The content marketing advice you'll need in 2026, according to MozCon speakers
- Kiera Carter
- Dec 2, 2025
- 7 min read
Author: Kiera Carter
With the rise of AI search and decline of organic site traffic, it's refreshing to know there's one constant: content is king. Content creation, strategy, and operations were key topics at MozCon in New York, where experts agreed on a nuanced, thoughtful approach to content in 2026. (Agreement? In SEO? I know—groundbreaking.)
That’s because anyone deep in the trenches knows success in this chaotic moment isn’t about recklessly abandoning fundamentals. It's about understanding your audience, applying your search skills to new platforms, and—for the love of all original content—not writing the same explainers as everyone else on the internet.
As a content marketer myself, I found it both grounding and freeing. So, as we head into 2026, I curated the best content tips from MozCon New York to help inform your future-first content strategy. If you’re looking to go deeper on AI search, check out 5 ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs by Kevin Indig.
Top content marketing tips for 2026
GEO or SEO? Stop stressing about acronyms
Lily Ray, VP of SEO strategy and research at Amsive, has a message for those panicking about GEO, AEO, and LLMO: it's SEO. "Good SEO is good GEO," she said in her talk, echoing a statement from Google's Danny Sullivan. "If you're doing things right from an SEO perspective, you should expect visibility in AI search as well."
Ray pointed to the tactics everyone's calling revolutionary—content chunking, FAQ schema, earning brand mentions across platforms—and reminded us that SEOs have been doing this for years. "Chunking is just writing good content with optimized headlines," she said. "The way people search has absolutely changed, but the tactics to earn AI search visibility are really just evolutions of many of the existing SEO and marketing best practices that we've employed for years."
Some (level-headed) adjustments you can make to evolve your content strategy, according to Ray:
Build your brand presence on Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube, “without being too salesy and too promotional.”
Answer common questions about your business very clearly on your website.
Adjust your KPIs and explore new AI search tools to measure your AI visibility.
Bridge search and social
We only spend 3.5% of our online time searching, as Paul Norris, organic media director at Journey Further, explained in his talk. The rest of the time, we're scrolling through social media, streaming YouTube videos, and browsing Reddit forums. "Discovery happens everywhere," Norris said. "Search is a specific behavior. It's not a channel."
But SEOs used to long-term organic traffic can bristle at the quick lifespan of social content. Norris shared research from Measure Studio finding that TikTok videos reach 75% of their total views within the first day, and YouTube Shorts hit 95% within 35 days. "Most social content is actually like fast food for algorithms," Norris said. "It spikes. It's fleeting. It's gone."
That’s exactly where search optimization comes in, he said. By making social content discoverable and indexable, you can extend its shelf life, and in some cases—particularly on Instagram—make it evergreen. His advice:
Don’t keyword stuff your captions. Instead, learn how people search within each platform and optimize accordingly.
Repurpose your content strategically. For example, one piece could inspire an on-site article for Google, short-form videos for TikTok, and long-form content for YouTube.
Work with creators. “That stuff lands better. They've got their own audience.”
Break free from keywords
The journey toward natural language search didn't start with ChatGPT, said Pete Meyers, principal innovation architect at Moz. “In some ways, we've been on the natural language journey for at least 15 years now.” This means we’ve already learned the building blocks: “Even though some of this is new, and we're a little worried, I think we have what we need, and we can take a little bit of a breath,” he said.
That’s the good news. The problem is that most SEOs are still thinking in keywords when they should be thinking in journeys. "People might be having multi-paragraph conversations that have multiple steps," Meyers said. “How do we cope with that from a keyword research standpoint?”
It’s a question we’re all asking, because it’s clear that traditional keyword research can't keep up. Meyers said to forget trying to track one-off, infinitely-long queries. Instead, group long-tail queries into topic families and use topic clustering tools to group semantic variations together.
When Meyers demonstrated typing "iPhone or Android" into Moz's Keyword Explorer, it surfaced questions like "why is Android better than iOS?" and "why is iPhone better than Android?" alongside "why people believe iPhones are better than Android." "These are all on the same topic cluster," he said. "We can start to group them together."
The key is understanding that every query represents a path from initial curiosity to final action. Map that journey, and you'll be positioned for success no matter what search looks like next.
Optimize your content operations
Josh Spilker, content marketing and SEO lead at AirOps, spoke about content engineering, or the practice of establishing a content engine primed for cross-channel distribution and efficiency.
