How AI is Changing Search Marketing in 2025

With the way people search changing, so is search marketing – it's not dying but evolving. Getting seen towards the top, on page one, for high-volume searches is still important in 2025, but we're gradually moving toward a different landscape. The battle was once about chasing rankings; now,the real fight is getting cited in as many relevant results as possible.

Top Changes to Search with AI in 2025 (So Far) – and Their Impact

Google AI Overviews Continue to Take Over

AI Overviews began rolling out in May 2024, but have only continued to show for more and more searches in 2025. Initially appearing for informational searches, they now show more than 80% of the time, even for local business searches.

Though Google claims AI overviews are driving more queries and higher quality clicks, they have caused click-throughs to websites to drop substantially. With users getting answers to their queries right in the search results, those who would have once bounced after a quick visit no longer need to click through at all. While this means the clicks that do come through may be of higher quality, the challenge is getting those clicks in the first place. Google has been seen not citing sources and instead suggesting users make additional searches, keeping them within Google's search results.

Introduction of Google AI Mode

Announced by Google in March 2025, AI Mode initially rolled out to the US before expanding to the UK in July. This feature bridges the gap traditional search and AI chatbots, bringing a personalised AI search experience right inside of Google. Tell it you don't like cheese, and it'll remember that preference, showing you recipes without cheese in future searches.

AI Mode is likely to reduce click-through rates even further, as users can get answers to their questions and explore topics in greater depth with follow-up queries. Users will naturally shift to making longer,more detailed searches, similar to how they interact with AI chatbots, to find exactly what they want. Compared to AI Overviews, there's even less incentive to click through to websites, as users can simply ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into any topic.

Multimodal Search Is Rising

Traditional text-based queries have long dominated how we search online, but AI is expanding our options. While voice search and reverse image search have existed for years, AI is making these capabilities far more advanced.

With features like Google’s AI Mode, users can now have natural voice conversations to find information, upload videos to identify objects or locations, or combine multiple input types in a single search session. This shift toward multimodal search allows to search in a way that helps get their message clearly across, through typing, speaking, showing, or a combination of all three, to find the information they need.

What Should Be Done Differently with Your Search Marketing

It’s early days for AI search, and what really works is still being figured out. That said, there are a few things you can focus on or change as a part of your search marketing to help maintain and increase your visibility.

SEO

Build Topical Authority

Writing relevant content in your niche has always been important, but now more so than ever. Interlinking content pieces to each other and across different areas of your site creates a powerhouse effect, where everything works together to support and pass value between pages.

Building yourself as an expert in your field is rewarded now and will likely become even more important in the future. As AI summaries dominate,becoming the norm, clicks will likely only continue to fall, and many publishers may be discouraged from creating content. Search engines need someway to encourage publishers to keep producing quality content, so topical authority will likely become an even stronger trust signal.

With AI search, just as you can appear in search results multiple times, the same applies to citations. The more comprehensive content you produce, the higher your chances of being cited repeatedly, increasing your overall visibility and click-through potential. Focus on creating content that dives deep into topics, providing as much valuable new information as possible.This will build users confidence in your expertise, along with AI systems,increasing the chances of you being recommended.

Keep Content Structured

Search will process content however it's structured, but writing it to be well-structured only helps. Content with good structure increases the chances of snippets being extracted, used as rich results like in the "People Also Ask" box, and in AI results with you cited.

Write your content with a clear heading hierarchy and make use of bullet points. This will help increase your chances of visibility in search but also help users read and navigate your content more easily. Adding summarises is also good practice, particularly for articles answering specific questions. Consider adding key takeaways at the beginning of your content.

Focus on More Than Just Google

For years, the focus on SEO has been around increasing your visibility on Google. In 2025, more people are changing how they search, partly due to AI, but also driven by shifts in user behaviour.

