The 6 SEO Trends That Will Shape Search in 2025

After the past few years, that conclusion is simple to reach. The last nails in the search coffin seem to be shifting rankings, a rise in zero-click searches, and AI-powered SEO frauds. In actuality, the 2015 version of SEO is what perished. Climbing a Google list of little blue links is no longer the only goal. Regulations, user behavior, and new technology altered that.

Although it takes place in new locations and in different ways, billions of people continue to utilize the internet to look for answers. Numerous new clients will come from search if SEOs adjust their approach to take advantage of these prospects.
In order to provide you the most significant SEO trends for 2025, we have examined current data, perused Reddit and LinkedIn, and consulted with SEO specialists. This year, use them to propel search growth.

1. AI in search results will continue to expand

In May 2024, Google launched its AI Overviews (AIO) on US results pages following around a year of optional testing. Positive and negative responses and outcomes poured in quickly. Google is anticipated to extend the use of AIOs and other generative AI features to additional questions this year.

AI Overviews are becoming more prevalent. They appeared in almost 7% of searches in June of previous year. That percentage shot up to almost 20% by November. An AIO was included in more than one-third of SERPs for certain major industries with informational aim, such as technology and business.

Other AI applications for SERPs are also being tested by Google. Sachin Patel, a SERP analyst, displayed AI-generated responses he discovered in the Things to Know section.

There may be a few advantages for SEOs, even though more AI responses in SERPs will result in more zero-click searches (we’ll discuss that in a moment).
First off, by including more citation links in its AIOs, Google appears to be responding to the opposition of content providers. Lily Ray, an SEO specialist, has brought that to light.

2. Answer engines might emerge as the main non-Google providers of traffic.

We have already discussed the growth of AIOs. However, other major AI companies are also expanding in the field of search engines, drawing more consumers as they go. Non-Google search referral traffic is increasing as a result, and this trend is expected to pick up speed in 2025.
ChatGPT search was introduced by OpenAI toward the close of 2024. The AI giant is already predicted to capture 1% of the search industry this year. Even though it’s a tiny portion, it comes from a huge pie.
Perplexity, on the other hand, has accumulated more than 15 million users and was one of the first real answer engines to exploit current online information. That shows a notable quarterly growth tendency, but it is nothing compared to Google’s over three billion regular users.
The rapid increase in referral traffic from these two new answer engines is the main story here. Referral traffic has increased overall by 71% from Perplexity and 44% from ChatGPT. According to one analysis of a wide range of websites, ChatGPT has increased referral traffic by 145 times since June alone.
The rise of AEO (answer engine optimization) will follow the carrot of new traffic sources. Marketers hoping to profit must understand which aspects of conventional SEO apply to AI-generated replies and which new strategies are necessary to get a citation.

3, One persistent trend in SEO is community search results.

Online communities will be a major area of focus for SEOs in 2025, according to Heman Patel, senior SEO expert at LocaliQ. He declared, “Community search results are here to stay.” “Search results from communities and forums like Reddit and Quora will still be displayed by Google. Companies ought to interact with the communities where their clients congregate.
The August core update significantly improved forums, particularly Reddit. At that point, Google started giving forum material top priority in SERPs. Reddit’s Google traffic increased fourfold as a result, making it the third most visible website in results pages.
Results for particular question queries appear to be more common on Quora and Reddit, which makes logical given that a large portion of the discussions on those platforms include direct answers to questions. There is a pull factor for forum popularity on SERPs in addition to Google’s push. People are adding “Reddit” to their Google searches. Their objective is to locate more authentic, relevant responses from professionals.
Marketers have therefore already started searching for strategies to profit from the rise of forum content SERP positions.
More people will turn to forums in 2025 for answers, particularly if AI-generated responses turn them off. As a result, more marketers will likely search for methods to draw clients from sites like Quora and Reddit. Direct participation in those forums or content optimization and publication there are two possible ways to do this.

