SEO Trends

Alex Moran Head of Organic Growth

10 min read

IndustryMedia

While I’ve been supplying what have been well understood as ‘SEO’ predictions for the last few years, this year feels different. Organic search is growing beyond what the industry has traditionally considered the main pillars of SEO and, in incorporating AI, the challenges continue to evolve. With this in mind the use of ‘SEO’ and ‘Organic Search’ may become much more interchangeable.

Now we are in an AI established world, these predictions are more looking at how they are seeping into every faucet of our behaviour as searchers and as SEO’s

1. Unified AI Experiences on Google search

This has been touted since the beginning of 2024 with ‘SGE’ and then in my predictions last year I spoke about the expansion of AI Overviews. I feel happy to say they have substantially increased as predicted, but as the industry has been talking about it for 3 years now, it shows how slow Google can end up rolling out features as they test user uptake.

With AI Mode being released in 2025 (and what should have been Google’s answer to ChatGPT originally), it shows the movements Google are making towards integrating the AI Experience more seamlessly into Google. You can already click on the AI Overview and then at the bottom ‘Dive deeper with AI Mode’, as well as AI Mode being pushed all the way to the front in terms of the Google search tabs. Overall, this experience will slowly become more seamless but moving slow enough that if you aren’t looking closely at it you may struggle to even notice it is changing at all.

Dive deeper with AI Mode button

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2. SEO becoming a much more blended experience across multiple organic channels

Thinking about on-page content and technical SEO alone has not been enough for a truly successful SEO campaign for years with the importance of Digital PR, but your online references are only growing in importance with the way sites are now referenced in AI Overviews and on LLMs.

Beyond that though ChatGPT has already teamed up with various brands including Stripe and PayPal to allow for online purchases directly in ChatGPT. This is a sign of things to come.

Google and other LLMs will soon follow suit, and I believe this will expand beyond more than just purchases and include booking of appointments, requesting callbacks, using contact us forms etc. This then brings in the important of looking at website usability and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). Is your site using Captcha to block bots? Is it not immediate to a bot where they can find the correct place to purchase or book? These all need to be considered to continue to make the user journey from LLMs as seamless as possible.

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3. Brand authority matters more than ever

In its infancy, the web was brand agnostic, viewing words for what they are and if they could read the pages at all. 25 years later, with Google’s growth and various revisions of how it looks at brand has gone from just looking at links, to then critiquing how links work, what type of links it can use (follow or nofollow), moving beyond links to also including brand mentions to now, a place where any references of a brand are treated with a strong perception. Brands are no longer a (relatively) simply mathematically calculated ‘domain authority’ or ‘PageRank’, but instead known as ‘Entities’.

Entities stand alone as all the information Google has on a brand. They consider all online references like variations in terminology, the social profiles, the good and bad context that surrounds them, how many times a brand is searched online, as well as all the older parts like links and brand mentions. It’s a much bigger picture and considering every single place your brand lives online. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor and focus on brand, even if that is outside of what you have traditionally considered SEO, or even online marketing at all. For example, a positive TV campaign could lead to an increase in brand searches and sentiment and lead to a positive impact on SEO.

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4. ChatGPT and Google AI to own the AI market

The technology industry has tended to let just one or two brands dominate. There’s plenty of different car brands, or fashion brands, or gym brands, or whatever else you want to consider. But on the web there is always very limited dominant players. Whether that has been Google’s major search dominance with Bing having a much a smaller slice and everyone every search engine being negligible. Or Microsoft and Apple being the only operating systems worth considering. Or even the social media industry being run primarily by Meta. With the different proliferation of LLMs it has been a race, Google even so desperate they released a clearly unready first iteration ‘Bard’. But the industry is starting to take shape now, and while Perplexity, Claude, and Grok may try various tactics I truly believe the industry will continue to gravitate towards limited options and these other brands will all eventually fade away or focus on a very specific niche.

But even in more specific areas, like image creation, the other brands might start to fall away as ChatGPT’s image creation gets better, it will only be a matter of time before Google offer something similar too.

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5. Understanding the relevance of AI search by industry

The prevalence of AI search, either via AI Overviews or in the LLMs has exploded in the last year. To the point where brands priority to be visible in them is starting to supersede priorities to appear on traditional search. This is a hard one to judge whether it will be well placed or not in the long term, the data has shown that LLM referred traffic to the website converts better that traditional organic, but currently the volumes are a much smaller slice. It is also hard to judge whether their rise in the last year will continue to grow at the same rate (or grow even faster), or the user base is starting to plateau. I have seen many articles contesting that either could be true.

What I do believe is that certain industries will benefit more than others and therefore there will be a greater market share in certain industries, while others may see less financial value in it. My recent research into organic search intent in the property industry shows that AI Overviews only appear for a tiny fraction of the commercial terms. However, this is not to say the property industry should disregard AI completely, it is instead considering what points of the user journey it will be important for e.g. the consideration stage or the transactional stage. I predict a lot more data to be shared about user habits and search types that will help influence well thought out strategies for experts in this part of organic search.

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6. Shopping experiences

Another interesting development in the last year is the more integrated faceted navigation option on shopping results already rolled out in the United States. Comparing the two search results in the US and UK the differences are clear:

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Here we can see for the US search on the left and at the top faceted navigation that looks and functions like a classic eCommerce site. It currently appears to be a relatively simple feature where you click on a button e.g. ‘women’s’ and Google edit the search to say ‘women’s black jeans’. It is another step Google are taking to remove the searcher from the sites themselves until the last available point. This allowing Google to continue to show as many products as possible and become the marketplace itself. If we combine this my second prediction above, with Google potentially eying up conversions on the site itself, it begs the provocative question: Is it possible that we may one day stop visiting websites all together?

Reflecting on 2025 predictions:

Proliferation of AI Overview – This one was certainly accurate and has been one of the most talked about topics of 2025
2.Increasing importance of Navboost – This hasn’t had as much chatter in the industry as I expected, but from our teams perspective we are continually looking at ways to ensure these metrics are factored in
3.Creating Helpful Content – Though an older ‘change’ the prediction was that it would carry more relevance in 2025. It’s not had as much in-depth discussion, but I can see from the industry, these changes are more naturally embedded into people’s sites today
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) – This remains and always will be a key metric and should be considered as part of the Navboost optimisation. However, Google has not openly released any new strictly CRO related algorithm updates in the last year.
Search Intent is #1 – This very much remains true today and is in fact even more prevalent considering my prediction number 5 around AI intent. It shows that keywords may have volume so look attractive, but will be unattainable or useless if you don’t get the intent right.