Is SEO still a good marketing investment in 2025? 

As anyone who works in marketing knows, the field doesn’t stand still for very long. Throw technology and digital into the mix and last year’s big thing can very quickly be a thing of the past.  

One area that has come under particular attention recently is SEO (in case you’re living under a rock, this is search engine optimisation). As the industry admits itself, 2024 was not one of the best of years for SEO, for a variety of reasons including the rise of AI, and it had many asking questions about whether SEO had a future. 

Side note: I’d recommend reading Search Engine Journal’s (SEJ) ‘State of SEO 2025’ to understand how marketing professionals are currently feeling about the industry. 

Are we seeing the end of SEO? Well, no, but it is changing extremely quickly and marketers have to stay ahead of the game to ensure they’re investing time and money wisely. 

In my opinion, SEO has been extremely resilient in the past and adapted with the times – it is fundamentally a discipline that has to be extremely adaptable to outside forces that are primarily out of their control – and I don’t doubt that this will be the case again as search changes.  

I’ll get into why I think this below. 

How is SEO changing? 

What do we know about search in 2025? As the likes of Ben Steele at SEJ has noted, the ‘appetite for information’ hasn’t changed and neither has the potential audience size that you could tap into. But the way that content is found and consumed is changing. 

This has to be a key consideration for any SEO strategy in 2025.  

An SEO strategy will also have to consider the big disruptions that are taking place in the SEO world right now, especially around algorithm changes and the continued roll out of AI.  

Algorithm changes are seen as one of the biggest SEO challenges in the community. This was demonstrated recently with notable websites including The Sun’s and Hubspot’s – the latter considered by many to be the “gold standard” for highly-optimised SEO content – tumbling from many rankings, resulting in a significant organic traffic drop.    

Many attributed this to Hubspot creating content that was simply not relevant to its core business. The company therefore lacked ‘topical authority’ and was penalised as a result. 

AI changes the game 

I don’t have to go into great detail about how AI is a gamechanger – that’s a given these days – but what is worth exploring further is the knock-on consequences for SEO and marketing.  

AI is changing the game is several ways, most notably: 

• How search results are displayed and summarised (see Google AI overviews as one example). 

• The rising use of other platforms for information gathering, most notably ChatGPT. 

• The increasing use of generative AI for content generation, and the effects this has on search. 

Let’s look at each in more detail. 

Are AI overviews a killer for SEO? 

I’d say yes for some websites, but for many sites that provide very detailed, expert-led content, absolutely not. 

I’m reminded of previous search ‘innovations’ by Google that killed traffic for websites and equally called into question SEO, including the ‘Knowledge Graph’ (which let’s be honest we’re using to find out celebrity ages and spouses!), or widgets such as calculators, and featured snippets.  

People could get the information they needed quicker, without clicking onto an actual page – the fact that these are still around suggest that they have been successful. 

AI overviews (AIOs) are similar, but they are only likely to be a traffic killer for those searches that require quick information without depth.  

It’s also worth noting that AIOs are not available across the world, and their rollout varies quite significantly across sectors. Also quite interestingly, the percentage of searches that triggers an AIO has actually decreased since their rollout, according to recent data analysis. 

What about Google alternatives? 

The rise of AI-driven searches has led people to use ‘AI assistants’ such as ChatGPT, X’s Grok or Google Gemini to gather information rather than use a traditional search engine. The benefits of an AI assistant is that it will summarise significant amounts of information for you, in the tone, language and complexity you desire.  

However, whether this information is wholly accurate is another matter, with a recent BBC study into AI assistants finding that answers produced by them often ‘contained significant inaccuracies and distorted content’ from the BBC.   

Many still don’t trust AI and some studies suggest this distrust in AI is increasing, not receding, all of which points to the fact that the search engine, and SEO, is not being killed off by AI. 

Fundamentally, it’s worth noting that Google handles 23 billion searches a day (!), while ChatGPT generates around 10 million conversations a day.    

Not forgetting also that to really benefit from all of ChatGPT’s feature, you have to pay for it. 

Will SEO survive the generative AI boom?

There’s so much that can be written on the uptick of businesses using generative AI to augment, or simply replace, human output. The last few years has seen many businesses try to use GenAI, especially for their marketing efforts, from creating content, generating imagery, and analysing data.   

While AI is undoubtedly the future and provides a significant capability for teams, the actual results have been less than stellar. That’s not just the output but also the human and capital resource still required to generate assets. 

So, the buzz around GenAI for marketing has cooled off somewhat. 

Ultimately, many people are not wanting to consume content that has been generated by a machine – they are looking for real human experts that have sector-specific knowledge. 

How to be successful at SEO in 2025 

As a marketer and SEO practitioner for several years, I’ve always reminded myself that great content, written by experts in their field, will always weather the storm of even the most challenging digital times.   

This is not just me, but straight from Google as well. Google still prioritises content that aligns with their EEAT – also known as Double EAT – strategy, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The extra ‘E’ for experience was added in 2022 and shows that Google is prioritising content from a source that has ‘first-hand, life experience on the topic at hand’. 

We also know that Google is prioritising high-ranking content to be part of its AI overviews, so of course it is highly beneficial for company pages to be SEO optimised. A recent study even suggests that not being part of AI overviews can significantly impact clicks and traffic. 

It’s clear then that if you’re putting out fantastic content written and formulated by experts in their respective industries, then the likelihood is that your webpages will rank higher, and you’ll benefit from higher traffic as a result. Of course, you’ll also have to consider technical and off-page elements in the SEO equation, but on-page content will be a key driver in SEO success. 

Conclusion 

Despite many predictions on the demise of SEO, it’s clear that it will continue for the foreseeable future, maybe just in an evolved form. But those companies that can adjust to the new realities of information consumption, and tailor and optimise content accordingly, will be the big winners when it comes to an increasingly competitive landscape.