Best SEO strategies from women in tech in 2026.

The best SEO strategies from women in tech in 2026 centre on one principle: stop optimising for rankings and start optimising for answerability. Across the Women in Tech SEO community, WTSFest London 2026, and the Sitebulb expert interview series drawn from the WTS Slack community, the same conviction emerges — SEO has expanded from earning blue links to earning citations inside AI-generated answers, and the women shaping this industry are leading that shift with precision, practicality, and rigour.

Who is shaping SEO right now.

The Women in Tech SEO community, founded by Areej AbuAli, has grown into one of the most influential voices in search. WTSFest London 2026, held at the Barbican Centre in February, brought together speakers including Crystal Carter (Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix), Aleyda Solis, Dawn Anderson, Tina Reis, and Zoe Burke — practitioners who are not theorising about the future of search but actively measuring and implementing it for real clients.

Their collective message is unambiguous: the fundamentals have not changed, but the surface you are optimising for has multiplied. A brand that earns a position-one blue link while remaining absent from the AI Overview above it has not won the search result. It has won the second-most-visible position on the page.

Optimise for answerability, not just rankings.

Aleyda Solis confirmed at WTSFest London 2026 that AI search is not separate from traditional search — there is heavy user overlap, and purchasing decisions are increasingly being made within AI interfaces. This means a brand cannot afford to be present in Google's blue links but absent from the AI-generated answer above them.

Crystal Carter reinforced this point, noting that 40% of business executives say they will be involved with agentic AI in 2026, and that websites must now include rich, verifiable content so that AI agents can provide accurate recommendations. The implication is structural: content that cannot be parsed and cited by an AI agent is commercially invisible to an expanding share of the market.

This reframing has practical consequences for how content is written, structured, and distributed. Optimising for a ranked position means competing for an algorithm's attention. Optimising for answerability means making your content the clearest, most citable response to a specific question — regardless of which platform is doing the asking.

Make content structured and easy to cite.

Kelly-Anne Crean, Head of Operations at Koozai and a contributor to the WTS Knowledge Hub, is direct about what this means for content production: it is no longer just about ranking pages; it is about being the source AI trusts and uses. Write for AI answers — make content structured and easy to reference. Using schema and structured data helps significantly.

Ramona Joita, SEO and AI Visibility Consultant, extends this to product and category content: write product descriptions that go beyond keywords. Add meaning, context, and relationships between items, collections, and categories so large language models can easily interpret them. This is not a copywriting brief. It is a data architecture brief applied to editorial content.

The shared thread across these perspectives is the shift from content as a keyword vehicle to content as a machine-readable representation of what your brand actually knows. An AI engine does not care whether your copy is well-written. It cares whether the answer is unambiguous, structured, and independently verifiable.

Use AI hype to fund your technical foundations.

One of the most actionable insights to emerge from the WTS community in 2026 comes from Aimee Jurenka, SEO Strategist at Ricketyroo. Her argument reframes AI hype from a distraction into a stakeholder communication tool.

Jurenka also outlines how the SEO role itself needs to evolve in response. Build AI-search readiness reports that visualise crawlability, schema coverage, and entity depth. Offer chunkability audits that show how well your content is understood by LLMs. Create AI comprehension dashboards instead of rank trackers. This is how you evolve from "SEO consultant" to "AI visibility strategist" — not by learning a new discipline but by reframing the one you already have.

Bengü Sarıca Dinçer, SaaS SEO Manager, reinforces that this evolution does not require abandoning the core discipline: fast, crawlable, well-structured content, clear expertise, and trustworthy signals. Watching how users move, how bots see, spotting drop-offs, and smoothing the experience is more important than ever. The foundations have not changed. The framing has.

Win stakeholder buy-in with data and story.

Tina Reis, Senior SEO Strategist, delivered one of the most-cited sessions at WTSFest London 2026, arguing that the biggest obstacle to SEO success is not a technical gap but a communication one. Her framework addresses two distinct sides of stakeholder buy-in: the intellectual side, satisfied by data storytelling, and the emotional side, satisfied by narrative. Combining both is what turns a strategy sitting in a deck into one that actually gets resourced and shipped.

The WTS Knowledge Hub article "Be an SEO Chameleon" extends this idea further, advising practitioners to adapt their communication style to different stakeholder types, use existing internal meetings as entry points for seeding ideas, and broadcast quick wins systematically to embed SEO into internal processes.

The practical implication for SEO teams is that every internal conversation about AI search is simultaneously a case for the foundational work that enables it — technical infrastructure, entity architecture, schema coverage. The language has changed. The work has not.

Stop creating single-use content.

Zoe Burke's PURPOSES mnemonic from WTSFest London 2026 is one of the most practical content frameworks to emerge from the women-in-search community this year. It insists that every piece of content must be justified before it is created, planned for multi-platform distribution from the outset, and given an evolution plan rather than treated as evergreen.

