Since 68% of all internet browsing starts with a search, it is vital more than ever for your website to appear at the top of SERPs to compete for site traffic, clients, or customers. SEO is your best bet for doing this. SEO industry is rapidly evolving as AI (artificial intelligence) comes to the market and businesses and website owners need to stay in the loop with these changes.

1. Alternative search results

This is perhaps one of the biggest SEO developments to expect in 2025: alternative search results. Search engines are trying new search scenarios, and these aren’t just changing the user experience around the search results, but also how you may need to structure your content.

This pattern is manifesting in two ways. What we tell you to keep up with the times.

AI-powered summaries

AI Comparisons show up in search results regularly. These are short overviews that answer a user’s question right at the top of the SERP so users don’t have to scroll down through result lists. The goal is user experience, but it’s not without risks.

Ai Overviews are now above organic results, thus taking over SERPs. More “zero-click” searches are the results of this; you know what, you’re looking for without having to go to a site.

How to make sure that your website is getting the full benefit of this new SEO trend:

• Focus on creating interesting and unique content that doesn’t copy what AI and Google already know. Since Google and other search engines are now relating sources to AI summaries, original content gives you an edge.
• Establish brand value and authority. If you have a well-known and commonly searched business then you are much more credible and likely to be mentioned in these summaries.

SearchGPT and conversational AI

SearchGPT and conversational AI are chats of artificial intelligence, which simulate conversations based on natural language processing and machine learning. They are much more dialogical and context-aware — the results usually come without the need to visit any web sites.

At the novelty level of these things, it’s not so clear just yet how you can always guarantee presence in these outputs. But the plan should start to emerge as we move through 2025.

Meanwhile, stay on top of these SEO tips to stay on top.

• Stand out and write in an easy to digest way. Build original content from your angle to stand out. Use concise sentences and paragraphs. Divide material into bullet points or list of numbers. Use clear headings and subheadings.
• Ensure accessibility. Avoid making things too complex with too many tabs in the body. — And, make sure to fill in all the fields when importing media (e.g., image alt text).
• Use structured data. Schema markup is structured data code that tells search engines how to see and display your web content. If you can, use schema markup (such as FAQ schema) to let AI systems know what your content is about, how it is structured, and what it’s about.

2. Wide adoption of AI content

An SEO 2025 big thing is Artificially-produced content more frequently. And more companies use AI to create content (at least in part). This allows for scaled content creation and can save money.

But, like I said earlier, you want to emphasize originality in your content. You don’t have to use AI alone: you’ll just end up with stuff that’s less unique, and it might be just what other people will be making, too. This leads to repetition, dull copy, and misinformation, which is going to damage your SEO.

It’s all about moderation — for the best possible ROI, your content must contain unique content and content that nobody else has. Think about using AI to edit, research or draft your text instead of creating the copy entirely. Always keep in mind, quality of the output inversely proportionate to quality of the input so you have to put in time doing research and gathering original data to make great content.

3. An increasing focus on E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — is also going to become more significant in 2025. These are clues for search engines to see whether or not your content is good. Now that Google is building in experience on top of its existing E-A-T model, you’ll need to have more hands-on content. Therefore, it is important to show these qualities on your site and pages in order to let the search engine know that you are worth a higher ranking.

A good SEO strategy on E-E-A-T also includes some of the most important aspects to have good web pages – such as:

• Clarity: Make your writing easy to read and digest, so it does not make any vague statements.
• Facts: Offer facts, well-written data backed by evidence or source.
• Human effort: Invoke what only human know-how can do. This separates your content from robo-content or non-intellectual content.
• Knowledge transfer: Provide something new to the subject matter. What matters is whether your content is interesting and useful to readers.
• Reconciling intent: If you are creating content, you have to match the intent of the searcher. That is knowing what the user actually searching for when entering a search phrase. Are they looking for content, are they looking to buy something, or are they going to a website?
• Continuity: Refresh your posts regularly with the new information and fashion to stay current.

You have to make sure that your page is better and more valuable than the other one. Give more valuable and interesting content than the copy and paste stuff will make users interested.

Intriguingly, this is no different from what successful SEO has always been about: quality user-friendly content. 

4. Increasing demand for video content

The rise of AI-driven content is a boom for human-made content. Videos especially will become a huge part of search engine optimization tactics.

Far from article and blog post, AI never resemblance the authenticity and humanness of human face-to-face communication with a camera. And this makes video content a powerful means of interacting with more people.

Since searchers and social-media users are watching video all the time, producing genuine, human-based videos can increase your SEO and visibility. Now think of how you can incorporate video into your content plan whether it’s social media or video only channels like YouTube.

YouTube’s growing importance

YouTube is now the king of SEO. Because YouTube is the second biggest search engine behind Google, you can use targeted video on YouTube to get noticed.

Search: Optimize your video titles, snippets, descriptions, tags with keywords for better discoverability. Tutorials, product demos, explainer videos, etc. that are relevant to what users are searching for can be things you can create for your business. These videos you can use to drive traffic to your site or get people to do something.

For even more local SEO power in 2025, build your local authority. Such as collecting positive customer testimonials, building place-based content, and connecting with your local population.

5. A shift toward local SEO

Location-based keywords are also essential. Keywords: They are the phrases that searchers use when looking for something. You can search for these terms using a tool such as SEO Space, or just make a list of the terms that someone could look for to find you site and target your pages and content with them. Such keywords are things that you must include naturally in your content, SEO titles, and SEO descriptions.

6. SEO testing

The algorithms of search engines are always changing and so to stay ahead in search rankings it’s not just about traditional SEO. Because of these adjustments, it’s hard to be sure which strategies will always work, so SEO testing has taken on a new significance.

We are seeing companies experiment a lot more with various methods and changes to their websites to try to compete in 2025. And you can also do your own experiment. It’s this learning-by-doing that helps you adapt quickly and efficiently.

With this method, you will have some ideas on what is most efficient for you to stay in search results and increase your rank.

For instance, we have a web designer directory on SEO Space’s website which we want to rank better on the search engines. We started a separate web designer directory on a separate Squarespace website to experiment with our own SEO. It has the same stuff but uses different SEO methods so that we can quickly learn which ones work best.  Try something similar for a key landing page in your site such as an event landing page or new products. An example would be that a bakery in Soho, London could find a domain like bakery-soho-london.com, build a one-page website to try different strategies, and then duplicate it on their current site. It is also helpful to use target keyword “bakery Soho London” here in domain to rank site up the search engines.