“I’m excited but exhausted by so many changes,” Victor Pan wrote in a HubSpot Slack channel just before dropping half a dozen links to the latest AI news. He’s a product SEO here, and he sounds like he needs a hug.
And no wonder. Even in tech, an industry that thrives on rapid change, AI is accelerating everything it touches by orders of magnitude. AI-powered search engines like Perplexity are gaining mainstream momentum, SearchGPT is securing deals with publishers to sidestep copyright issues, and your friendly neighborhood SEO is pinching the bridge of their nose.
For the scoop on search trends you should know about as a marketer, AI-powered and otherwise, I talked to SEOs here at HubSpot and around the world.
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But before we look ahead, let’s go back to the 1990s and take a quick look at how search has changed in the last three decades.
How the Search Landscape Has Changed
An entire generation has grown up never knowing a time before Google.
To get a broader perspective on the evolution of search, I turned to Mikkel deMib, a Denmark-based SEO who has been doing SEO since before it was called SEO.
“The first few years, we called it ‘search engine positioning,’” he tells me. I was alive and using the internet then, and I still feel like a kid listening to a bedtime story about the land before time.
I ask deMib about some of the major turning points in the last 25 years that might provide some context for understanding the future of search. The switch to mobile, he recalls, was first prophesied around Y2K, shortly after the introduction of wireless application protocol (WAP) that allowed mobile devices to connect to the internet.
“And of course it totally failed,” deMib says, because “from a usability point of view, it was terrible.”
It was another decade before Google adopted a mobile-first philosophy and content publishers adopted mobile-friendly UX. Now, deMib sees upwards of 90{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} mobile traffic in certain verticals, like women’s fashion — a number that’s not likely to surprise HubSpot readers.
The Evolution of Search in 2024
Rory Hope, Head of EN Growth at HubSpot, echoes Pan’s exhausted excitement.
“There’s a lot of chatter in the industry,” he says, “about Google essentially thrashing between different priorities.” And that’s “causing a great deal of stress for the SEO community.”
Pan takes a long view of all this AI-activated change, cautioning marketers to focus more on the grounding principles of good content rather than trying to optimize for every single update.
When I asked him how SEOs were figuring out how to optimize for Google’s AI Overviews, he reminded me that “there was a time” — October 2015 — “that Google really pushed forward a new format called AMP.” Accelerated mobile pages were designed for faster mobile loading, and — see if this sounds familiar — it let users read content without clicking through to the website.
“And now AMP is a dead project,” Pan says. In other words: We can’t see the future, so let’s not panic just yet about a zero-click world.
Go deeper: We’ve got even more pro tips and actionable advice on adapting to the new search era.
Trends
I use the word “trends” advisedly here. Every SEO I talked to emphasized the interconnectedness of the changes they’re observing, exercising caution about using the word “trend” (See above for Victor Pan calling time of death on Google AMPs).
And many of the SEO trends we saw in 2023 are still playing out.
That said, here’s five things SEOs are keeping an eye on in 2024 and 2025.
1. AI
DeMib, who has seen more than his fair share of false starts and dead-ends in the SEO world, calls AI a “fundamental shift in technology that is maybe as big — maybe even bigger — than the internet.”
Artificial intelligence isn’t so much an SEO trend as what it’s powering: chatbots, search engines, Google’s AI Overviews, and more. AI Overviews (AIO) has especially piqued concern, with everybody racing to understand what will happen if AIO keeps users on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) instead of clicking through to websites.
The vast majority of SEOs are making sure that AI is central to their overall strategies.
In a HubSpot survey of over a hundred U.S.-based SEO professionals, 73{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} either strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement, “AI tools, features, or solutions are becoming an important part of my company’s SEO strategy.”
Many of those SEOs use AI for tasks like optimizing websites for technical SEO and improving SERP rankings. AI is also a means to efficiency; nearly three-quarters of respondents said they use AI simply to save time.
Not sure where to start? Here’s a pro tip: HubSpot has a free AI search grader app that quickly analyzes your brand based on what your prospects and customers are seeing across AI search engines — then gives you actionable recommendations on how to improve.
2. Zero-Click Search
With the fitful launch of Google’s AI Overviews in May 2024, “zero-click search” shifted from theoretical concern to waking nightmare, depending on who you ask.
We’ll likely see the term used exponentially more in 2024 and beyond, but whether we’ll actually see a zero-click world remains to be seen.
In a HubSpot survey of U.S.-based SEO professionals, only 6{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} specifically named Google’s AI Overviews as a threat to search traffic. And the biggest concern, generative AI chatbots, was selected by only 13{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} of respondents.
A tiny percentage, just 2{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740}, believe that Google algorithm updates will result in search traffic losses.
Readers of a certain age may remember when AOL was effectively synonymous with “internet.” DeMib says that pre-2000, “[the internet] was a lot of big sites like Yahoo! and AOL that defined themselves more like a portal. They were trying to give users everything they wanted to keep people on their site.”
