Apr 12 · 6 min
What I’m testing right now to show up in AI Overviews (April 2026 edition)
Three experiments with real clients this month: structured data tweaks, content depth tests, and one counterintuitive thing about citations.
I help businesses rank on Google and show up in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. The work has changed completely in the last three years — and most consultants are still selling the 2019 playbook. I’m not.
Most SEO consultants sell isolated services. I don’t — technical SEO without content is expensive plumbing, content without technical fundamentals is invisible. Here’s how I work in 2026.
Most audits are 80-page PDFs nobody reads. Mine is a 12-page priority list with the 3 things to fix this month, the 5 for next quarter, and the rest for later — or never.
The content factory model is dead. Google killed it in March 2024 with the helpful content update. I help you publish less and rank more — topic clusters built from real search behavior, not from keyword tools.
NAP citations matter less than they used to. Review velocity, Google Posts cadence, and category accuracy matter more. I’ll tell you which of the 200 things to do are actually moving rankings in your market.
I’ve been testing AI Overviews and ChatGPT visibility since the SGE beta in 2023. The content that ranks in classical search and the content that gets cited by LLMs aren’t the same thing — and the gap will widen.
I started doing SEO in 2010, when keyword density was a strategy and people argued seriously about exact-match domains. I’ve watched this discipline reinvent itself three times since then: the Penguin/Panda era, the user-intent era, and now the AI era. Most consultants who started before 2015 are still doing 2015 SEO. I don’t.
My take: most advice from 2018–2022 is now actively harmful. Content factories are dead. Schema markup as a magic ranking factor was always a myth. Topic clusters that ignore user behavior are wasted budget. What works in 2026 looks more like editorial journalism than growth hacking — and that’s what I bring to my 200+ clients in fashion e-commerce, B2B SaaS, medical clinics, and digital publishing.
Results measured in Search Console, not in pretty screenshots.
organic traffic in 8 months. The fix the previous agency missed for 18 months: their canonical tags were pointing to a staging subdomain. Two days of work, the entire site got reindexed, and they finally started ranking for products they’d been selling for two years.
qualified leads from search. They had 200 blog posts ranking for almost nothing — content from a previous agency that had optimized for volume, not intent. We deleted 140, rewrote 30, left 30 alone. Three months later, traffic doubled and the right traffic this time.
appointment requests from Google Maps. The owner thought local SEO was about keyword density on the homepage. It’s about review response time, Google Posts cadence, and category accuracy on the Business Profile. Two changes in week one, results visible by week six.
“Ben found in two weeks an indexing issue that had been blocking our growth for an entire year. Sharp technical chops.”
“Working with Ben is like having a senior in-house SEO department. Pragmatism, transparency, and measurable results every month.”
“We show up in ChatGPT answers when our competitors don’t. Ben started preparing us for this in 2023, before AI Overviews were even rolled out in our market. That kind of foresight is what we pay for.”
Technical notes, real case studies, and experiments with AI and SEO — what I’m actually testing this month.
Half opinion, half playbook. The stuff I won’t write on the public blog because it’s too specific or too contrarian.
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