Hello! Happy New Year and welcome to 2025. As usual, at the start of the year, there are a whole raft of predictions as to what will happen.
I normally like to write my owns thoughts and predictions on what I’ve heard and read, but I thought I’d do things a bit different this year, and provide you with the thoughts of some of the experts I like to follow.
In 2025, what’s standing out is the growth of search engines. It’s no longer just confined to Google or Bing. We’re seeing the growth of AI search engines, like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity AI (One I wasn’t aware of this time last year).
Here are some of the articles that have caught my attention and are well worth having a look at.
On Neil Patel’s blog
2025 Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions
Zero-clicks, I spoke about this last year. From my own personal experience, there are a lot of questions I type into Google, that give me an AI generated answer on the SERPs.
I only click on a link if I want more in-depth information and understanding of the question I’m asking.
Search Engine Journal
22 SEO Experts Offer Their Predictions For 2025
The thoughts of CEO and Co-Founder of Wordlift, Andrea Volpini stood out for me in this set of predictions.
She writes:
“SEO professionals and marketers should optimize for both human and AI audiences, particularly large language models (LLMs).
LLMs excel at processing structured, concise text, but often struggle with complex, visually rich websites.”
Montserrat Cano talks about branding and the importance of creating a brand that people trust. Users and search engines prioritize trusted brands, so consistent branding and high-quality content are essential. It’s crucial to communicate what the brand represents and offers, so it becomes a reliable source for LLMs to cite.
Crawling Monday
SEO Trends, Predictions & Tips for 2025
One of my favourite go to SEO experts is definitely Aleyda Solis.
Listen to SEO predictions, trends and tips for 2025 in this in-depth SEO conversation with experienced SEO specialists.
During the video, they talk about how AI-driven overviews and answer engines will dominate search results – moving beyond informational to transactional queries. This is something I’ve already started to notice with my own personal use of Google.
Something I’ve spoken about in previous posts is that we’ll see low-quality, mass-produced AI content will face penalties. It’s important to focus on authentic, high-quality content emphasizing expertise.
Lily Ray
How To Prepare for the Future of SEO: 17 Tips From Lily Ray
Lily Ray is another one of my favourite SEO experts.
I like this point she made here:
“Leverage unique company resources: Build content around original data, insights, and perspectives”
I already have experience of this from my time working for the pet insurer ManyPets. Using the company’s own claims data was one source of producing new and relevant content.
Content Marketing Institute
40+ Content Marketing Trends Experts Predict Will Matter for Success in 2025
No surprises to see that AI dominates many of the predictions for 2025, as illustrated by this quote:
“In 2025, AI will shift from being a competitive advantage to a baseline expectation.”
I wrote about this last year and the importance of training colleagues and other teams on AI, establishing guidelines for ethical use and transparency.
Hubspot
5 Marketing Experts Predict The Top Trends We’ll See in 2025
And finally, over at Hubspot, they’re talking about Audio AI. This is the first time I’ve come across this term.
“the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to process, analyse, and create audio. It can be used to generate speech, enhance audio quality, and understand natural language”
You can potentially turn blog posts into podcasts or translate voices into different languages.
Sounds interesting. It’s something I’m definitely going to keep my eyes on during the next few months