The final instruction in Burke's framework is the one most brands ignore: stop single-use content. A piece that lives only on the blog, is promoted once on social, and is never updated is not a content asset. It is a cost centre with a publication date. The brands winning in 2026 are treating their strongest pieces as persistent entities — updated, distributed, linked to, and cited across every relevant surface continuously.

Expand your presence beyond your own website.

Melissa Popp, VP of Content Strategy and Innovation at Ricketyroo, articulates a strategy that women in tech SEO are increasingly calling "training-data SEO": publish thought leadership on high-authority domains, participate in open datasets, and make your expertise crawlable. If your brand does not appear when an AI explains your topic, you have already lost the awareness stage. The future of organic visibility starts in the prompts, not the SERPs.

This directly connects to Ramona Joita's parallel recommendation: expand beyond your website and get featured in listicles, Reddit discussions, and reputable publications, and publish thought leadership on LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack to help AI systems associate your brand with authority. The underlying mechanism is the same — AI engines do not cite from a single source. They corroborate. If your brand is mentioned consistently across multiple independent, high-quality surfaces, citation becomes structurally likely rather than structurally improbable.

For Australian mid-market businesses, this is the most exploitable gap in the current landscape. Most competitors are optimising their own site for Google. Almost none are building the distributed, multi-source entity presence that makes AI citation structurally inevitable. The window to establish that presence before competitors do is measurable in months, not years.

Track the metrics that reflect the new reality.

Aleyda Solis recommended at WTSFest 2026 that teams future-proof their measurement frameworks by tracking visibility, citations, and sentiment alongside traditional rankings. Three tools were specifically highlighted as instrumental for this expanded tracking: Radyant AI Search Dashboard for monitoring brand citations across AI interfaces, SimilarWeb for broader traffic and competitive intelligence, and Waikay for AI search exposure and sentiment.

Emina Demiri-Watson, Head of Digital Marketing at Vixen Digital, offers an important caution around measurement obsession: "We should be focusing on how well we understand our audiences, how our brand shows up, and how all of that drives genuine connection and action." The expanded toolkit is a means, not an end. The end is commercial visibility that converts.

Dawn Anderson, whose WTSFest session on generative information retrieval was one of the most evidence-grounded talks of the event, provides the steadiest perspective on where this all leads: "In a fast-moving AI landscape, misinformation spreads easily, even among SEOs. It's okay to say 'I don't know' while we test and learn. Focus on fundamentals. High-quality, technically sound, authoritative content still underpins success, regardless of interface changes."

The eight strategies, consolidated.

• Optimise for answerability, not just rankings.

  Map every core content piece to a specific question your buyer is asking in an AI interface. If your page cannot be summarised as a direct answer in two sentences, restructure it before you publish.

• Structure every page for LLM extraction.

  Use clear H2 and H3 headings that mirror real questions. Lead each section with the answer. Apply schema markup — FAQPage, Article, and ProfessionalService at minimum. Structured content gets cited. Unstructured content gets summarised away.

• Use AI hype to fund your technical foundations.

  Frame every crawlability, schema, and entity depth conversation in the language your leadership is already using. The "AI search readiness audit" is the fastest door into foundational work that has been deprioritised for years.

• Build stakeholder communication as a core SEO skill.

  Tina Reis at WTSFest was clear: the gap between strategy and execution is almost always a communication gap. Satisfy the intellectual side with data storytelling. Satisfy the emotional side with narrative. Do both in the same meeting.

• Apply the PURPOSES framework before every content brief.

  Every piece must have a defined point, real audience intent beyond search volume, a multi-platform distribution plan, cross-channel optimisation baked in, an evolution timeline, and a revenue-connected success metric. If it fails any of these, it is not ready to brief.

• Publish on high-authority external platforms deliberately.

  LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, reputable industry publications, and open datasets. AI engines corroborate before they cite. A brand that appears on one domain is a hypothesis. A brand that appears consistently across multiple trusted sources is a fact.

• Make brand signals technically visible.

  Remove JavaScript dependency from value propositions and accreditations. Optimise the salience of credentials, partnerships, and methodology claims so LLMs can extract and cite them reliably. Brand is now a hard signal, not a soft one.

• Expand your measurement framework to include AI-layer metrics.

  Add Radyant, Waikay, and Bing AI Performance to your reporting stack. Track AI-referred traffic as a segment in GA4. Monitor your brand's presence in AI-generated answers for your core commercial queries monthly — and treat any absence as an actionable gap, not background noise.

Voices to follow and resources to bookmark.

The Women in Tech SEO community's WTS Knowledge Hub at womenintechseo.com/knowledge is an ongoing repository of practitioner-authored articles covering enterprise SEO alignment, search experience optimisation, habits for consistent results, and AI agent strategy. WTSFest Portland 2026 is the next event on the calendar, continuing the community's work on the US west coast.

The collective point these practitioners are making — and demonstrating with documented results — is that the SEO discipline has not been disrupted. It has been extended. The businesses that treat AI citation as a separate concern from SEO will build two incomplete strategies. The ones that treat it as the same underlying problem, approached from the same technical and content foundations, will own both surfaces.