Original research · 29 July 2026
We reviewed 216 SEO deliverables from our 2018 playbook. We retired 14 of them.
What SEO and AEO agencies actually sell in 2026, what search demand data says about the services themselves, and the line by line review that rebuilt our own catalogue, published as an interactive planner.
Every agency has one: the master deliverables sheet. Ours dated from 2018, a 216 line, roughly 810 hour a month catalogue of everything a full service SEO retainer could contain, from robots.txt checks to blogger seeding. It was a good sheet. It ran real client programmes for years.
In July 2026 we put every line of it on trial against three bodies of evidence: the service menus of leading SEO, AEO and GEO agencies (NP Digital, Brainlabs, Amsive, Siege Media, Graphite, Seer Interactive, iPullRank and the specialist boutiques), live Ahrefs demand data for the services themselves, and Google's own deprecations and policy changes. Then we rebuilt the catalogue and published the whole thing, including the interactive planner we now scope engagements with.
The market moved. The numbers say how much.
About 68 percent of US Google searches now end without a click, up from 60.5 percent in 2024 (SparkToro and Datos). Where an AI Overview appears, clickthrough at position one drops by roughly 35 to 60 percent (Ahrefs, 300,000 keyword study). A quarter of searches trigger an AI Overview, rising to nearly half in healthcare (Conductor). AI assistants remain a small referral channel in absolute terms, around 1.1 percent of visits, but those visitors are worth roughly 4.4x an organic visitor (Semrush), and about 87 percent of them arrive from ChatGPT.
Demand for the services followed. US monthly searches, from the Ahrefs API, averaged by year:
| Term (US) | 2022 avg | 2024 avg | 2025 avg | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| generative engine optimization | 0 | 277 | 6,439 | Peaked Jul 2025 at 14,343; settled high |
| answer engine optimization | 19 | 364 | 3,485 | Still climbing through 2026 (c.5,100 YTD) |
| ai seo | 518 | 2,319 | 9,633 | 15x its 2022 level |
| ai visibility | 0 | 22 | 1,177 | Accelerating: c.4,700 per month 2026 YTD |
| llms.txt | 0 | 12 | 2,813 | Hype spike mid 2025, fading fast since |
| seo agency | 21,109 | 28,086 | 59,214 | Core demand UP roughly 2.6x vs 2022 |
| guest posting service | 629 | 741 | 1,057 | Low and flat; commercially marginal |
| digital pr | 1,546 | 2,889 | 2,237 | Steady niche demand, no breakout |
Three readings matter. Buyers increasingly search for the problem in plain AI terms (ai visibility, ai seo) rather than the acronyms, so market the outcome, not the jargon. llms.txt is a useful cautionary tale, a deliverable that spiked and faded inside a year, worth shipping as hygiene, never as a hero product. And demand for SEO agencies overall is up sharply, which supports repositioning, not retreat. One caveat we keep attached to this table: Ahrefs updated its volume model mid 2025, which partly explains spikes visible across unrelated terms that year.
What we retired, and why
Fourteen deliverables came off the catalogue. Almost none died because clients got bored. Each traces to a Google policy change, an AI driven behaviour shift, or AI commoditisation of production. The most load bearing examples:
| Retired deliverable | Why |
|---|---|
| Disavow maintenance and toxic link audits | Google (John Mueller, Mar 2026): not part of normal site maintenance; most sites do not need it |
| FAQ and HowTo rich result schema | HowTo deprecated 2023; FAQ rich results removed from Search entirely in May 2026 |
| Guest posting, blogger seeding, paid placements | Site reputation abuse policy (Nov 2024); Forbes Advisor de indexed |
| Volume citation and directory building | Named link spam by Google; a declining local factor for a decade (Whitespark) |
| Press releases sold for links | Wire links carry no equity; nofollow guidance since 2013 |
| Infographic link building | Devalued embed tactic, absent from modern digital PR menus |
| Meta keywords work | Ignored by Google since 2009 |
| AMP builds and m dot mobile sites | AMP requirement dropped 2021; mobile first indexing complete |
| Keyword volume content calendars | AI Overviews absorbed informational clicks; HubSpot lost c.70 to 80 percent of blog organic traffic |
| Rank tables as the core KPI | c.68 percent of US searches end without a click; rankings decoupled from traffic |
| Commodity copy and basic meta writing as billable production | In housed with AI; freelance writing postings fell c.30 percent post ChatGPT |
One retirement deserves a second look. Local citation building died as a Google play, but mentions are now among the top AI visibility factors (Whitespark 2026), so the directory volume line was reborn as AI mention building: a different job, a different target list, and a much better reason to exist.
What is new
The 2026 catalogue has a stage that did not exist in 2018: AI search. It contains the work that makes a brand present, accurate and cited in AI answers. An AI visibility baseline audit across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI surfaces. AI crawler access audits, because a surprising number of sites block GPTBot at the CDN without knowing it. LLM share of voice monitoring against competitors. Citation gap analysis, targeting the roughly 34 percent of AI citations that PR can influence (BrightEdge). Entity and knowledge graph optimisation. Answer first restructuring of priority pages, because AI systems lift passages, not pages. Reddit and community strategy, since user generated content is cited around seven times more than business sites. And attribution work in GA4, because a large share of AI referral traffic currently hides in Direct, which means most businesses are undervaluing the channel they are being told to worry about.
None of this replaced the fundamentals. Technical SEO, information architecture, log file analysis and original research all survived the review, and several became more valuable, because clean structure and unique data are exactly what retrieval systems reward. That is the same argument as the Four Pillars, arrived at from the commercial side.
Use it yourself
The whole catalogue is live as an interactive planner: five stages, 97 deliverables, each with what it is, why it matters, the expected impact and the market evidence. Build a monthly plan, drag it across the weeks, and send it back as a proposal request.
Sources
SparkToro and Datos zero click research (2026); Ahrefs AI Overviews CTR study and Keywords Explorer API demand data (pulled July 2026); Conductor 2026 AEO and GEO benchmarks; BrightEdge AI citation research (2025); Semrush AI SEO statistics; SE Ranking agency pricing survey (260 agencies); Search Engine Journal State of SEO 2026; NP Digital Organic Search Trends 2025; Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors 2026; Surfer query fan out research; Google Search Central (site reputation abuse policy, structured data deprecations, disavow guidance, mobile first indexing); Harvard and Imperial freelance market study; agency service pages for NP Digital, Brainlabs, Amsive, Siege Media, Graphite, Seer Interactive, Rise at Seven, iPullRank, Omniscient Digital, Skale, Discovered Labs and NoGood.
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