SEOs Don’t Know Marketing. In 2026, That’s a Problem.

Okay, this one is going to start by being controversial… So, let’s just shoot from the hip!

For most of SEO’s history, you didn’t need to be a marketer.

Sure, you needed to understand Google. Crawling, indexing, authority, relevance — these were engineering and optimisation problems.

Marketing was a separate consideration. Put simply, for many SEOs, marketing was someone else’s job.

And that was fine, because the game was ‘rankings’.

But we’re now in 2026, and that ship has sailed… the game has changed.

The problem SEOs face now isn’t ranking, it’s recognition. And recognition is absolutely a marketing problem.

For a discipline that has spent two decades perfecting its ability to reverse-engineer algorithms, that’s an uncomfortable shift. It means thinking differently about what the job actually is. It means learning frameworks that are very rarely featured in an SEO course. I alluded to this earlier this year on my LinkedIn, sharing a post that encouraged SEOs to learn from Godin and Kotler as much (if not more) as they do from their favourite SEOs (Aleyda Solis and Lily Ray instantly come to mind for me personally).
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What does this all mean? it means dusting off something most SEOs quietly skipped: the 4Ps of marketing.

SEO as a Ranking Problem (and Why Marketing Didn’t Matter)

Cast your mind back to how SEO worked, and, for many in the space, how it still works. The problem was always clearly defined. A brand wanted to appear when someone searched for something. The job was to make that happen. Keywords, backlinks, technical health, on-page relevance - these were the levers, and pulling them correctly got results.

Marketing, in the traditional sense, didn’t feature. You didn’t need to understand what a product stood for to rank it. You didn’t need to think about brand positioning or distribution strategy.

You needed to understand the Google algorithm.

The metrics reinforced this. Positions. Traffic. Clicks. Click-through rate. None of these required any appreciation of brand, audience psychology, or market positioning. Success was measurable, reproducible, and largely disconnected from the wider marketing mix.


Sure, the best SEOs were those who could look towards the foundations of marketing and connect the two BUT it wasn’t essential to the success of an SEO strategy.

Now, this wasn’t a failure, not at all. This mindset and widespread industry focus, was a reflection of how search worked. Google had near-total dominance. One surface, one set of rules, one place to win. If you understood the algorithm, you didn’t need to understand the market.

That dominance created an entire generation of SEOs who are technically brilliant, but in my opinion strategically narrow at the same time.

Not through any fault of their own, the discipline simply didn’t demand anything more.

The Shift: From Ranking to Recognition

Now let's look at 2026. Something fundamental has changed in how people find things. Search is no longer a single channel with a single set of rules. It’s diverse! Whether AI Overviews or ChatGPT, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, search is democratising and the logic that facilitates a brand’s presence on each surface is not the same.

More significantly, AI-generated answers are increasingly becoming the first point of contact between a brand and a potential customer. When someone asks an LLM for a recommendation, there is no ranking. There is no page one, no blue links in sight. There is only whether the model knows enough about your brand to include it in the answer, and whether it regards you as credible enough to cite/recommend.

That’s a recognition problem, not a ranking problem.

So much so that the brands that get found are not necessarily the ones with the most optimised pages. They’re the ones that are known,  that have built enough presence, enough entity signals, enough cultural and contextual weight that they are recognisable to the systems doing the surfacing.

Entity recognition.. AKA: the degree to which search systems and AI models understand what your brand is, what it stands for, and what it does, this is now a core visibility input. And entity recognition is not built through technical SEO alone.

It’s demonstrated and engineered through all the things SEOs have historically left to other people.

It’s built through marketing.

Enter the 4Ps: What SEOs Never Had to Think About

The 4Ps... AKA: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, are one of the most foundational frameworks in marketing.

They’ve been around since the 1960s and taught in every business degree since. Most SEOs have heard of them. Very few have had to care about them. In fact, since I finished my degree at the University of Hull, I have only heard mention of the 4ps by a handful of SEOs, despite being in the industry for 8 years at this point. 

That’s about to change.

This isn’t a lecture on marketing theory. The point isn’t to turn SEOs into brand strategists overnight. The point is that each of these four dimensions now has a direct and material impact on search presence and developing preference - and ignoring them leaves significant ground uncovered, specifically within the organic search conversation.

So, let’s assess what each one means for SEO in 2026 and beyond.

Product: If Your Brand Isn’t Clearly Defined, You Cannot Expect It To Be Recognised

Entity clarity starts with knowing what you actually are. That sounds obvious. In practice, it’s where a surprising number of brands fall short.

For AI/LLM interfaces and search engines to surface a brand accurately, they need to understand it clearly. What does this company do? What category/categories does it occupy? What does it stand for? If the answer to those questions is vague, inconsistent, or spread across a hundred pages of loosely connected content, the entity signal is weak.

Product definition: The clarity with which a brand articulates what it is and who it’s for — feeds directly into structured data, topical authority, and getting over any brand ambiguity.

