Ishara Fernando

What the Future of SEO Actually Looks Like in 2026

Search has quietly changed shape. The top of a Google results page now often leads with a generated answer, not a list of links. ChatGPT users are asking full questions and expecting complete responses. Perplexity cites sources inline. The behavior that SEO was built around, a user typing a keyword and clicking a blue link, is no longer the dominant pattern. One of the biggest changes in how teams should think about this is the rise of prompt research: the process of studying the full questions