Here are the top ways SEO evolved throughout 2024 and how you can navigate these changes for better results in 2025.
A lot of 2025 SEO trend posts will give you generic predictions like “technical SEO will still matter in 2025,” or “you will need to write great content,” or that TikTok and voice search will be big.
Instead of guessing at trends for 2025 or listing SEO tactics that still work, in this article, I’ll focus on what happened in 2024, what that means for SEO, and how that should inform how you think about SEO as we enter 2025.
Here are the top seven ways SEO changed in 2024.
If you’ve run informational searches on Google recently, you’ve likely seen something like this:
These are AI Overviews, AI-generated responses to queries created by Google. Three things are currently true about AI Overviews:
Let’s look at the history of AI Overviews:
Percentages like 7-15% don’t sound like a lot, but for a certain set of queries that might mean more like 80% of searches. Or your site might get 60-70% of its traffic from 25-50 pages, and those pages might be disproportionally impacted.
If you’re a cybersecurity software company, you may be seeing results like this one (only with ads overlaid over the AI Overview) in all of the search results where you rank in organic results:
Meanwhile, if you’re a local business trying to rank for plumbing in Sioux Falls, you likely don’t have an AI Overview within miles of your SERPs:
The results here are still Local Services Ads, Google Maps, and standard organic search. Through all of the shake ups the SERP displays, the best practices for local SEO stay relatively consistent.
How does this impact sites? For sites that have AI Overviews in a lot of their search results, there are a variety of impacts, including:
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The ability to push a button and—for very low costs—generate content of reasonable quality is another thing that’s had a major impact on SEO in 2024.
Originality AI estimates that the percentage of AI content ranking in the top 20 Google results has more than doubled in 2024.
Entire industries have been built around the growth of generative AI content, including:
And of course, many more are likely to pop up over time.
During the pandemic, people flocked to online sources to do comparison shopping. Many affiliates had quietly been ranking for all kinds of “best X” and “best X for Y” searches. With all of the new search volume around these terms, additional attention (in the form of media and users noticing) was paid to this fact.
Subsequent updates meant that these smaller affiliates were replaced with large, authoritative sites (more on this shortly).
This is a common trend in Google search results over the years. It’s happened with larger publishers cranking out thin content, with guest blog marketplaces, with niche sites, and it’s already happened with AI. The basic cycle goes something like this:
Advice from 17 years ago still stands: Don’t make Google look stupid.
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As Google responded to AI content, one of the biggest shifts in 2024 (a continuation of Google updates over the last couple of years) has been how aggressively “UGC” or user-generated content from forums and Q&A sites has been.
Here’s organic traffic to Reddit:
Here’s organic traffic to a niche forum focused on stargazing (many niches will have a forum or two with the same graph):
And here’s the traffic graph for Omnicalculator, a large site with calculators around topics like calculating a dog’s weight, calculating steps to calories, etc.:
Looking at where Omnicalculator has gained traffic in the last year is particularly instructive here. Some of the terms are calculator terms where they displaced other calculators or traditional articles, but here are some terms in the top 10 traffic gainers for them:
Google’s Helpful Content Update impacted a lot of “niche sites” or small independent publishing sites focused on a specific area (frequently focused around and dependent upon Google for traffic, which was then monetized via ads or affiliate marketing).
Some sites have seen recoveries, some have seen partial recoveries, and many have abandoned any effort to recover or rank in Google at all.
Helpful content updates have been the subject of a ton of speculation, misinformation, and agitation for those impacted. Speculation about the focus of these updates includes:
Every Google action leads to an equal and sometimes opposite reaction from SEOs.
An interesting picture is starting to form here:
Enter: Parasite SEO and “Site Reputation Abuse.”
While parasite SEO didn’t start in 2024, it has become a more talked about and more heavily utilized tactic.
This manifests in a few ways:
And, of course, as this practice got more and more press and attention, Google responded with a “site reputation abuse” policy and update this year.
Outlook India, which had become a popular parasite SEO host, has seen surges and drops in the way of all of this:
And Forbes and CNN saw hits as well:
More and more stories along these lines continue to surface, and as they get pushed into the press and Google responds, what works and doesn’t will likely continue to change.
Google is no stranger to accusations of being a search monopoly, and it seems like their search quality rater guidelines get leaked every year, but there were some developments that were specific to 2024:
While this may not have had a visible impact on many sites trying to rank in search results in 2024, there could be any number of implications, including:
Google also had a creator summit–recapped by various attendees–where they admitted that in some HCU traffic drops, content was not the issue.
Even if you’re a small, locally-focused business, any and all of these changes, trends, and events in 2024 could impact you at some point.
But what can you actually do about any of them right now?
There are a few things that you (or the person in charge of your SEO) can do right away to address these trends:
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Additionally, there are a few things you can keep in mind as 2025 progresses:
Ultimately the main thing to keep in mind as you enter 2025 is to try to understand how your search results (both the rankings and the search features included in them) have changed, are changing, and may change in the future so that you can continue to generate as many leads, sales, and profits as you can from SEO in 2025.
