The basics
What is SEO in 2026, and is it still worth doing?
SEO is making a website answer the questions people actually type, so Google shows it and AI assistants quote it. AI answers now appear on roughly half of all searches, so the job has doubled: rank in the results, and be worth citing above them.
It is still worth doing, with one honest caveat. It is slow. Anyone selling fast SEO is selling something else.
The year in search
What changed in search this year
Google rebuilt search around Gemini and announced it at I/O in May 2026. AI Mode is no longer something you switch on. It is the default, and it reached a billion users a month in under a year.
Two findings from 2026 matter more than the rest. When an AI answer sits above the results, the top organic listing loses close to a fifth of its clicks. But sites quoted inside that AI answer pick up roughly a third more clicks than the top listing would have given them.
Read those together and the strategy changes. The game is not outranking the AI answer. It is being inside it.
One more thing worth knowing: the pages cited in AI Mode and the pages cited in AI Overviews barely overlap. Two different windows, and they are not won the same way. And ads now occupy a quarter of AI Overview results, up from almost nothing at the start of 2025. The free space is shrinking while you watch it.
Do it yourself first
Seven things you can check today, without us
None of this needs a paid tool, or us. About half an hour in total. If you find four of the seven on your own site, that is normal, and it is exactly why they are worth looking at.
1. Does Google even know your pages exist?
Checksearch site:yourdomain.com in Google and count the results.
What you wanta number close to your real page count. Twenty pages and three results means Google has not crawled them.
Fixregister in Search Console, submit your sitemap.xml, and check robots.txt is not blocking something by accident.
2. Does your page title say what you sell?
Checksearch for yourself and read the blue line. That is the title a stranger sees.
What you wantthe words a customer would type, near the front, under 60 characters. “Home” and “Welcome” are not titles.
Fixput the service and the city in it. In Bulgaria the gap is enormous. “Изработка на сайт” gets 1,600 searches a month; “уеб дизайн” gets 320. Same service, five times the people.
3. Is your Google profile claimed?
Checksearch your business name. If it says “Own this business?”, the profile exists but is not yours.
What you wantcontrol of it. On an unclaimed profile anyone can edit your hours, phone and address.
Fixclaiming is free at business.google.com. When we counted the 50 most-reviewed restaurants in Blagoevgrad on 20 August 2026, 17 of them had not done it.
4. Is your menu or price list a PDF?
Checkopen your site on a phone and tap the menu.
What you wantnot a download. PDFs open slowly, zoom badly, and Google reads them far worse than an ordinary page. An AI assistant effectively does not read them at all.
Fixput the same content on a page as normal text. An hour of work, and it starts appearing in search.
5. How fast is your site really?
Checkrun your address through Google's PageSpeed Insights, free, and read the mobile score rather than the desktop one.
What you wantLCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. Red on mobile is a brake on the whole domain, not on one page.
Fixit is nearly always oversized images. Shrink them before you think about anything else.
6. Do the pages you want ranked get internal links?
Checkopen your homepage and look for a real link to the service page you most want to sell.
What you wantlinks pointing at it. A page nothing points at looks unimportant to Google, however well it is written.
Fixlink to it from the homepage and from your most-read articles, and make the link text the service itself, not “read more”. We found this fault on our own site while writing this page: our footer had been pointing at our website page with the wrong words on every Bulgarian page we have.
7. Does your site answer in a way that can be quoted?
Checkask ChatGPT something your customer would ask, and see who gets cited.
What you wantsentences that stand alone. “It cut the time by nearly half” means nothing out of context. “Our website builds start at €500 and take 10 days” can be lifted whole.
Fixwrite specifically. A name, a number, a date or a price in every sentence you want quoted.
If after those seven you decide you are fine on your own, we have done our job here. If you would rather somebody watched them for you every month, that is the service below.
The price
How much does it cost?