“We were told that machines are coming for our jobs, and that every article would be AI generated,” he said. “The reality is that AI capabilities have created a new category and the people who figure it out are going to have a competitive advantage.”
That advantage—and thing to “figure out”—is your process. “We've had a ceiling with incremental improvements: you tweak your brief, you tweak your outline, you tweak some of your internal linking processes. But you can't tweak your way out of a broken system,” he said. “What we're really thinking about is how content gets built, how it gets managed, how it gets scaled, and how you can do that in this new environment.”
Start by whiteboarding out your entire content process. When you break down what it takes to publish one piece—outline, slug, meta description, internal links—you'll realize how many individual steps you're managing and can start to see opportunities.
Make sure to put a human in charge of quality. “Content engineering is about orchestrating humans and LLMs together with a clear strategy, not just around disconnected tools.”
Stop measuring traffic. Start measuring trust.
Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, said his organic traffic is at an all-time low, but his leads are at an all-time high. "It took me 13,000 visits from search to get 67 newsletter signups," he said, "and only 2,821 visits from social to get 66." If you're still celebrating traffic numbers while your conversion rates tank, you're measuring the wrong thing.
Reynolds breaks marketing into three stages:
Being seen
Being believed
Being chosen
"Google's great at helping you be seen, but it's not great at being believed or chosen," he said. So, how do you start measuring “belief,” essentially trust, in your brand and company, in order to be chosen, everyone’s ultimate goal?
Reynolds suggests tracking the percentage of traffic that comes from sources other than search and AI. "If that number is really low, humans don't give a shit,” he said. “Track newsletter signups by source—if 50% are coming from social, that's people choosing to hear from you.”
Think like a publisher
The future of PR looks less like backlink outreach and more like operating an in-house newsroom, as Misty Larkins, director of public relations and internal communications at the University of Missouri Health Care, explained in her talk about digital PR. "When you create the data, you control the story.”
That’s why companies are now hiring economists, statisticians, and data journalists to lead their content teams—because journalists quote and cite original sources. If you’re that original source, you're not just another brand hoping for coverage; you’re the expert that informs the story.
This doesn't mean you need to hire a full-time economist tomorrow. But it does mean investing in content that's actually newsworthy: original research, surveys, trend reports, analysis of your internal data. "Instead of creating 50 pieces of generic content that's indistinguishable from your competitors, think about creating five highly differentiated pieces that all work together," Larkins said.
Actually be a thought leader
Chima Mmeje, senior content marketing manager at Moz, has zero nostalgia for the days of “boring SEO-optimized content that nobody wants to read."
The old process was predictable: do keyword research, copy what's on the SERP, use a tool to check your optimization score, and publish. "It was like math. It was boring. It was lifeless. It was lame."
Real thought leadership means becoming the primary source, not an interpreter. "Nobody wants to link to a secondary interpreter.” she said. “Everybody wants to link to the source of truth."
Mmeje pointed to Mike King as an example. “When the Google leak happened, Mike King was there first, reverse-engineering the patterns and teaching people how to assess it,” she said, noting that King's analysis earned 2,200 inbound links from a piece that doesn't even rank on the SERP.
The barrier is mindset more than time. Mmeje suggested publishing just two original research pieces per year, writing opinion pieces that "either alienate or inform," and capturing demand as trends break instead of six months later.
Focus on your heavy hitters
Not all pages are created equal. In the post-traffic era, you need to know which pages are working hard for the business, and which ones are worth leaving behind.
That’s the basis of the heavy-hitters framework shared by Bianca Anderson, organic growth manager at hims & hers. Your heavy hitters are the top 10 to 20% of URLs that drive the majority of your conversions.
Your action item: Apply a weighted score to your reporting that favors conversions (70% weight) over traffic (30% weight) to identify the pages that deserve your attention. From there, you can focus on updating the pages truly worth your time.
So, as Anderson says, "when leadership asks you,’ how bad is it?’ You can say, ‘our top traffic-driving content is down, but our conversions are doing really well.’" The marketers who'll thrive in 2026 are the ones who laser focus on the pages that actually matter—to the audience and to the business.
Kiera oversees content on Wix Studio's AI Search Lab and SEO Learning Hub. She has 15 years of experience in SEO and content strategy. In a past life, she held editorial leadership positions at companies like Hearst and People Inc. Her journalism has been published by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and others. Linkedin
