SEO
The rules moved, and most sites are still built for the old ones
We check the rules against live search, not against last year.
A few times a year we check our standing list of how a page should be built to get found. Not against what was true when we last looked, but against what search is doing right now. We did that pass this month.
The short version: several rules quietly changed in the first half of 2026, and most sites are still built for the ones from a year ago. Take speed. The bar dropped from under 2.5 seconds to under 2, and a site sitting comfortably at 2.3 the day before got reclassified from fine to needs-work overnight. Zero memos went out. The page did not change. The bar moved under it.
Marking up questions and answers a certain way used to earn an expandable list in search results, a big chunk of real estate. In May, Google turned it off. The markup is still worth doing, just for a different reason now: it used to earn a snippet, today it helps AI systems understand your page. Same five minutes of work, totally different payoff. If you don't know the payoff moved, you'll rip it out for no reason or keep it for the wrong one.
The fundamentals didn't get replaced.
None of this is a teardown. The bar moved on some of them, a couple of old shortcuts quietly closed, and a new door opened that most competitors don't know how to walk through yet.
Which brings us to the big one, the change that matters more than any single number. A year ago, getting cited in the AI answer box was basically a side effect of ranking well. That link has come apart.
A year ago, a top-ten spot tended to earn the citation. The overlap has fallen sharply.
The right lesson, and the wrong one.
Is the old playbook dead? No, and that is the wrong lesson to draw. Panic gets it backwards. The research keeps showing the same thing works, just pointed at a new target: write the actual answer near the top of the page instead of burying it, put a real named human on expert content, keep a clean heading structure, publish things that are genuinely yours. Good hygiene, pointed at a new target.
Who actually loses? Not the ones who did it wrong. The ones who did it right once and assumed right stays right. It doesn't. We'd rather find out the line moved by going to look than by watching traffic slide and wondering why.
Check your own site against the current rules
The rules moved. The same work still wins.
The old playbook isn't dead, it's pointed at a new target. Panic gets that exactly backwards.
We'd rather find out the line moved by going to look than by watching traffic slide and wondering why. That's the same look Beacon runs on a client's site: current rules, not last year's.