Focus your efforts beyond just Google, considering other traditional search engines like Bing, but also LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude. Google is still, and will be for a long time, the go-to place for search, but more people will continue to explore alternative search methods. The younger generations, they’re already turning to platforms like TikTok to find answers in video format.

Traditional SEO still provides the foundation for visibility across search platforms, but it's important to consider other factors that carry more weight as these platforms rise. One of the biggest shifts forgetting visibility in LLMs is the importance of third-party validation. For recommendation-based searches like "best SEO specialist in Lincolnshire," success depends more on what others say about you than what you say about yourself.

Sync Your SEO with Other Marketing

If you've written an article like "How AI is Changing Search Marketing", integrate it into your broader marketing strategy. Repurpose the content across different channels, sharing insights on social media, breaking it down into short videos. This approach not only extends its reach but also increases the chances of you getting seen in search.

Search is starting to surface more than just text in its results, but videos too. Google has recently started indexing professional Instagram accounts, pulling through photos and videos to appear in its results.The more formats you appear in, the more supporting signals you send, the higher the chance of you getting seen in search.

PPC

Currently, search ads can only be run in traditional search results, though paid advertising options are coming soon. ChatGPT has announced that ads will arrive on their platform in 2026, while Google is expected to bring them to AI Mode and AI Overviews very soon.

Experiment with AI Max

Google announced AI Max for search campaigns back in May, working similarly to Performance Max but designed specifically for search advertising. Like Performance Max, it features keywordless technology but also uses broad match keywords for targeting. To help you show up for more relevant searches, Google's AI learns from your existing keywords, creative assets, and URLs.

AI Max will likely become the foundation for advertising in AI-powered search results, so should be experimented with. You can easily enable it on in just one click when setting up search campaigns.

Go Beyond Google

As new AI search platforms rise and LLMs develop further,new advertising opportunities are bound to arise. To tap into the se opportunities and stay ahead of the curve, it's important to go beyond Google.

Explore advertising on other platforms like Bing's AI-powered search and ChatGPT when options become available. The key to staying ahead is staying agile - with everything changing so fast with AI, what works well today might not tomorrow.

Challenges AI Brings to Search Marketing

Tracking

The future of tracking your search performance is unknown at this stage. For paid search, it’s fairly straightforward and will likely stay the same. For organic search, it’s a bit more complex.

Currently, data from Google’s AI features is recorded in Google Search Console as web traffic, grouped together with traditional search results. There’s no way to filter AI-driven clicks separately, though Google has said it’s to come soon.

Using Google Analytics, you can get more detail into where traffic is coming from beyond Google:

1. Go to Reports > Generate Leads > Traffic Acquisition.

2. Change the data filter from Session default channel group to Session source/medium.

Traffic from Google's AI mode appears as google / organic, merged with traditional search results. Traffic from other search sources will also appear here, a common few being:

• chatgpt.com / referral – organic traffic from ChatGPT

• perplexity.ai / referral – organic traffic from Perplexity

• bing / organic – organic traffic from Bing

• bing / cpc – paid traffic from Bing

Keyword tracking is common practice for measuring that SEO efforts are moving things in the right direction, but with AI search, it’s not much use. AI results are personalised; what one user sees will likely be completely different to another, even if they used the same query. There’s still a place for keyword tracking with traditional search, but with AI, it’s about tracking an increase in impressions, clicks, and conversions, not position.

Research

With AI, users are starting to use longer queries to get answers to exactly what they need. Queries are going from something short like…

“SEO specialist Lincoln”

to something longer like…

"I'm looking to work with an SEO specialist based locally in Lincoln. I need someone experienced in SEO auditing who can identify all the flaws with my site's SEO and present them clearly for my marketing team to develop into a strategy. Do you have any suggestions?"

We’re gradually moving towards a landscape where each and every search is unique, and that’s only going to make keyword research more difficult. From my perspective, I see it as we’ll be focusing less on exact match keywords and more on patterns within queries.

