Why SEO uncertainty is creating opportunities for challengers

We’re well beyond the halfway point of 2026, and businesses are getting nervous. Me? I’m watching my 2026 predictions take shape.

Google is answering more questions today without sending clicks outside of its own platform. AI platforms are still the shiny object despite not yet delivering meaningful referral traffic. Attribution is still broken, and leaders are questioning whether SEO is still worth the investment.

Real talk: I’ve watched two clients of mine respond very differently to the current Google climate. One is taking its foot off the gas because it isn’t seeing the same ROI as it did in the past. The other is doubling down, seeing an opportunity to challenge a competitor that has dominated their market for more than a decade.

Both decisions, without a doubt, involve risk. The difference is that one business is focused on what it could lose by continuing to invest, while the other is focused on what it could gain while everyone else pulls back.

Stable markets protect market leaders

Catching a market leader under normal conditions is insanely difficult. They have stronger brand recognition, larger content libraries, better backlink profiles, more first-party data, and years of customer reviews and third-party validation. Oh, they also have those large budgets, teams, and historical performance data to keep building on those advantages. Gulp!

When everyone plays by the same rules, the leader’s head start continues to compound. Publishing a few more articles or improving several category pages won’t erase years of accumulated authority. At best, you may prevent the gap from growing.

To close it, you need more than good intentions and executing Brian Dean’s legendary Skyscraper Method. You need the market itself (and what it rewards) to change.

That is exactly what is happening now!

Doubt creates opportunity

Search behavior no longer exists entirely within Google’s ecosystem. Buyers have more ways to find answers, and no business has completely figured out how to win across all of them.

That uncertainty weakens some of the advantages market leaders spent years building. Their content libraries, reporting models, and proven playbooks were designed with scale (but also for a more predictable search environment).

Funny enough, the size and legacy that helped these companies dominate may now slow them down. They have more outdated content to reassess, more stakeholders to convince, stricter measurement requirements, and more existing revenue they’re afraid to disrupt. Investing in an unknown channel is difficult when every dollar must immediately prove a direct return.

The market leader is still ahead, and you won’t overtake them overnight. But we’re no longer running on a straight track. The course has changed, and everyone is learning it at the same time. (This should get you excited, unless you’re the big company…)

That creates an opportunity to close the gap faster than a “stable” market ever would.

You don’t need to recreate their last five years

Closing the gap doesn’t mean recreating everything the market leader did/does. You don’t need to match them article for article, backlink for backlink, or keyword for keyword. Much of what worked over the past five years will likely not deliver the same value over the next five.

Instead, invest in assets that matter! Get it in front of wherever your customers search, research, and make decisions:

• Original research and proprietary data.
• Recognizable subject-matter experts.
• Firsthand experience and credible opinions.
• Strong product, service, and category insights.
• Customer reviews, case studies, and other proof. (Yes, this is SEO!)
• Traditional and digital PR.
• Clean technical foundations and accessible structured information.
• Content people actively seek, reference, and recommend. (No, not search volume. I’d be OK if we never talked search volume ever again.)

These aren’t “SEO assets” or “GEO assets.” They’re evidence that your business deserves to be discovered, cited, and trusted. This is not an E-E-A-T play to improve SEO/GEO. Legitimate value that generates brand champions, with the result being organic visibility.

You don’t have to recreate the leader’s past. You need to build for where the market is TODAY!

Stop using referral traffic as the only scoreboard

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI platforms may not send meaningful referral traffic anytime soon, and you can ignore Google’s claims about clicks being the same.

That doesn’t make visibility worthless. It makes referral traffic an incomplete measurement. Attribution has always screwed organic marketing, so not really anything “new” here.

Clicks still matter. But so do branded search demand, direct traffic, assisted conversions, mentions and citations, answer visibility, and sales conversations influenced by content. We should also measure whether the traffic we still earn converts at a higher rate because customers encountered the brand throughout their research.

The goal isn’t to invent softer metrics to excuse declining traffic. It’s to recognize that last-click sessions alone no longer capture visibility’s full impact on customer decisions.

The biggest risk is waiting with everyone else

Waiting feels safe when your competitors are just as uncertain as you are. But when everyone pauses, even smaller (but very intentional) investments can create an outsized advantage.

Any Warren Buffett fans? His most quoted advice feels especially relevant right now:

• “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful”

This isn’t an argument for blindly going all in on AI, publishing 100x content, or paying someone promising you “AI rankings”. It’s about investing in the research, expertise, customer proof, brand recognition, and technical foundations your competitors will wish they had once the market becomes clearer.

By then, those assets won’t be something a competitor can beat by publishing a slightly longer article with one or two more data points. These become defensible resources that are expensive and time-consuming to replicate (which means 99% of your competitors won’t even try)

Uncertainty doesn’t eliminate risk. It gives you a choice between the risk of investing now and the risk of falling further behind.

Build for the next five years

You probably can’t outspend the market leader or recreate what made them successful overnight. You certainly won’t close the gap by copying their playbook and seeking out easy button shortcut solutions.

You may never have a better opportunity than when customer behavior is shifting, proven strategies are breaking, and everyone else is waiting for certainty.

You don’t need to recreate the previous 50 years.

You need to start winning the next five.

Sure, keep firing your marketing team for short-term P&L wins. Your competitors could use the help to put you out of business.

This post first appeared on the author’s website and is republished here with permission.