It failed for Yahoo! and AOL and it will fail for Google, deMib believes.
“Nobody can give users everything, in my opinion. It’s not going to work. People are still going to want to buy products that are only found on a certain web shop. People want different perspectives. They’re not going to read all the news in one news outlet.”
DeMib also points me to a study that SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin did on zero-click. Among the findings, Fishkin found that although there’s been an increase in zero-click searches, there’s been a parallel increase in the number of searches.
“It’s evening out,” deMib says. “The number of people who click away from Google is actually about the same, even though the percentage has dropped.” (You can read Fishkin’s full study on the SparkToro website.)
And not everybody thinks zero-click is the start of the SEO apocalypse. Amanda Natividad, SparkToro’s VP of Marketing, asked on LinkedIn, “Do you want people to see your [content] or not?”
She explains: “When I‘m telling you to create zero-click content it’s because you need to optimize for impressions. To optimize your social media content so that people see it.”
3. Follow-up Search Intent
Even with the increase in zero-click queries, Amanda Sellers says “that doesn’t mean that’s the only search users will make.”
Sellers is HubSpot’s Manager of EN Blog Strategy, and she tells me how important it is to consider follow-up searches.
“Let’s say a user searches for something extremely basic and the AI Overview provides an answer. Some people are going to be satisfied with that answer — and some are not. So for the people who are not satisfied, what follow-up searches will they do to further refine their journey?”
Sellers says that anticipating follow-up search intent is key to content strategy in 2024 and 2025. Ultimately, we should be writing content for our audience — not Google. (Ironically, this is also what Google says.)
4. Ranch-style SEO
Clearscope CEO Bernard Huang made ripples in the SEO world with an April 2024 blog post called “Why Ranch-Style SEO is Your Future-Proof Content Strategy.” It begins with an exhortation to “unlearn what you know about SEO.”
That sounds scarier than it is. Huang says that rather than focusing on long, in-depth articles, publishers should “[disaggregate] content into precise, digestible pieces that strategically align with the user’s search journey.” That is, switch from skyscraper SEO strategy to ranch-style.
Huang lists three reasons why ranch-style is the future of search:
- It’s responsive to the shift from keyword-centric to topic-centric SEO.
- It mitigates the negative impacts of generative AI on the web.
- It “partners” with firsthand experience as a ranking factor.
This goes hand-in-hand with Sellers’ advice about follow-up search intent: Good content strategy is about anticipating your readers’ questions at each stage of their journey.
5. Video SEO
Video SEO is already a specialization, but expect more growth in this area. Pan says “consumers want to watch videos on their favorite platforms” — not necessarily your website — and that requires an understanding of both YouTube optimizations and how social media platforms give visibility to native versus externally hosted videos.
Sellers adds, “When you’re creating content in this challenging search landscape, it’s more important than ever to keep in mind how your audience searches for and consumes information.”
Consumers have the tools and ability to research quite literally anything, and an increasing number of prospective customers are turning to YouTube. Rory Hope, HubSpot’s Head of EN Growth, says it’s because they’re “seeking human perspectives in relation to their pain points.”
Plus, Hope points out, more and more video carousels are popping up in Google search results “as part of its goal to serve more human-led perspectives for users.”
All of this adds up to an important focus area for SEOs, Hope says.
“SEOs should be monitoring the search results pages for target keywords and topics to see which ones have video carousels, and then coordinate with media teams to create relevant video content.”
The Future of Search: How Marketers Are Shifting Gears
Search is dead; long live search!
HubSpot original research shows that SEOs are generally optimistic about Google’s AI Overviews and other generative AI search engines, with 48{326198e71d5f7582f354f6f6ee7a089ba2f57e2fa39b69186a2948f78a2d5740} of respondents saying that AIO would improve search traffic over the next six months.
If there’s one braided through line in these trends, it’s that AI is driving a lot of change in the search landscape, SEO is very much alive and well, and the human element is still vital to search.
More than three-quarters of SEOs agree that they will use AI in 2025.
Google’s addition of a second “E” to E-A-T in late 2022 was a clear signal that publishers should be writing for their readers — not Google. “Content creation isn’t about keywords. It’s about topics and editorial angles,” says Sellers.
“Expertise,” the original “E,” could theoretically be faked by AI. But “experience” — not so much.
To recap, here’s how our experts recommend that marketers and SEOs shift gears to accommodate new trends in the search landscape:
- Write for your audience.
- “Use AI for the things AI is good for, and use human-led content for the things that human-led content is good for.”—Amanda Sellers
- “Everybody should embrace and spend some time with all the new AI-based tools that are becoming available now.”—Mikkel deMib
- “Monitor SERPs for target keywords and topics to see which ones have video carousels, and create relevant video content.”—Rory Hope
- Deepen your topical coverage and sharpen your editorial angles.