SEO in 2025: Still Growing, Just Not Where You’re Looking

SEO is still relevant in 2025. What has changed is where the value sits, what it takes to compete, and how honest you need to be about what organic search can and cannot deliver for your business. The channel is not dying. Parts of it are maturing, parts are shifting, and a few assumptions that worked five years ago no longer hold.

If you are running a serious marketing programme, SEO still deserves a seat at the table. The question is which seat, and under what conditions.

What Has Actually Changed in Organic Search

The noise around SEO’s decline tends to conflate two separate things: changes to how Google surfaces results, and changes to whether organic search drives commercial outcomes. These are not the same conversation.

Google’s AI Overviews, which rolled out at scale through 2024 and into 2025, have reduced click-through rates on certain query types. Informational searches, the kind that used to fuel top-of-funnel content strategies, now frequently produce an AI-generated summary above the organic results. For many publishers who built their entire model on high-volume informational traffic, this has been genuinely painful.

But that is a content monetisation problem as much as it is an SEO problem. If your strategy was built around capturing informational traffic and converting it slowly through a long nurture sequence, the economics of that model were always fragile. The AI Overview change has simply made the fragility visible faster.

Commercial and transactional queries, the searches that sit closer to a buying decision, continue to produce clicks. Google still needs to show users where to go, what to buy, and who to trust. That is not a problem AI can fully absorb, and it is not trying to. The search results page for “best accounting software for small businesses” or “commercial HVAC maintenance London” still looks like a page that wants you to click something.

I spent several years managing SEO programmes across financial services, retail, and B2B technology clients. The ones that performed consistently were never the ones chasing informational volume. They were the ones with clear commercial intent mapping, strong technical foundations, and content that actually answered the questions buyers were asking at each stage of the decision process. That approach is more valuable now, not less.

If you want a fuller picture of how SEO fits into a broader acquisition strategy, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers the channel from foundations through to measurement, and it is worth reading alongside this piece.

The Rankings Obsession Is the Wrong Frame

One of the things that has always bothered me about how SEO gets reported internally is the fixation on position. Rank one for this keyword. Top three for that phrase. I have sat in board meetings where someone presented a ranking report as evidence of marketing success, and nobody in the room asked what the business outcome was.

Rankings are a leading indicator at best. They tell you something about visibility. They tell you nothing about whether that visibility is reaching the right people, generating qualified demand, or contributing to revenue. I have seen businesses ranked on page one for dozens of keywords and still losing market share, because the keywords they were ranking for were not the ones their buyers were using.

This connects to something I think about a lot when evaluating marketing performance. A business can look like it is growing while actually falling behind. If your organic traffic is up 15% year on year but the total addressable search volume in your category grew by 40%, you are losing ground, not gaining it. The absolute number flatters you. The relative number tells the truth.

Share of search is a more honest metric for SEO health. It measures how often your brand appears relative to competitors across the keyword landscape you care about. It is harder to game, harder to misread, and much closer to what actually matters commercially. Moz has written usefully on what meaningful SEO success looks like beyond the vanity metrics, and it is worth revisiting if your team is still leading with rankings in performance reviews.

Why E-E-A-T Is Now a Commercial Reality, Not Just a Guideline

Google’s quality framework, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, has been part of its evaluator guidelines for years. For most of that time, it functioned more as a philosophical statement than an operational ranking signal. That has changed.

The combination of the Helpful Content updates and the proliferation of AI-generated content has forced Google to get more serious about surfacing content that demonstrates genuine knowledge. Thin, generic, well-optimised content is harder to rank than it was three years ago. Content that reflects real experience, real expertise, and a genuine point of view is performing better across most verticals.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one thing that becomes obvious when you are evaluating hundreds of marketing cases is that the work that holds up over time is grounded in a real understanding of the audience and the category. The work that looks clever but lacks substance tends to underperform on the back half of the measurement period. The same dynamic is playing out in SEO. Content that exists to rank is being displaced by content that exists to be genuinely useful.

For businesses in regulated sectors, professional services, healthcare, or finance, this is actually good news. If you have genuine expertise and you are willing to put it on the page in a way that is accessible and specific, you have a structural advantage over content farms and AI-generated generic articles. That advantage compounds over time if you maintain it.

