SEO Week 2026 Ryan Jones Semantic Success Secrets

My 2026 SEO week NYC talk on semantic success secrets and how we must evolve.

1. @RyanJones
2. @RyanJones Ryan Jones SVP @WeAreRazorfish Founder, SERPrecon.com @RyanJones Linkedin.com/in/jonesy www.RyanMJones.com
3. @RyanJones My day job Title: SVP, SEO Role: I co-run the SEO Practice How Long: going on 15 years Company name changes: 6 (so far)
4. @RyanJones My night job What: Semantic Relevance SEO Tool Features: AI Share of voice, GEO Optimization, Real metrics! Sign up: SERPrecon.com (everyone gets a free trial!) Coupon Code: SEOWEEK. (25% off FOR LIFE!) Swag? Stickers – come see me
5. @RyanJones
6. @RyanJones What else I do
7. @RyanJones And WAY too much cornhole…
8. @RyanJones I’ve been talking about AI search for over a decade
9. @RyanJones Let’s talk about AI vs SEO
10. @RyanJones I’m Tired of Hearing SEO is Dead
11. @RyanJones The Metrics Disagree Google 90% Other 5% Bing 3% Yahoo 2% Search Market Share 5.8% 13.5% 14.4% 59.4% Gen AI Market Share AI vs Google Market Share 21.9M 350M 376.6M 517M 16.5B 31.8X
12. @RyanJones The clicks aren’t coming back Source: ahrefs
13. @RyanJones Especially if you’re using AI Content. Source: ahrefs
14. @RyanJones SEO isn’t dead. What you were doing wasn’t SEO. The S stands for Schrodinger
15. @RyanJones
16. @RyanJones Gotta change how we think of SEO. We need to update our branding. Clients have a real problem. Traffic is down. We can’t say “it’s just SEO” That traffic is gone.
17. @RyanJones We have a perception problem Many self-proclaimed SEOs are just spammers
18. @RyanJones So We Re-Branded
19. @RyanJones Whatever we call “this” Bad SEO is dead
20. @RyanJones We Need To Evolve FROM | SERP & KW Focus TO | Semantic Relevance FOCUS Winning the #1 position in Google search results Winning brand SOV & Inclusion wherever our audience is AUDIENCE People using only search engines People searching everywhere (search engines, social, retail, LLMs) INFORMED BY Keywords, Historical Search Volumes Topics, Semantic Relevance, Audiences, Experience KPIS Awareness (impressions, rankings), consideration (clicks, users, sessions), conversion (site engagement) Are we showing up? (visibility, impressions, citations) Are we standing out? (sentiment, referrals) Do we have business impact? (direct and indirect conversions) CONTENT Keyword-optimized web pages Semantically relevant content across multiple formats & platforms GOAL KPIS & OKRS Total Sales, Conversions, Orders, Brand Growth
21. @RyanJones Your Attribution Models Are Broken
22. @RyanJones For AI It’s all about SOV now.
23. @RyanJones
24. @RyanJones That’s right. SEOs are coming for that brand budget!
25. @RyanJones It’s harder to game the algorithm
26. @RyanJones So people are gaming the metrics
27. @RyanJones It’s not the race you think it is
28. @RyanJones Silly Human, The Internet is for Bots
29. @RyanJones The new user It's not just a person behind a keyboard. It's also the AI model reading your content before the person ever sees it. AI is now the first audience. It decides what to include, quote, or reference — using Search. We're not just optimizing for people anymore — we're optimizing for machines that summarize for people.
30. @RyanJones Most AI searches have 0 historical search volume. 80% of these 1,955 keywords have <100 monthly searches.
31. @RyanJones How do you optimize what you can’t measure?
32. @RyanJones Let’s un-pack the AI overview patent
33. @RyanJones Generate LLM output
34. @RyanJones Generate synthetic queries (We can reverse engineer this!)
35. @RyanJones This is what we care about!
36. @RyanJones Or, we can go to Google testimony
37. @RyanJones
38. @RyanJones You don’t need to rank for that query. You need to be retrieved. (sorry link builders and guest posters)
39. @RyanJones GEO Requires Slightly Different Writing Styles AI doesn’t rank pages. It retrieves passages. These principals ensure your content is easier to match, extract, and cite.. so skip grandma’s entire life story on your recipe pages. ANSWER-FIRST Content that clearly summarizes answers upfront is 33% more likely to be cited by AI systems. SEMRush, 2026 SOURCED STAT Adding specific sourced statistics increases LLM visibility by 30%–40%. Princeton / ACM KDD, 2024 DEFINTION Cited sentences are nearly 2x as likely to define rather than describe. Search Engine Land, 2026 QUOTABLE​ Content structured into clear, extractable chunks can increase AI visibility by 30%. Princeton / ACM KDD, 2024
40. @RyanJones Step 1: Understand the Fan out Note: there’s 67,000 tools that do this, including SERPrecon, but you can get it straight from the Gemini API like above. Get this script here.
41. @RyanJones Step 2: Create structured content that ranks for those queries
42. @RyanJones Dominating the appliance search landscape with AI Whirlpool brands consistently appear side by side in AI Overviews and dominate the top organic results. To meet Whirlpool’s goal of appearing side by side in AI Overviews and the top traditional results, we unified keyword strategy and ran a single cross-brand loop, turning their search presence into a synchronized front that squeezes competitors off page 1. +165% shared page 1 KWs +138% share of search 150K AI Overview citations PERFORMANCE VALIDATION
43. @RyanJones Owning the AI Answer with third parties For our Oral B client—where most purchases happen un-tracked in-person at retail stores—the recommendation was all that mattered. Influencers and YouTube strategy resulted in increased offline sales at CVS/Walmart/etc., as a strong correlation was shown between AI presence and an increase in offline sales. PERFORMANCE VALIDATION
44. @RyanJones The Search Paradigm Will Continue to Shift
45. @RyanJones How do teams and SEOs adjust for this future? How does the C suite adjust? “Just make my clicks go up” “they’re not coming back” If “it’s just SEO” why do you need more $$?
46. @RyanJones Your org structure and OKRs are the real problem
47. @RyanJones Take More Credit!
48. @RyanJones Clicks are vanity metrics
49. @RyanJones Tools need to do better We need semantic relevance We need SOV and upper funnel measurement Historical Keyword Volumes won’t cut it anymore The future will NOT resemble the past
50. @RyanJones Note: the tool above is FREE! So I built
51. @RyanJones Media Mix Modeling AI Overviews We wanted to isolate the effect of our AI overview increases against sales. When accounting for offline sales, AI Overviews contributed almost as much as paid search for this client. (Results varied by client)
52. @RyanJones Ask AI what it knows and doesn’t know about your business.
53. @RyanJones Do you have a Wikidata page? All AI trains on it.
54. @RyanJones Tokens are expensive. Chipotle Chat is Free
55. @RyanJones Claude tracks who’s being mean.
56. @RyanJones If you’re not nice to AI, this could be our future.
57. @RyanJones Thank you! More Sites of Mine: WTFSEO.com SEODataViz.com ServerHeaders.com SEOnews.pro Use code: “SEOWEEK” to get 25% off for LIFE! Ryan Jones SVP @WeAreRazorfish @RyanJones Linkedin.com/in/jonesy www.RyanMJones.com