Search engine optimization (SEO) will remain a critical component of any successful marketing strategy in 2025, but it’s time for businesses and marketers alike to find ways to adapt to an increasingly sophisticated search ecosystem. AI technologies, shifting consumer behaviors, and major changes to how search is inherently structured are all reshaping how we understand organic online visibility.
We’ll explore the top SEO trends that we predict will define 2025. From the growing importance of AI-powered search to the rise of voice and visual search, understanding these changes will help you stay ahead of the curve and optimize your strategies for maximum impact.
1. Humans & AI Will Work Together to Produce H-E-E-A-T Content
After Google rolled out its Helpful Content Update, SEOs and content writers alike learned the potential negative implications and effects of AI-generated content. But, more so, they learned the importance of high-quality content that truly helped users find answers to their questions.
The framework of helpfulness (H), experience (E), expertise (E), authority (A), and trust (T) – or H-E-E-A-T – is the foundation of crafting that high-quality content, and ensuring that a piece of content meets each of these standards will become even more important as we continue to adapt to new technologies and leverage AI as a tool, rather than a crutch, when it comes to content writing.
As we figure out the nuances of using AI tools to help support content creation workflows, it’s likely that AI-generated content will become more common. Since we’ve understood the real penalties, however, of simply churning out AI-generated content, publishing it, and hoping for the best, our workflows will adapt to include heavy human influence and editing to build content that’s helpful and meets established H-E-E-A-T standards.
Content is the backbone not just of traditional SEO tactics and strategies but of emerging AI-enhanced and AI-dependent strategies as well. AI models and LLMs are trained on existing content, and their responses and abilities become sharper and more accurate when the content they’re trained on is of higher quality. It will be critical that we deeply invest in how we produce content to keep up with the latest technologies without sacrificing quality.
What You Should Do: Investigate the AI tools at your disposal for use in your content creation workflow and determine which are the best options based on quality and functionality. Build a process that incorporates AI tools for efficiency and heavy human oversight for editing and quality assurance.
2. AI Tools Will Continue to Evolve to Support SEO Strategy
AI tools go beyond content generation. As more SEO platforms incorporate tools with AI capabilities, these features can not only identify potential issues – on both the technical and content side – but they can also suggest solutions. With this sort of real-time analysis and identification, SEO platforms and the experts who use them can begin to become more proactive with their strategies rather than constantly monitoring technical status or metrics and reactively suggesting fixes.
These AI enhancements will be particularly useful to small businesses or small teams that have limited resources to devote to SEO improvements, or who may not have specialized SEO knowledge. With more detailed suggestions for title tags, meta descriptions, and other key aspects of technical and on-page SEO, teams can more easily and quickly ensure that their SEO foundation is strong and focus more energy on innovating or testing new strategies.
What You Should Do: Take stock of the current SEO platforms and tools you’re using and any of the AI-enhanced features and capabilities they offer. Ensure that you have AI tools in your toolkit that can truly support the efficiency of your strategy and implementation.
3. SEO for Bing Will Become a Larger Focus
Most organic search strategies have focused heavily on the Google ecosystem – what people are searching for in Google, where you’re ranking in Google’s search results, Google’s algorithm updates, etc. As answer engine optimization becomes more critical to overarching organic strategies, however, so does expanding your presence on other search engines.
Focusing on Bing in particular will be key. With the introduction of ChatGPT’s new ability to search the web, this LLM is pulling search results from Bing – not Google. To ensure that you’re optimizing for your brand’s visibility in ChatGPT, you’ll have to invest in your organic strategy on Bing. On top of that, Microsoft is continuing to invest in artificial intelligence and additional search tools, so SEOs must not silo themselves to Google.
What You Should Do: Audit your organic performance on Bing to understand what content is indexed on this search engine and your keyword rankings in these search results. Identify opportunities for optimization and improvement and build a plan for implementation. Use Bing Webmaster Tools for additional insights.
4. Search Will Continue to Become Multi-Modal
There are now so many different ways that users can find the answers or information they’re looking for. They can still use traditional search engines, of course, but more and more users are turning to search functions on social media, answer engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity, or voice search.
With all of these different search platforms, users can now search using combinations of text, visuals, and voice inputs. Answer engines specifically can process all of these inputs as part of a query simultaneously and offer more nuanced results. This expansion of how people are searching will require SEO experts to re-evaluate their current content and repurpose it across media types where necessary to help these new search platforms “read,” process, and understand each content format.