400 euro a month, and the first month carries extra weight: it includes a one-off fix of everything the opening audit finds, so the ongoing work starts from a clean base instead of sitting on top of old problems.
For that you get the same work we run on our own site. The keyword and AI-search research is paid data, not guesswork: we buy the real Bulgarian search volumes rather than estimating them, and the research decides what gets built. You see the Search Console numbers every month, the same screen we see.
If we build your website, you are not buying this separately. Search work is included in the €500 build and stays included in the €1,500 monthly partnership.
The monthly work
What do you actually do each month?
We look at the Search Console data first: what people typed, where the site appeared, what got clicked and what got skipped. The work comes out of that, not out of a package list.
Then we fix what the data points at. Sometimes that is rewriting a page title because the current one earns impressions and no clicks. Sometimes it is a new page, because people are asking a question the site never answers. Sometimes it is structure: the wording, headings and direct answers that make a page quotable by ChatGPT and by Google's AI at the same time.
Straight talk
Do you guarantee first place in Google?
No, and nobody honest will. Google does not sell positions to SEO agencies. A guarantee means the person offering it either does not understand the system or is hoping you do not.
What we commit to instead is showing you the real numbers every month, from Google's own reporting, and correcting course from them. That is the whole method.
Proof
Has it worked for anyone?
The honest answer: our own site is the freshest example, and it is a work in progress we publish as we go.
The Brasserie at Darleys in Derby saw website visitors grow 316 per cent to 32,400 over six months. That was brand, social and site work together, not SEO alone, and we would rather label it exactly than let you assume otherwise.
We started in May 2025. We would rather show you a small true number than a big vague one.
The people
Who does the work?
We do. Two people, no juniors, no outsourcing. The person reading your Search Console is the person who wrote the page it reports on.
Straight answers
The things people ask us first.
What is SEO in 2026, and is it still worth doing?
SEO is making a website answer the questions people actually type, so Google shows it and AI assistants quote it. AI answers now appear on roughly half of all searches, so the job has doubled: rank in the results, and be worth citing above them. It is still worth doing, with one honest caveat. It is slow. Anyone selling fast SEO is selling something else.
How much does it cost?
400 euro a month, and the first month carries extra weight: it includes a one-off fix of everything the opening audit finds, so the ongoing work starts from a clean base instead of sitting on top of old problems. For that you get the same work we run on our own site. The keyword and AI-search research is paid data, not guesswork: we buy the real Bulgarian search volumes rather than estimating them, and the research decides what gets built. You see the Search Console numbers every month, the same screen we see. If we build your website, you are not buying this separately. Search work is included in the €500 build and stays included in the €1,500 monthly partnership.
What do you actually do each month?
We look at the Search Console data first: what people typed, where the site appeared, what got clicked and what got skipped. The work comes out of that, not out of a package list. Then we fix what the data points at. Sometimes that is rewriting a page title because the current one earns impressions and no clicks. Sometimes it is a new page, because people are asking a question the site never answers. Sometimes it is structure: the wording, headings and direct answers that make a page quotable by ChatGPT and by Google's AI at the same time.
Do you guarantee first place in Google?
No, and nobody honest will. Google does not sell positions to SEO agencies. A guarantee means the person offering it either does not understand the system or is hoping you do not. What we commit to instead is showing you the real numbers every month, from Google's own reporting, and correcting course from them. That is the whole method.
Has it worked for anyone?
The honest answer: our own site is the freshest example, and it is a work in progress we publish as we go. The Brasserie at Darleys in Derby saw website visitors grow 316 per cent to 32,400 over six months. That was brand, social and site work together, not SEO alone, and we would rather label it exactly than let you assume otherwise. We started in May 2025. We would rather show you a small true number than a big vague one.
Who does the work?
We do. Two people, no juniors, no outsourcing. The person reading your Search Console is the person who wrote the page it reports on.
Colin Rooney, colin@wonderworksdesign.net, +359 877 971 400. WhatsApp and Viber on the same number.