When AI processes queries, tokenisation is an important, where a query is broken into tokens. These are then translated to vectors to help understand what’s semantic similarity. While keyword research will always have a place, there’s likely going to be a shift towards something like tokens, looking at which words, phrases, and concepts consistently appear in responses and how they relate to user intent.

Spam

AI allows you to speed up your search marketing processes, but used wrong, can cause harm. When ChatGPT first became public, there was a huge wave of spam, people churning out masses of generic content, which flooded search results.

Search engines are now much better at detecting and penalising this type of content, with systems designed to identify low-quality AI spam.

Using AI for Search Marketing

AI isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity. Used right, it can help you do search marketing better and faster.

Content Creation

Using AI to streamline your content creation process is perfectly fine, just as long as you don't become reliant on it. Treating it as your assistant, you can use it for…

Ideas - Come up with a topic and ask for well-structured article ideas, then adjust them to make them yours.

Outlining - Give it your article idea and ask it to come up with an outline for you. Don’t just use it, but take ideas from it, looking at your competitor pieces too.

Shaping - It doesn’t matter how content is written. Filled with unique information, connects with users, that’s all it needs to perform well. Use AI to help structure your piece, turning your key points into paragraphs.

Finalising - Ask AI to check your piece for you during the finalising process, whether that’s improving flow or checking spelling is correct. Make sure you go over it before you say it’s done, because remember, AI isn’t always right.

Ad Creation

AI is making the whole ad creation process much easier. With LLMs, you can get ideas on how to structure your campaigns and brainstorm copy. Within most of the search advertising platforms themselves, there’s also assistants that can help set up the ads too.

Google launched an AI assistant back in 2023 to help users find answers and solve account issues. Since then, it has developed further and now helps with everything from writing copy to generating ideas directly from your target landing pages. Microsoft has also integrated CoPilot into its platforms, offering similar assistance.

With AI Max currently rolling out, it's going to be even easier to not just set up, but manage your ads with AI. Google's AI optimises your AI Max ads in real-time, staying aligned with your message. Many third-party management tools also have AI capabilities, some of which provide recommendations and can even action them for you.

Research

Search marketing research can be time consuming, and if you’re outsourcing, expensive. Using AI however, the process can be sped up.

One of the ways you can speed it up is by connecting Ahrefs to an AI assistant like Claude by API (only available on Enterprise plan). Instead of manually navigating dashboards and analysing data, you can simply chat to AI, instructing them to perform research tasks for you. Keyword research, competitor analysis, what would have once taken hours of manual work, now, can be completed in minutes.

You can learn more about the Ahrefs MCP server on GitHub.

Data Analysis

AI is a game changer when it comes to making sense of your data. You can now download data from analytical platforms like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Microsoft Clarity, then feed it into AI tools to ask direct questions about performance, trends, and opportunities you might have missed.

Microsoft Clarity has already integrated CoPilot directly into their platform, giving you AI-powered insights into how users that come from search interact with your site. Instead of manually analysing heatmaps and session recordings, you can get instant explanations of user behaviour patterns, and even chat about it.

Many reporting tools have also started introducing AI features that let you have conversations with your data. Rather than building complex reports or trying to interpret charts yourself, you can simply ask what's working, what isn't, and why. Looker Studio by Google now has Gemini built in, which not only helps analyse your data but can even generate custom visualisations based on what you're looking for.

Keep Your Search Marketing Strategy in Line with AI

A lot has changed with search so far in 2025, and without a doubt, there’s still a lot to come. Stay persistent with your search marketing and keep adapting as things change - no one knows what’s round the corner, but people will always be searching. These days, it’s more than just getting seen on Google, but anywhere and everywhere people search.

Want to put your search marketing strategy in the hands of a specialist who's committed to staying ahead? An experienced search marketing consultant offering a range of professional PPC and SEO services, I'm here to help keep your focus on your business while staying ahead of all the changes.

Take your next step towards search success – get in touch today.

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