Evolving SEO for 2025: What needs to change

SEO Trends in 2025: User-first Strategy led by AI

In 2024, the SEO field has undergone earth-shaking changes. In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a potential threat, but a core driving force, and its influence far exceeds expectations. While Google still dominates the search engine, SEO professionals are shifting their focus: from optimizing specific channels to understanding and serving users, regardless of the way and platform they choose to interact with.

This shift represents a fundamental change in SEO, from keyword strategy to user-centric strategy. Here are the preparations our team has made to address the challenges and opportunities in 2025:

• Application of AI in SEO
• Interaction between SEO and social search based on large language model (LLM)
• Emerging SEO focus in 2025
• Forecast of the most important factors this year

AI Application Strategy in 2025

Since Google launched AI Overviews in May and then restricted it due to flaws in the results, there have been plenty of articles about AI Overviews. The AI ​​overview has changed significantly, and the results are increasingly similar to traditional search results pages (SERPs)—a predictable result, as both are powered by Google’s algorithms.

In contrast, LLM-based search is not Google's monopoly area. Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and Google's Gemini are all competing, and new competitors are emerging one after another. These non-Google LLMs rely on different algorithms, resulting in variability and uncertainty in search results.

Brands should focus on strategies that have been effective, especially those that have been effective over the past few years: gain insight into user needs and provide content that can predict and meet their information needs. While this is the underlying strategy, the way and where content is deployed has changed over the past year.

LLM-based SEO and social search

AI is changing the way people interact with search. More and more users are using AI overview, and more people are using LLM for search activities. LLM represents a transformation that integrates multiple sources into one (e.g., synthesizes 100 articles into one response).

Social search is the opposite: it provides a unique human perspective from platforms like Reddit, TikTok, and LinkedIn. While AI-generated content (e.g., an automatically generated LinkedIn response) is common, it is often easy to identify and has low engagement. Content from these platforms is becoming increasingly frequent in Google's traditional SERPs and is now starting to appear in LLM search results.

In short, users are willing to participate in a large amount of aggregated content and human perspective. This highlights the importance of brand SEO – ensuring that people can find what they should see at the right time and place when searching for brands. A good, strong brand should be able to cross various touch points. Non-brand keywords are still an important part of SEO, but in 2025, both are important.

Emerging SEO Focus in 2025

Excellent SEO in 2025 will optimize the user experience and cover a more comprehensive and three-dimensional customer journey, including more platforms than Google. Google remains a strong metric for measuring important factors and continues to dominate most search activities, but I expect that this will become more fragmented as 2025 develops.

With this in mind, the issues that SEO needs to solve are changing. You should no longer start with "What keywords should I try to rank?" Now the better problem is to start with user behavior, for example:

• “If a user starts searching on Google or LLM, what can my brand do to showcase and provide value?”
• “What kind of content people want to consume on Reddit and TikTok?”
• “What kind of information do people want LLM to provide?”

I've mentioned the need to focus on brand searches. Apart from that, I encourage my clients to invest in community engagement (regardless of where their specific community is). These offer different levels of brand building link opportunities.

2025 SEO Forecast

Here are some brief predictions:

• LLM platforms like Perplexity will gain momentum. Its user experience and quality are impressive and it continues to improve rapidly.
• Community engagement will drive business growth. For B2B and e-commerce/B2C, participating in the community will become a key growth strategy. While AI content will advance and become less formulaic, the need for high-quality, differentiated content that presents a unique and creative human perspective will always exist. As AI content grows, it will highlight the value of a real, smart voice.
• Video content is still a powerful tool to stand out. As AI has not made significant progress in the medium, video continues to provide a unique opportunity for differentiation. Brands focusing on high-quality videos and strategically deployed on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn are expected to gain strong engagement in 2025.

2025 SEO: Focus on users, platforms and content

Understanding users will become the driving force for successful SEO in 2025 and beyond. As users explore more and more search platforms and more algorithms need to be navigated, obtaining visibility will be both complex and challenging. However, the more we understand our users and their behavior, the more we can interact with them effectively and bring meaningful results to our brand.

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