The KPIs of the future are inclusion-rate (visibility), citation-frequency, retrieval-recall and conversions, not just impressions or clicks.

Quality & trust as ranking signals

With generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, the web is now flooded with AI slop. Anyone can create a 500-word blog post in just a few seconds. However, LLMs increasingly give privilege to authentic expertise and first-hand data. EEAT-style credibility (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) becomes algorithmically detectable through bylines, provenance metadata, and structured evidence. In short: human insight surfaces best in machine summaries.

Agentic AI will have a prominent place in 2026

ChatGPT is evolving from being a pure answer engine to becoming an action layer for the internet. E-commerce integrations with Stripe, Shopify, and Walmart point to a broader shift: AI models are no longer just answering questions, they’re also executing tasks. This is part of the emerging agentic AI trend, where systems can not only generate ideas or text but also take steps on your behalf (like checking prices, placing orders, or running parts of your business). The end game isn’t a chatbot that helps you to think, but one that helps you to act. The boundaries between conversation and execution are starting to blur.

As a marketer you should understand how these mechanisms work and how to embrace them in your daily routine.

Tip 1: Design for retrieval, not just ranking

Structure content so LLMs can retrieve and quote it accurately. Break articles into short, single-topic paragraphs with clear headings, bullet lists, and explicit data points. Add schema (FAQ, How To, Product) and use literal phrasing for key entities (Large Language Models reward clarity over creativity). Avoid heavy JavaScript; most AI crawlers can’t render it.

The goal is “chunk-level relevance”: every section of your page should stand on its own as a fact-ready snippet an AI can reuse. In 2026, content that’s both human-readable and machine-parsable is your new competitive moat.

Tip 2: Focus on entity consistency and brand identity across the web

Generative engines don’t “rank pages”; they reconstruct knowledge from what they find across the web. That means your brand and entity descriptions must be consistent everywhere: website, LinkedIn, press releases, Wikipedia, even GitHub. If your company bio, tone, or tagline differs across sources, LLMs will treat you as multiple fragmented entities, lowering your chance of being cited.

So, keep a unified naming convention, bio paragraph, and tagline, and ensure structured metadata (Organisation, Person, Product schema) mirrors it. When models can confidently link your mentions to one authoritative source, they’re far more likely to surface your perspective in synthesized answers.

Would you like to discover the other 26 marketers’ and content creators’ visions for 2026? Download the whitepaper here.