What You Should Do: Audit existing content to understand where it can be improved for these new search modalities and what pieces of content can be repurposed in other formats to better address different types of queries. Implement structured data where applicable to make it easier and more efficient for answer engines to understand your content.
5. Video Will Dominate as a Favored Type of Organic Content
“Content” now means so much more than the written word. It encompasses all different forms of media, and including a variety of media – especially video – in your organic content and SEO strategies will be a key component of success in 2025.
Attention and engagement are now the name of the game, and very little content is as attention-grabbing or engaging as video. It’s interactive, and it’s a medium of vast opportunity for brands to showcase their identities, their mission, and their value propositions.
Google recognizes this, too. The search engine prominently features YouTube videos, and now even TikTok videos sometimes, in its search results. It’s an entirely new environment where brands can focus on their visibility and how they’re being featured.
Here we can even see a YouTube video being pulled into AI Overviews:
What You Should Do: Prioritize producing video content for your brand that you can share across multiple platforms. Consider accessibility through captions and auto-generated transcripts to reach a larger audience and enhance indexability. Host your videos on YouTube or use VideoObject structured data to boost the possibility of Google returning your video in search results.
6. Reputation Management Will Eclipse Traditional Backlink Building
Backlink building has long been a cornerstone of SEO strategy when it comes to improving your domain rating and your organic rankings. There’s always been a fine line, however, between building your backlinks in a healthy way and taking a spammy approach. It was easy to get penalized for using black-hat link building practices. On top of that, your backlinks aren’t bringing much additional value to your users – it’s a lot of work, for a small, incremental reward.
Over the course of 2025, reputation management and digital public relations (PR) practices will be the new approach. Reputation management goes beyond backlink building and focuses on creating a holistic online presence through helpful content that proves to be worth referencing within your industry.
These strategies will re-center users and help address core concerns: how people perceive your brand, how you build trust with your target audience, how you inspire loyalty in customers, and how all of these pieces can drive additional conversions.
Building a strong brand presence and following will also be a key part of effective reputation management, as this will help ensure a strong base of consumers who support your brand and can voice their support to other potential customers.
What You Should Do: Focus on where your brand is an expert and can offer a unique and helpful perspective. Center your content around those areas, emphasizing topics where you can really bring additional value to your current customers and potential new customers. Engage with your audience on social platforms to boost interest and loyalty and strengthen your brand presence.
7. How We Understand Organic Attribution Will Change
As Google’s AI Overviews and other AI-powered search modalities continue to expand, zero-click searches will only increase. More and more users are finding the answers they need directly on the search results pages.
When it comes to data and reporting, we’ll see a decline in many of our traditional SEO metrics that we’ve relied on for so long, like organic sessions. On top of that, “ranking in position #1” will take on a different meaning – this will now be more like “position zero,” as we account for the content and sources featured in AI Overviews.
SEO experts will have to shift how they understand organic performance and the best metrics to inform their understanding. Examining organic impressions and engagement-based metrics like time spent on page will likely provide a clearer picture of how well a website or a piece of content is performing in organic search.
On the flip side, sessions from direct traffic sources will likely see a surge as websites capture more middle- and bottom-funnel traffic rather than the top-of-funnel traffic that was coming from organic search in the past.
Zero-click searches will also impact the platforms experts should be looking at to understand their performance. AI visibility platforms like Goodie can help you understand how your brand is or isn’t showing up in the responses from answer engines like ChatGPT and Claude. These insights will help you ensure that you’re remaining visible even if you’re garnering fewer clicks.
What You Should Do: Evaluate the metrics you use to assess your organic performance, and be prepared for major increases or decreases in certain metrics or traffic coming from different sources. Take the time to understand how AI Overviews and answer engines are impacting your baseline performance by investing in an AI visibility tool and then assess where there are opportunities for improvement.
Make 2025 Your Year of SEO Success
SEO in 2025 promised to be more dynamic and exciting than ever before. By embracing the right technologies and staying agile in response to changes in user behaviors, businesses can position themselves for sustainable organic growth.
The trends we’ve discussed offer immense opportunities for those willing to adapt and innovate. Staying ahead of these trends means understanding what they mean for your brand and your customers and taking a hard look at how your strategies can be updated today.
The brands that succeed will be those that stay informed, experiment boldly, and prioritize the needs of their audiences. As you refine your approach, remember: the heart of great SEO lies in delivering value, relevance, and exceptional experiences to your users.
What do you think of these trends? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
