Last Updated on December 17, 2025 by admin
“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. “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. 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. Image Source Image Source 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% 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% 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% specifically named Google’s AI Overviews as a threat to search traffic. And the biggest concern, generative AI chatbots, was selected by only 13% of respondents. A tiny percentage, just 2%, 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