SEO Insights: December 2024 Report

Happy New Year! As we wave goodbye to 2024, we look ahead and adapt our focus to what 2025 is likely to bring in terms of search engine evolution.

2024 could be considered as the year of the introduction of visible AI in search results. It’s important to highlight “visible” in that statement as Google has used AI for many years to refine the search results, but most of this has happened in a “black box” environment, meaning that users are unlikely to even know that it’s happening.

Visible AI has come in the form of AI Overviews (which we first reported back in July). These are the AI driven summaries provided to searchers which Google and Bing display above the search results. These took pride of place mostly above the organic search results, although the quality of the overviews was, and still is, questionable at times.

Whether we like them or not, Google says users do like them, they are here to stay and will likely be a bigger feature going forward.

What can we expect in 2025?

During 2025, it will seem that Google was relatively kind to us by limiting the use of AI Overviews in search in 2024, as it’s highly likely that these will become far more abundant and prominent in 2025.

We are already seeing Google introducing AI-generated “Things to know” and “What people are saying” options when searching. On top of this, there is even the ability to further search with AI within the AI Overview by highlighting text to generate further information.

Google is releasing AI focused updates at a scale never seen before. The reason is that they are likely worried about the threat of AI based tools, such as ChatGPT, which are increasingly being used for search instead of Google.

In a recent internal meeting held by Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, he highlighted the challenges faced by the company in 2025 and stated, “I think 2025 will be critical, I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”

He also stated, “With the Gemini app, there is strong momentum, particularly over the last few months, but we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.”

Gemini is Google’s equivalent of ChatGPT. Google’s difficulty is that Google is seen as a search engine, whilst OpenAI’s ChatGPT is seen as an AI chat tool. With OpenAI recently launching its own search tool, Google is obviously worried.

And so they should be…but this need to challenge OpenAI will cause significant disruption in search.

Google’s AI Overviews are powered by Gemini and with their focus to become the leading AI chat app, they will likely continue to use their search engine to market Gemini. With over 8 billion searches a day, Google’s search engine is an astonishing opportunity for the company to use it to market its Gemini technology.

What does this mean for the organic search results?

We already saw in 2024 that the AI Overviews (AIOs) were beginning to steal traffic away from the organic search results. Regardless of the moral and ethical implications of this, it’s likely that we will now see these AI Overviews becoming more frequent and possibly even bigger than they are now, and further reducing traffic to websites.

The AIOs currently require a click on a button to expand them, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the button removed and the overviews open by default.

We will likely see the option to read AI generated summaries of websites in the search results, and further options to refine and expand on searches.

Google’s goal is clear: keep users within the search results for longer. That way that will see more ads and, therefore, generate more revenue for the company.

Google’s mission was always to send users away from its search results as quickly as possible. Google was designed to send users to websites with the best and most relevant information for search queries. But now that’s changed, and Google is more interested in keeping users searching, buying products, viewing images, refining their searches and giving them more and more options to stay and not leave.

Every time a user refines their search, they see a new set of ads. It’s abundantly clear what’s happening here.

What does that mean for businesses?

Organic search is still vitally important for businesses. The best most valuable traffic comes from search. It’s not going to go away but it is going to get harder, as AI Overviews, products, forums, query refinements, etc. are all making the search results very busy and reducing traffic to websites.

As with any new challenge, there are always opportunities. Many businesses just won’t be able to cope with this fast-changing environment and there will be many losers.

At Artemis, we invest heavily in our R&D to continually test and better understand the implications of Google’s fast-paced changes. This ensures that we are best placed to always have the most forward-thinking strategies to implement for our clients.

2025 will be a challenging year, but, as always, we look forward to the challenges ahead and continue to provide the most effective strategies for success in search.

Here’s to a great 2025!