In 2026 — an age seemingly ruled by AI and fear of change — blogging remains as useful as ever. It’s not dead, but it has changed.
Now, you might disagree. “But Courtney, I’ve been blogging — I’m just not getting the same clicks and views as I used to!” you might say.
I’ll hold your hand while I tell you this, but … your mistake? You’re still blogging like it’s 2016.
Because today, content isn’t just competing with other blogs. It’s competing with AI overviews, short attention spans, artificial slop, and a sea of copycat posts that all say the same thing in slightly different fonts.
So the question isn’t: Should I still blog?
It’s: Am I blogging in a way that actually helps my business in 2026?
One of the most important things to understand about blogging in 2026 is Answer Engine Optimization (don’t worry, it’s slightly more fun than its cousin — and every blogger’s biggest headache — SEO).
To get what AEO is, let’s do a quick little exercise.
Pick your favorite color. Open a new tab. Now type this into Google:
“History of the color [insert your favorite color here].”
Unless you’ve gone out of your way to disable it, you probably got a nice, tidy AI Overview right at the top of the page.
Right now, I’m looking at the history of the color yellow. And within seconds, Google can tell me that yellow is one of humanity’s oldest colors, that its symbolism changes depending on where you are in the world, where traditional yellow pigments came from, and how all of that evolved into the modern age.
And here’s the best part, as a consumer: I didn’t even have to open a single website, article, or blog post.
In fact, I have to scroll multiple times before I even hit the first actual search result link.
This is great for readers who want a quick, concrete answer. But it’s less great for businesses who rely on those readers to click around, page-hop through a few sources, land on their site, and slowly fall in love with their content (and, ideally, their product).
That whole process? That’s what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has always been about. The better your keywords, the higher you show up in search results, the easier you are to find, and the fewer hoops people have to jump through to reach you. It works … but it’s kind of a headache. It’s also not the whole story anymore.
Because the new name of the game is AEO.
In other words: How do I make sure my blog post is one of the sources cited in Google’s AI Overview?
Visibility is the key here. Google’s AI has thousands upon thousands of sources it can use to generate an overview. Your goal is to make your content so clear, structured, and trustworthy that it sees yours and goes, “Yep. That’s the one.”
So your goal isn’t to “beat AI.” Your goal is to make your content the kind AI wants to pull from. The top things Google’s AI Overview takes into consideration are:
Sorry, another acronym for you to memorize … but this one’s worth it, I promise!
EEAT is simple (and honestly pretty intuitive). It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s basically Google’s way of asking: “Should we believe you?”
I know, I know ... you finally mastered SEO, recently learned about AEO, I’ve just introduced EEAT, and now you’re collecting acronyms like they’re Pokémon.
But the good news is, if you’re a genuine, helpful source, most of EEAT is probably already second nature. You just need to make sure your website and content prove it at a glance.
The internet is full of blog posts that are technically fine … but you can’t help walking away feeling as if you’ve just been served cardboard instead of the steak dinner you were promised.
These are the blogs that feel like they were only written to take up space on a page or fill a quota; they’re often nothing more than recycled talking points, generic fluff, and a waste of time.
That kind of content doesn’t help readers, and it doesn’t earn trust. It also doesn’t fool Google’s AEO algorithm.
What the readers and robots really want is a blog with “meat” on it: clear answers, specific examples, practical steps, and real insight.
Strong topics usually do things like:
Please note, you don’t only have to blog about things directly tied to your service — in fact, you shouldn’t! You’ll run out of “meat” quickly and find yourself only reaching a narrow audience.
For example, a dental office should absolutely write about “best dental practices,” but “the history of toothpaste” can still be worth publishing. Maybe it busts a trending myth. Maybe it does a deep dive on ingredients healthnuts are googling, or maybe it’s tied back to modern oral health. Whatever the case, that’s at least three new audiences reached.
In the AEO era, “meat” isn’t just one strong post. It’s topical authority. Content clusters (multiple interlinked articles on the same subject) signal to Google’s AI that you’re a reliable source.
The goal isn’t just to publish. It’s to build a body of content that proves you know your stuff (sound familiar? That’s EEAT!).
Google’s AI tends to choose pages it can easily scan, chop, and summarize. That means the posts most likely to get pulled into an AI Overview are the ones that answer the question quickly (often in the very first sentences), using short, clear statements. Think less “once upon a time,” and more “here’s the answer, here’s why, here’s what to do next.” Be as straightforward as possible.
(See what I did there? I could’ve opened this section with “Cut the fluff — be as short, honest, and straightforward as possible.” But instead, I cut my own fluff and made sure the very first sentence answered the question at hand.)
Because Google’s AI is essentially extracting bite-sized snippets to build its overview, structure matters a lot. A few things that make your blog post easier for AI to scan and pull accurate info from:
(Again, see what I did there?)
Readability is one thing both your readers and your robots can agree on.
Whew, another easy one! Freshness simply means you need to make sure you’re updating any time-sensitive topics. AI models want accurate information, so they scan for sources that regularly update their content.
For example, if you scroll back far enough on our website, you’ll see a few similar blog posts we’ve done in the past:
There are more, but you get the gist (and if you don’t, you should probably go read a few of our other blogs — wink wink). The content might still be useful, but since those posts were written multiple years ago, Google’s AI is a lot less likely to pull them when it’s generating an AI Overview for today’s Googler.
Which is exactly why you’re getting yet another blog about blogging … except this time, it comes with “2026” in the title. Google’s AI will immediately know this is a “fresh” and relevant blog.
Okay, so you understand how to get people to your page … now, how do you make sure they’re happy about it?
NO AI SLOP!
Your reader just used keywords to hurdle over SEO, came face to face with an AI Overview — which used an algorithm to soullessly chop the most blunt, straightforward sentences out of the top ranked EEAT sources and Frankenstein it all together into the most boring summary on the planet — and, by some miracle, they still landed on your page.
In short, a robot has taken your reader’s hand and led them to you. They’re here now. And whether they realize it or not, they’re hungry for something human.
So don’t let another robot greet them.
This is your moment. You don’t have to outsmart the algorithm anymore — you just have to connect. Human to human.
Readers can instinctively tell when something was lazily produced with AI. You can’t always put your finger on it, but somehow, you just know … and you can’t help but be drawn to the blog that shows the effort, energy, and connection that just can’t be replicated by a robot.
I’ll prove it.
I had ChatGPT write one conclusion to this post, and I wrote the other. One will leave you feeling like I took the lazy way out, like there’s something missing — some spark, some humanness. The other will leave you feeling satisfied.
I’ll let you guess which is which:
Okay. I just threw a lot of words, do’s, don’ts, algorithms, and half the alphabet (in acronym form) at you ... it’s a lot. I get it.
Luckily, there are people out there who do this for a living — actually, scratch that. There are people out there who live for this kind of thing.
So if adding AEO to your already bursting-at-the-seams marketing toolkit sounds like too much, that’s totally okay! Stop trying to do it all yourself and let us content writers navigate blogging in 2026 for you.
We have two great writers on the Wild Fig team who would love to help you master AEO and get noticed by the robots. Schedule a quick exploratory call to learn more!
P.S. We also put together a little infographic for you that summarizes the biggest hits of this blog. Click on the image below to download a copy for quick reference!