AI SEO & Business Automation Podcast

James Dooley: SEO predictions for 2027.

Today I'm joined with Charles Floate, and there is no better person I wanted to ask because I have known you for 15 years. By the way, happy 30th for yesterday.

I have known you for a long time, and you have always seemed to be two steps ahead of the game. There have always been systems and processes that you brought to me that I had never heard of before.

I have gone, “What is this?” Then 12 months later, people are talking about what you spoke about a long time ago.

I know it is a hard question to ask, but what are your predictions for SEO next year, and how do you see things moving?

Charles Floate: It is all based on AI by default, basically.

As soon as Google changes from the traditional 10 blue links argument, where it is now 10 blue links plus AI views at the top, once that AI overview or AI mode becomes the default experience, it is going to change everything.

The current consensus and internal reporting from Google is Q4 2026.

Now, I am not 100% confident in their confidence in that deadline. I do think they will probably end up delaying it.

Is it going to be delayed by a month, three months, six months or 12 months? We are not 100% sure.

But I do believe 2027 will be the year that at least the US, for example, defaults into some sort of AI experience for search.

James Dooley: Let me stop you there.

AI mode, I am presuming everyone here will know what that is. You are saying Google is looking to move over to AI mode by default in Q4.

How do you know that, and do you think they are going to do it as a blanket change for all searches?

Charles Floate: If you are a Google shareholder, you can listen to their quarterly earnings calls, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai gives out his timelines for various things happening.

He said on the last earnings call that Q4 2026 is the deadline for when they are trying to achieve AI as the default experience.

He did not say AI mode or AI overviews. He just said AI as the default search experience.

So you can take that as you wish. It might not even be the case that the default AI search experience is available right now.

They might not have invented it yet. It might be a new interface that suddenly comes out. The AI itself might even invent the new layout. We do not know.

However, their current internal consensus is that they are trying to achieve that by the end of this year.

As soon as that happens, it basically changes the entire SEO industry, the entire landscape and all of the targeting.

It will upend careers, jobs and, to some extent, people's value and worth. I think that is going to be a massive shock to the industry.

If AI has not already been enough of a shock for content writers, editors, graphic designers and all the other people who play a big role in SEO, it will be an even bigger one once that becomes the case.

James Dooley: Would it be a big shock? There are certain people in the industry who say GEO is just SEO.

What would actually change? Do you disagree and believe AI SEO is different to SEO?

Charles Floate: If AI mode becomes the default experience, then it definitely is completely different from the traditional 10 blue links landscape.

The algorithm behind the LLM that is powering AI mode is nothing similar to the traditional SEO algorithm.

Your approach to trying to rank and be picked up in AI mode is not going to be the same as your traditional SEO experience.

If anything, the one website mentality that the majority of the industry has had, where you just focus on producing your own website, your content, fixing technical mistakes, building links, building authority and social shares on one domain name, has gone out the window.

AI mode is taking from multiple sources.

In some cases, it could be taking from 20, 30 or 50 different pages to build an output for the user.

Again, it might not be a text output. It could be a table, a graphic, a little video or all sorts of things.

We do not know yet, but it will be a different output and a different experience from traditional blue links.

All the information powering it will be different.

You are going to have to move away from a one-domain play, where you do the blog, the on-page and all the work for one domain.

Instead, you will need to build consensus from different publishers, reinforce your entity and make yourself and the people in your company seen as experts in that niche.

That is what will help the AI choose you as the output for whatever query the customer, or potential customer, is inputting.

James Dooley: So with regards to that, you are looking more at holistic marketing and being seen everywhere.

SEO is going to become more like marketing as a whole.

Charles Floate: 100%.

There is still weighting going on. Certain sources will be weighted higher than others.

Maybe a Wikipedia page will mean more to the AI than a podcast episode with 100 followers, for example.

There will still be certain work that has a much bigger impact than other work.

I also believe this will eventually become EO, which is everywhere engine optimisation.

The best bit of advice I have had in the last few months was to use the example of FatRank, which is a lead generation agency in the UK.

You get the entity attributes, so you search something like “FatRank PPC lead generation” minus “fatrank.com” and see what shows up.

That means you are not looking at anything on your own site. You are seeing how your brand looks elsewhere on the web.

Then you can do “FatRank SEO lead generation” minus “fatrank.com”.

You can do that for different services and see how powerful your brand looks outside your own domain.

Building consensus offline, off-page topical maps, semantic content networks and interlinking them all matters.

People could call it tiered link building or whatever they want, but it is about building relevance off your own website.

James Dooley: What do you say to that?

Charles Floate: I think it is a fantastic idea because you are understanding how Google is interpreting your brand from a third-party position, especially for AI overviews.

If we move to a position where AI overviews also demote self-references, then third-party corroboration and third-party sources become even more important for how AI sees you.

At a minimum, when somebody searches your brand plus reviews, your brand plus scam, or whether your brand is a good company, that already influences how customers and people see your brand and reputation.

That kind of work is already important now.

But as that becomes the default experience, it will be the only way to get AI to have a more positive sentiment about your brand.

The worst thing you can have is negative sentiment.

A lot of companies right now have mixed sentiment. Some users are saying they are the best company in the world. Some are saying they are the worst company in the world.

Some blog posts say they are number one, and some say they are number 10.

The more positive sentiment you build now, the better positioned you will be when that becomes the default.

James Dooley: With regards to SEO predictions for 2027, I know it is all guesswork. None of us truly know what is going to happen.

But how important are things like podcasts or video? Should people be trying to do more video format as well as web pages?

Charles Floate: 100%.

Right now, at least, the self-referencing demotion you might get from being on James.com and saying the same stuff we are saying here does not apply on YouTube.com.

It does not apply on Spotify.com or other third-party sources.

You are not going to get that same demotion penalty for doing the same content and posting it to a third-party site.

From a trust angle, it helps Google understand your entity as a real expert and authority in that niche.

It also gives you a better ability to rank and be picked up for those positive sentiments in the first place.

James Dooley: What about social media?

You have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Reddit, Quora, discussions and other things showing up in Google search.

How important will that be if we move towards AI visibility and not traditional Google search engine results pages, especially when Google keeps pulling in Reddit?

Charles Floate: I think Reddit is becoming more and more the number one source for Google, AI and users in general to get real user expert opinion.

If you imagine the r/SEO subreddit has some of the best SEOs in the world commenting on somebody’s post asking for advice, then AI, users and everyone else will want to gather that information.

That is why Reddit has become more and more of a priority.

It is also one of the last websites with a fully user-backed dataset for AI companies to ingest, put into training data and use in their outputs.

I see Reddit becoming probably the number one source of the internet for user consensus about certain topics.

James Dooley: Anyone watching this, I hope you liked the different SEO predictions Charles Floate shared for 2027.

I would love to hear your feedback. What do you think is the future of SEO?