4, The importance of optimizing for sales increases.

By the end of 2024, another intriguing SEO trend began to take shape. Search engine optimization for down-funnel content became a hot topic among marketers and SEOs. Therefore, there is a new drive to deliver mid- and bottom-of-the-funnel content through search engines rather than concentrating too much on high-level informational content.

This presents a significant opportunity for the upcoming year, according to Sam Dunning, host of the Breaking B2B podcast and founder of the B2B SEO firm Breaking B2B. It’s crucial to optimize for both search and sales so that your sales team can use consumer data, questions, and objections from sales calls to generate content. In this manner, it resonates, fosters trust, and converts customers in addition to ranking.
According to a Seoworks research of 50 firms, Google might actually prefer websites with a large proportion of branded content.
Therefore, incorporating a small amount of brand or product advertising into your SEO material doesn’t appear to have any drawbacks. Incorporating “a-ha” moments about the product into pieces that aim to generate leads and income is something Sam advised. “Add demos, gifs, and video, for instance, to help your content sell.”
Sam added that companies that “quickly identify and approve money bottom-funnel keywords” are the ones who generate the greatest pipeline revenue from SEO.
In his article, JBH’s SEO director Andrew Holland explains why “SEO content needs a business-first mindset.”
This implies that “content creation for SEO must always be connected to business objectives.” Because, regrettably, far too much SEO content was produced with traffic as a vanity metric in mind,” Andrew stated.
Professionals are increasingly sharing how they use SEO to do more than just draw in new clients. For instance, copywriter Tasmin Lofthouse describes how to utilize “Emotional SEO” to boost sales in this post on the Moz site.
It’s evident that marketers are considering ways to decrease the time it takes for customers to make a purchase, even though they may be concerned about a possible decline in organic search traffic.

5, We’ll have to make do with zero- Click on Searches.

Since Google introduced highlighted snippets, the danger of zero-click searches has been a constant concern. They will probably account for a larger percentage of searches this year. In their 2025 plan, marketers who presently depend on search traffic for growth will need to take this new reality into consideration.
Rand Fishkin examined clickstream statistics for Google users in July 2024. He discovered that a little more than 41% of US searches resulted in a click. However, only 360 out of 1,000 searches resulted in a click to access the web after removing clicks that led to Google-owned properties (like Google Flights).
It’s crucial to remember that this evidence supports an increasing trend. Only 25% of all queries resulted in zero-click results, according to a 2022 study.
Is this the result of AIOs? Most likely not, given that in July, AIOs weren’t appearing in many searches. However, it doesn’t mean they won’t continue to have an impact. Due to AIOs, Search Engine Land predicted a rise in total searches but a fall in referral traffic. If AIOs have any impact, it will be to increase zero-click searches rather than diminish them, although this is still up in the air.
The zero-click trend is exacerbated by the rise of answer engines and the growing usage of social media websites as search engines. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Perplexity all make a concerted effort to prevent people from clicking away from their services.
Even 30% of billions of searches is a significant number of organic hits that can still be obtained. However, we have finally reached a point where zero-click searches are unavoidable. This implies that by 2025, all of us will require zero-click search tactics in our marketing campaigns.

6, “SEO is dead” is finally dead.

We’ve been hearing for years that SEO would die as a result of changes like zero-click searches and changing algorithms. Finally, the song is shifting as the data shows otherwise. Search is booming, according to prominent speakers; it just looks different and occurs in other areas.
Recently, 30,000 websites were tested by Neil Patel Digital. The outcomes? Despite the widespread use of AI Overviews, organic traffic rose.
We can’t deny the trend because, to be fair, many reliable websites have seen a decline in organic search traffic. Even if that persists, search will still be a successful marketing tactic because it provides additional advantages like brand awareness and traffic from other sources.
In a recent LinkedIn comment, Rob May, Senior SEO Manager at DNSnetworks, expressed it as follows.