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SEO Week 2026 Ryan Jones Semantic Success Secrets

SEO Week 2026 Ryan Jones Semantic Success Secrets

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

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Ryan Jones

May 01, 2026

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  1. @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)
  2. @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
  3. @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
  4. @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.
  5. @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
  6. @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.
  7. @RyanJones Most AI searches have 0 historical search volume. 80%

    of these 1,955 keywords have <100 monthly searches.
  8. @RyanJones You don’t need to rank for that query. You

    need to be retrieved. (sorry link builders and guest posters)
  9. @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
  10. @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.
  11. @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
  12. @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
  13. @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 $$?
  14. @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
  15. @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)
  16. @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