By the SEW Editorial Staff | A Look Back at a Year of Transitions
If you were walking the halls at Pubcon this year, the shift was palpable. The familiar SEO playbook no longer matched what was happening in real search results. AI summaries, legal pressure, and changing user behavior pushed the industry past the era of blue links. 2025 became the year SEO stopped chasing clicks and started defending visibility.
With Google providing more answers directly on the search results page (SERP) through featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other rich results, the traditional 'click' to a website is becoming increasingly rare. This change has led many to question the future of organic traffic and ponder whether Google has, in effect, 'deprecated the click'. To me, that sums up 2025 in a nutshell - the year Google decided they'd had enough of being a search engine, sending traffic to other sites, and instead was going to keep all the clicks for themselves.
Back in the middle of summer, I took a run at predicting what would come next out of Google. Sorry, but I pretty much nailed the last six months point by depressing point. That was a popular one that became one of the top stories of the year for us on SearchEngineWorld all year long. So let's pause, take a look back, then take a look forward at those top stories in SEO for 2025.
1. Zero-Click Search Became the Default
AI summaries moved from optional features to the prima facie interface for standard search. By mid-2025, many queries resolved entirely inside AI answers, with users never reaching a traditional results page. Publishers reported rising impressions paired with collapsing referral traffic, a pattern tracked closely across SearchEngineWorld throughout the year.
SEO teams and agencies primarily adapted by redefining success. Being cited, summarized, or referenced inside an AI response mattered more than driving a session. Brand recall and topical authority replaced page-level traffic as core performance signals, a shift echoed repeatedly in news stories, conference sessions, and hallway conversations at Pubcon.
Steve Wiideman, Wiideman Consulting Group "In the past, a key role we played included quantifying SEO task recommendations. In 2025, this role took second place to defending long-term rankings, with clients very excited about shiny things (aka generative AI). For example, we've had to invest time convincing clients not to write exclusively with AI tools, but instead to stay focused on E-E-A-T. The narrative was "why don't we invest our SEO time in completing foundational work, rather than obsess over LLMs that currently drive less than 5% of leads and sales?" All the while, not neglecting content refinement and citations to address attributes that benefit LLM visibility.
2. The Publisher Rebellion Never Fully Materialized
Despite several years of predictions and publisher rants, widespread blocking of AI crawlers never happened. Most publishers continued feeding content into AI systems, even as referral value declined. The fear of becoming invisible outweighed the push for collective resistance.
High-profile traffic losses exposed the weaknesses of at scale content strategies. HubSpot's decline became a reference point across the SEO industry, reinforcing long-held views in the WebmasterWorld forums that authority, focus, and expertise outperform volume. EEAT stopped being a nice idea and became operational reality.
Duane Forrester, Author: Machine Layer, Duane Forrester.com "We are hiring the wrong skills. Back in July 2025 I did a light study and compiled the results in a substack post. The bottom line is that companies hiring SEOs today are hiring for old skill sets, and appear to be ignoring new skills. Only 7% of the job descriptions reviewed even mentioned AI. The rest all focused on traditional SEO skills. Is this really the path a company wants to follow, when 2 years from now you'll be wondering why you perform so poorly in ai-based results, and have no one with the skills to work on the problem? Is your company prepared to help your new hires learn the new skills and workflows, or will you expect them to learn on their own somehow? There is a looming problem in this area, and it's going to start becoming a bigger issue throughout 2026."
3. Antitrust Remedies Were a Wash
The long-anticipated remedies following the 2024 monopoly ruling landed with limited real-world impact. While exclusivity agreements were restricted and limited data sharing was mandated, search behavior and competitive balance changed little. The most meaningful effects were indirect. Platform partners retained revenue without exclusivity, subtly loosening default search behavior over time rather than triggering immediate disruption.
That said, the highest traffic story of the year (and ever) was our breakdown of DOJ Papers Outline Google's Stack from the anti-trust trial.
4. Bing Quietly Gained Ground With AI-First Search
Microsoft leaned into AI citations and publisher references earlier and more visibly than competitors. Bing placed emphasis on attribution and source clarity, giving publishers a clearer signal of how AI systems interpreted their content.
For technical SEOs, Bing became a proving ground. Testing entity structure, schema discipline, and citation patterns there offered insights that translated elsewhere. This trend surfaced repeatedly in Pubcon technical sessions and post-conference analysis.
Nick Stamoulis, Brick Marketing "Overall 2025 was a wild year for SEO at many levels that we all know about within the industry. I think the major underlying issue that not many industry experts discussed is the paralysis that current SEO in the age of AI is causing small and mid-sized brands. I am hearing and seeing companies not willing to change their thinking or ways to invest properly in SEO, AI Search (GEO) and content marketing, etc. I am optimistic that in 2026 companies, teams and marketers will develop the best ways forward to invest properly, so they are not playing catch up in 2027 and beyond as SEO/GEO continues to evolve and change."
5. OpenAI Sets Search Inside ChatGPT
ChatGPT evolved from an answer engine into a discovery surface. Shopping results, product imagery, reviews, and direct purchase paths began appearing inside conversational responses, compressing research and conversion into a single interface.
Late-year reporting confirmed exploration of ad formats and paid placements. For marketers, this introduced a new channel outside the traditional SERP, discussed extensively in forward-looking Pubcon sessions focused on non-search discovery.