Now, SEOs have always cared about these things at a technical level. What’s different now is that the source of the problem is often not technical. It’s strategic. The brand hasn’t decided clearly enough what it is. And that’s a marketing conversation. And in 2026, SEOs increasingly need to be in the room for the conversation - ensuring the brands they work with are considering these factors and establishing how best to implement these considerations.

Price: Credibility and Trust Are Now Part of Discoverability

Pricing might seem like the most ‘out of our wheelhouse’ of the 4Ps from an SEO perspective. It’s not.

When AI/LLM platforms make recommendations, they’re drawing on signals that go well beyond keywords and backlinks. Brand credibility,  the degree to which a brand is perceived as trustworthy, legitimate, and proportionate to what it’s charging, is one of those signals, a key signal at that.

Brands that are seen as credible get cited/recommended. They get referenced. They appear in the “best” and “top” responses that AI/LLMs generate. Brands that feel overpriced, underdelivering, or out of step with their market positioning, they simply don’t build the kind of third-party authority that feeds recognition.

For SEOs, this means commercial positioning is no longer just a conversion consideration. How a brand is priced and perceived in its market feeds into the broader trust signals that determine whether it gets surfaced at all.

That’s a new lens, and one worth developing.

Place: Distribution Is How You Build the Signals That Get You Recognised

For most of SEO’s history, the answer to “where does your brand live?” was straightforward: Google. That’s where the audience was. That’s where the visibility was. That’s where you focused.

That answer is no longer sufficient.

Distribution, thinking of where your brand, your content, and your product exist across the search universe, that is now a direct input into search presence.

Put simply, a brand that exists only on its own website is a brand that is generating entity signals from a single source. Now, In an era where AI’LLMs are trained on the breadth of the web, and where search surfaces draw on signals from TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, podcasts, and press, that’s a structural disadvantage.

If you take our Search Everywhere® philosophy — the principle that modern search requires presence across every surface where your brand audiences discover things, you begin to see the practical expression of ‘Place’ as an integral part of a search strategy.

It’s not about chasing every platform for its own sake. It’s about understanding that distribution builds presence, which in turn creates recognition, and recognition drives preference.

Promotion: Brand-Building Is Now the SEO Strategy

This is the P that comes closest to territory SEOs have always known, yet it is also the P where the SEO mindset shift is most significant.

Historically, promotion in an SEO context meant link building. Get enough authoritative sites to point at yours, and your rankings begin improve (especially if you built more links into key pages versus SERP competitors).

The logic was fair, the execution wasn’t always fair if we’re being honest (hello link buyers), but the principles of this were widely accepted and understood.

Now, promotion is something broader and more complex.

The signals that build recognition are not just links, but brand mentions, citations, reviews, cultural presence, earned media, influencer association, and the accumulated weight of a brand being talked about in the right places by the right people.

PR, influencer, and content (Key disciplines that SEO has often treated as adjacent rather than integral), are now the mechanism through which entity signals are demonstrated at true scale.

A brand that is genuinely talked about, genuinely cited, genuinely present in the conversations happening across the web is a brand that AI\LLMs and search engines alike recognise as real, relevant, and credible.

This is what the Entity Signal Stack describes (Blog Drops later this week - right here on the Deviation Blog). It describes the layered architecture of signals: foundational, distribution, authority, reinforcement. These concepts come together to build the kind of brand recognition that translates into presence across search surfaces spanning the search universe.

Promotion, done well, populates that entity stack, accelerating the flywheel effect of the entity signal stack. SEOs who understand this stop thinking about link acquisition and start thinking about brand authority and amplification.

The outcome is the same. The strategy and associated tactics? wildly different.

Embracing Your Inner Marketer As An SEO

None of this means SEO stops being SEO.

Technical foundations still matter. Crawlability, site structure, schema, page experience… These remain real inputs into real visibility outcomes.

I cannot be clear enough, the fundamentals haven’t been replaced.

But they cannot be the reliance or the entire strategic effort for brands with SEO any longer. They’re one layer in a larger conversation, a ‘Search Everywhere’ discussion. And the SEOs who treat them as the entire effort will find themselves working for a problem that is no longer the primary problem within the industry.

The adaptation required isn’t a career change BUT It is a perspective change.

It means being curious about product positioning. Being interested and consciously contributing to how a brand is priced and perceived. Thinking about distribution as a strategic choice, not just a channel mix. Understanding that promotion builds the signals that make everything else work.

It means being willing to have conversations that used to belong to someone else, bringing a ‘search’ lens to those conversations for brands.

The SEOs who thrive in the next five years will not just be technically excellent.

They’ll be the ones who can translate between algorithm logic and marketing strategy, those who can understand both what Google wants and what a brand needs to do to be genuinely recognisable in the world (the real world and the AI/LLM one).

That’s always been what marketing was for. SEO just got away without it. Until now.

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