SEO Insights: February 2025 Report
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Google has been rolling out updates over the last couple of months.
However, they’ve been unexpectedly calm about it recently.
Despite this, like clockwork, we’ve been seeing the usual ranking volatility that we’ve become accustomed to whenever updates roll out.
But if there is one thing we can be sure of going forward it is that rankings will become increasingly unstable and “noisier” as Google continues to use its AI to better understand the intent behind search queries.
What we can expect, in addition, is a decline in overall organic search traffic.
We can primarily attribute this to an increase in the presence of AI Overviews in the search results.
“Flat is the new up”
Search Engine Land recently used this phrase to describe how organic search has evolved. It can also be argued that maybe not losing traffic is actually a positive in the current search climate, where flatlining can be seen as a good thing.
Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) occupy key positions at the top of the search results, and as these become increasingly intrusive and visible for a greater number of search queries, it does lead to users clicking fewer organic links and sending less traffic to websites.
AIOs are currently more obvious and common in US search results than in the UK, and many US websites are already seeing traffic declines as a consequence of these.
Just last week, a large US based education company filed a lawsuit against Google for “significant traffic loss” caused by the AIOs. And this is quite early on in this phased rollout of AIOs by Google and they are likely to grow and become more prominent in the search results over time.
Whilst the AIOs currently default to a closed position on initial load, Google is testing expanded versions which occupy more space in the search results. As this rolls out, we can expect a greater level of traffic coming from the AIOs instead of the organic search results.
When Google originally unveiled the AIOs in a blog post, the AIOs appeared in their open position, so we can expect that this is their ultimate goal, to present them in this open style by default, and it’s likely to happen this year.
We have already started detecting traffic coming from the links in the AIOs so it’s very important now to also focus about being present and featured in the AIOs as well as in the traditional organic results.
It’s not all bad news
As part of our significant and continuous investment in R&D, we have been very focused on understanding the impact of AIOs on search traffic in the US, and have also been running experiments to optimise websites for increased presence in the AIOs and in other AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.
Using our proprietary research and methodologies, we have developed our own “Artemis Intelligence®” to optimise websites for a strong presence not just in the AIOs and AI tools, but also to improve organic search rankings which are refined using AI.
Having developed Artemis Intelligence® into a formidable system (and one with continual long-term attention and investment) that can maximise opportunities in an AI focused search space, we will ensure that our clients continue to not just maintain their current traffic levels, but also to grow their overall traffic from search.
