Another year in search has come and gone, and Google called it the third year of a 10-year platform transition. By 2025, that change became impossible to ignore. AI has moved from testing and previewing into the core of how search actually works.
Below are the biggest SEO news of 2025 in Search Engine Land.
Note: This article does not cover any news related to Google algorithm updates. Barry Schwartz wrote a different iteration of that, which will be published today.
10. Emergency features and programs
Independent researcher Metehan Yesilyurt analyzed browser-level interactions to reveal how Perplexity scores, reorders, and sometimes drops content. He featured a three-layered read-only engine for enterprise search, manual authorization, and a host of engagement and compliance features.
Yesilyurt’s research also found an increase in authoritative domains, strong early performance, and topics focused on technology and AI. The rankings also feature time decay, clusters of linked content, and synchronized YouTube trends that increase visibility across platforms.
9. Google Search Console query groups
Google has added query groups to the Search Console Insights report. The feature uses AI to group similar search queries into specific audience topics and doesn’t affect rankings. It was phased out for high-volume sites and replaced long questionnaires with topic-level collections that made it easier to see performance shifts.
8. The Downfall of HubSpot SEO
HubSpot’s organic traffic has seen a drop from 13.5 million to 8.6 million per month, with most of the loss coming from its blog. The decline followed several Google updates, and SEOs publicly pointed to thin, off-topic content, traffic at all costs that went beyond HubSpot’s basic technology.
7. SEO vs. GEO
The SEO identity crisis continued as Google dismissed new terms such as GEO (productivity engine optimization) and AEO (response engine optimization), arguing that good SEO is good GEO, and that the same fundamentals drive AI Overview standards.
That trend is at odds with Google’s admission that a decline in search traffic is inevitable as AI answers replace clicks, even if traditional search still largely dominates discovery.
However, search behavior is breaking: users are turning to AI for quick answers and to Google for deep research, pushing brands to optimize visibility, not just traffic.
6. Google AI mode
Google has rapidly expanded AI Mode from an opt-in test to a widely available, and likely soon to be automatic, search experience. It has added deep research, agent actions, personalization, and Gemini 2.5, which shows advanced and complex search behavior.
At the same time, AI Mode has exposed huge transparency gaps. It first broke referral tracking and still includes performance data in regular Search Console reports, raising new concerns about visibility, exposure, and what SEO is becoming as AI takes a bigger role in search.
5. Cloudflare vs. Google
Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said AI is disrupting the business model driven by web search. He said Google served more content while returning very little traffic as a result of zero clicks. He added that AI companies are deepening inequality by consuming large amounts of content with little return to creators, putting real publishing at risk unless the economic model changes.
4. Google search market share dips
Statcounter data showed that Google’s global search share fell below 90% in October, November, and December 2024, the first time its search share has stayed below 90% since early 2015. The decline was mainly due to Asia, and the US’s December plunge of 87.39%. Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo captured a large portion of the lost.
3. Content generated by AI
Google has strengthened its position on AI-generated content by telling quality raters to give Very Low ratings to pages where most of the primary content is auto- or AI-generated with little originality or added value. It also expanded its spam definitions to target limited, low-effort AI use.
At the same time, Google tested AI-generated and AI-generated search snippets, pointing to a future where AI both judges content harshly and increasingly controls how that content appears in searches.
2. Overview of Google AI’s impact on clicks
Analyzes from Seer, Ahrefs, Amsive, and BrightEdge all showed the same pattern. Google Search generated more impressions and AI overviews, but sent fewer clicks. The decline was sharpest for unbranded, informational queries, where AI Overview reduced classic results, and CTR dropped significantly.
The study also found a strong winner-take-all. Brands cited in the AI Overview saw higher paid and organic CTR, while those left out lost, showing that AI visibility is driving results.
1. RIP, number=100
The removal of Google has been around for a long time &num=100 The search parameter has disrupted SEO data across the industry. It broke rank tracking tools and coincided with a sharp drop in Google Search Console views and query counts.
Early analysis showed many sites lost reported visibility, especially beyond page 1. The change suggested years of increased metrics from scrapers and a new, possibly more accurate, view of organic performance.
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