The Top Headlines in SEO for 2025

Another year, another wild ride in the world of SEO. You may recall last year’s hit piece on Google completely unbiased marketing roundup touching briefly on some AI news and updates, and predicting more in 2025. Well, I’m happy to say that I was correct. I’d love to credit this to my obvious genius, but really, it was a given that the people behind the machines would naturally just keep pushing, whether we wanted them to or not.

2025 wasn’t all doom and gloom. While it was heavily dominated by AI news (because, let’s face it, it is pretty unavoidable at this point), there were also the annual Google Updates that generally cause a bit of havoc in the rankings, and a surprising win for us all (that also caused a bit of havoc, naturally). And so, without further ado, let’s take a look at the top headlines in SEO for 2025.

Core Updates Offer Small Reprieve

Google Core Updates are inevitable. 2024 saw an unheard-of number of core updates (four), and 2025 was reported to have as many, if not more. Luckily, we only had two, and they were relatively unremarkable. Why is this a win? Core updates tend to cause a lot of volatility with website rankings, which, in turn, causes your beloved SEOs a lot of stress.

The best thing about these core updates in 2025 was that the one in June appears to have helped with the recovery from websites that were hit by September 2024’s Helpful Content Update. Small victories? I’ll take them.

SEO is not Dead, AI Admits

To all those in 2024 who said AI was coming for our jobs, I’d like to tell you to stuff that opinion in the rubbish because SEO is alive and kicking. As Google’s own Danny Sullivan says, “good SEO is good GEO” (that G stands for “generative”, not “garbage”, as we first thought). GEO is literally doing the same thing that SEO has always done: providing a great page experience and creating unique, valuable content. It was trained on our work, and it’s also using Google’s best practices, so really, it has us to thank for its success.

Additionally, data from Similarweb back in August showed that 95.3% of ChatGPT users visited Google, while only 14.3% of Google users visited ChatGPT. So, while AI search feels like it’s the thing everyone is using these days, Google is still the default search engine. This even extends to the people using AI for absolutely everything; many are still cross-checking their information with Google. I once again remind you that this is because all of the information ChatGPT is giving you is mined from existing sources you’d find in a Google search.

Chegg Sues Over AI Overviews

Chances are, if you’ve searched for anything on Google this year, you’ve encountered AI Overviews. If you’re running a business and have a website, there’s even a chance some of your content has been used in AI Overviews to answer queries. Some businesses are happy to show up in the AI Overview, seeing it as a mark of success to be mentioned by the Google Gods for their expertise. Others, like Chegg, have filed lawsuits against Google due to major business impacts, such as, in Chegg’s case, a 49% decline in traffic year-over-year and a 98% decline in market value. Those aren’t small potatoes; it’s the whole dang crop. This was reported back in February, and since then, Chegg’s revenue has suffered so much that they were forced to lay off 45% of their workforce at the end of October. At the time of writing this, the lawsuit is ongoing (ironically, AI Overviews provided that answer).

Search Console Rollercoaster Ride

In September, Google Search Console users noticed something strange: impressions fell, but average position improved. This was because the &num=100 URL parameter was removed. For those who don’t know, that parameter was being used to scrape up to 100 results, including those low-visibility rankings in positions 30-100. By removing that parameter, Search Console is showing only the results actually seen by users, causing the drop in impressions whilst raising average positions. This drop represents a more accurate baseline, as experts believe the inflated impressions were from automated crawlers and possibly even large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, using third-party tools to scrape Google results. And hey, seeing that average position rise felt pretty good, even if we had nothing to do with it.

AI Overviews Caught Cheating

Well, violating spam rules, at least. According to a viral social media post, Google’s own AI Overviews was caught breaking the spam policies that Google holds the rest of us accountable to.

Google’s guidelines clearly state that, to avoid being flagged as spam, content should:

• Provide substantial additional value and originality if drawing on other sources, and avoid copying or rewriting.
• Be by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrates they know the topic well.
• Clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (ex, having used the product or service, or visiting the place).

Content should avoid:

• Mass production on many different topics in hopes that some may perform well in search results.
• Using extensive automation to produce content on many topics.
• Mainly summarizing what others are saying.

Despite these guidelines essentially describing what AI Overviews do, they still rank #1 for many queries. This is a perfect example of “do as I say, not as I do”. Is AI Overview Google’s nepo baby?

Wrapping Things Up

Thus concludes the 2025 SEO year in review. It’s been a wild ride, especially if you’re AI Overviews, apparently. But, whether you love them or hate them, they’re here to stay (depending on the results of that lawsuit, am I right?). Stay tuned for 2026, where we’ll get to see if AI crashes and burns or continues to grow, causing the rest of us to crash and burn, literally. I’ve got a calendar full of marketing news to bring your way and a mix of familiar and new contributors for our biweekly blog. Thanks for sticking around, and have a safe and happy holiday season!