Dave Davies, Weights & Biases by Coreweave "I'd suggest that biggest announcement in 2025 as far as its impact on 2026 and beyond, will be the rollout of agentic capabilities into Chrome. "The great decoupling" and the erosion of traffic at the TOFU and MOFU stages of the customer journey will pale in comparison to what follows, as browsers and other systems can simply act on the user's behalf. When we couple this with other important advancements of 2025, like the adoption of the MCP protocol to make agent communications easier, and the announcement of the AP2 protocol to facilitate agents making payments, e-commerce, and the consumer journey is about to change in ways we've never seen before."
6. Schema Markup Turned Strategic Again
Structured data reclaimed its role as SEO infrastructure. AI systems leaned heavily on clean entities, explicit relationships, and well-defined attributes to generate summaries and answers.
As repeatedly discussed in the WebmasterWorld forums, sites with disciplined schema coverage showed higher inclusion rates inside AI responses. This was not about chasing novelty, it was about precision and consistency.
Sam Page, Head of SEO, InMotion Hosting "The biggest issues in 2025 are uncovering what AI SEO really is and how to do it. There's more going on than content structure, site architecture, and mentions/citations. There appears to be an underlying and hard to quantify authority contributor to AI visibility that folks aren't talking about. Another huge issue is attribution. As search engines fragment, understanding traffic becomes more complex. Think about Reddit, ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Quora, Wikipedia, etc and modeling impressions across those platforms. SEO attribution is getting fuzzier, not clearer. I'm working on models to understand our visibility and lean into platforms as marketing tools."
7. Stealth Story of the Year: Content Pruning and Updating Beat Content Creation
Publishing more stopped producing returns. Sites that consolidated, updated, and tightened existing content consistently outperformed those pushing volume. Successful teams treated content as maintained infrastructure rather than one-off campaigns. Pages were audited, rewritten, and clarified, a strategy long advocated on SearchEngineWorld and finally validated at scale.
While we didn't cover any stories here directly, there are many stories around the web covering this. We will be covering it in depth in the new year.
8. Search Diversification and the Post-Google Marketing Playbook
We believe new websites will find more traffic not from search, but from new and old-school traffic channels. We call it the Post Google Marketing Playbook. Discovery fragmented across platforms. TikTok became a primary research surface for younger users, while Reddit surged as a trusted source of first-hand experience. AI systems increasingly pulled from these community-driven spaces.
Authentic discussion regained value. Forums and lived experience content surfaced more frequently, a reversal of years dominated by polished but shallow optimization, and a return to principles long discussed on WebmasterWorld.
While a ton of press was written about this in the SEO space, the real-world impact was negligible. Rank trackers simply adjusted.
Toolmakers shifted toward sampling, modeling, and alternative data sources. What appeared minor at first rippled through technical stacks, dominating late-year WebmasterWorld discussions.
The real change is that static rankings fail to explain performance in an AI-driven environment. Many queries no longer produced a stable list of results, making position-based reports misleading and effectively deprecated. SEOs shifted toward impression share, citation frequency, and brand presence ("slop-on-top") inside AI answers. Agencies that failed to update reporting models struggled to justify results, a recurring theme at Pubcon agency roundtables.
The public dispute between Automattic and WP Engine escalated into operational risk. Code access restrictions and platform uncertainty affected millions of sites. Ultimately, it educated the WordPress public that WordPress is less open than many believed.
SEO teams were pulled into infrastructure decisions, balancing performance, control, and update stability. The incident reinforced that CMS choices are SEO choices, a theme revisited across many Pubcon technical tracks.
While we didn't cover the blow-by-blow tit-for-tat between Automattic and WP Engine, we did note a few interesting tidbits:
11. Local SEO Transformed by Conversational Search
Local discovery became deeply personalized. AI summarized reviews, inferred intent, and adjusted recommendations dynamically, reducing reliance on static optimization.
Local SEOs pivoted toward review quality, service clarity, and real-world signals. Optimizing for how people speak, not how they type, reshaped local strategy across the industry.
AI agents began completing tasks end to end, from research to booking. SEO expanded beyond pages into feeds, APIs, and structured datasets.
Optimization increasingly required collaboration with engineering and product teams, a shift many Pubcon speakers described as overdue but unavoidable.
13. Euro DMA Enforcement Targeted Self-Preferencing
European regulators focused on self-preferencing across shopping, travel, and local results. While enforcement targeted specific markets, implications reached globally.
To limit regulatory exposure, search interfaces adjusted sourcing and layout behavior worldwide. The result was a subtle but lasting influence on visibility strategy heading into 2026.
14. Instagram Posts Are Ranking and Showing in Google and Bing
Starting on July 10, search engines began indexing Instagram content from professional accounts, making Instagram SEO a fresh tool. This change can shift social exposure and content strategy for brands. It opens a new channel for organic visibility by allowing individual Instagram content, photos, captions, and possibly even reels, to show up in Google and Bing.
Our top focus for 2026 will of course be all things SEO, but we will be tracking the following topics with a closer eye than the rest:
Content pruning and updating beat content creation.
Google's Aluminium OS (sp? don't know) - if Google releases this in 2026, we believe it will ultimately be one of the biggest stories in Operating Systems since the iPhone.
Will Google Discontinue AdSense?
We believe that within 12 to 24 months, Google will discontinue AdSense as AdSense publishers fall off the network. There was a steep decline in the number of sites running Google AdSense in 2025, and that decline will continue. Why support an open web built on CPM ads when they can push CPC on the SERPs? When trying to make sense of confusing SEO outcomes, we ask one question: Google gets paid?
The Post Google Marketing Playbook. We will lean hard into alternative traffic sources. It is clear SEOs are not going to go quietly.