The Technical Foundation Still Matters, and Most Sites Still Get It Wrong

There is a version of the “SEO is dead” argument that is really just frustration with technical debt. Teams invest in content, see underwhelming results, and conclude the channel is broken. Often the channel is fine. The site is broken.

When I was running agency teams, we would frequently inherit SEO programmes from clients who had been publishing content for two or three years with minimal organic growth. In most cases, the content was not the primary problem. Crawlability issues, duplicate content at scale, slow Core Web Vitals, internal linking that went nowhere, canonicalisation errors on faceted navigation, these are the things that prevent good content from performing. Fix the foundation and the content starts to work. Leave the foundation broken and you are pouring effort into a leaking bucket.

A proper technical audit is not a one-time exercise. Sites change, CMS updates introduce new issues, and what was clean six months ago may not be clean today. Running structured SEO audits on a regular cadence is one of the most consistently undervalued practices in organic search management.

Core Web Vitals have been a confirmed ranking factor for several years now, and the gap between fast sites and slow sites in competitive verticals is measurable. If your site is loading slowly on mobile, you are paying a ranking penalty and a conversion penalty simultaneously. That is an expensive problem to ignore.

How AI Is Reshaping the SEO Workflow, Not Replacing It

The conversation about AI and SEO tends to collapse into one of two positions: AI will replace SEO, or AI is just a tool. Neither is quite right.

What AI has done is change the cost structure of content production, which has flooded the web with more content than at any previous point in history. The volume of published content is not the bottleneck anymore. Differentiation is the bottleneck. If you can produce ten articles a week with AI assistance, so can your competitors. The question is whether any of those articles are better than what already exists, and whether they reflect a perspective that a reader cannot get from a generic AI summary.

AI is genuinely useful in the SEO workflow for specific tasks: keyword clustering, content gap analysis, brief generation, meta description drafting, structured data markup. These are tasks where speed matters more than originality. Where AI falls short is in producing content that demonstrates real experience, takes a defensible position, or reflects the kind of nuanced commercial judgment that builds trust with a sophisticated reader.

The businesses I see getting the most from AI-assisted SEO are the ones using it to accelerate the structural work while keeping human expertise at the centre of the content itself. They are not replacing their subject matter experts. They are freeing them from the low-value parts of the production process so they can focus on the parts that actually differentiate.

There is also a longer-term strategic question here about how search engines evolve in response to AI-generated content at scale. The competitive dynamics between Google and Microsoft in search have historically driven significant changes in how results are ranked and displayed. Both companies are under pressure to maintain result quality as AI content volume increases. That pressure is likely to continue working in favour of demonstrably authoritative sources.

SEO as a Product, Not a Project

One of the most useful reframes I have seen applied to SEO in recent years is treating it with a product mindset rather than a campaign mindset. Moz has explored this approach directly, and it reflects how the better-performing SEO programmes actually operate in practice.

A campaign mindset treats SEO as a series of discrete projects: an audit here, a content push there, a link building sprint when rankings dip. The work is episodic, the team is reactive, and the results tend to be inconsistent. A product mindset treats the organic search presence as something that needs continuous iteration, user-centred thinking, and a clear hypothesis about what will drive improvement.

When I grew the agency I was running from around 20 people to over 100, one of the structural changes we made was moving away from project-based SEO retainers toward ongoing programmes with defined objectives, regular sprint cycles, and clear accountability for business outcomes. The clients who engaged with that model consistently outperformed those who treated SEO as a quarterly deliverable. Not because the tactics were different, but because the consistency of execution and the speed of iteration compounded over time.

Organic search is a long-game channel. It rewards consistency, penalises neglect, and does not respond well to being treated as an afterthought between paid media campaigns. If your organisation does not have the appetite for that kind of sustained commitment, you will get better returns from paid search in the short term. That is not a criticism. It is just an honest read of where the effort-to-return ratio sits for different business contexts.

The Businesses That Should Still Be Investing in SEO

Not every business should be prioritising SEO in 2025. The channel makes most sense when the following conditions are in place.

First, your buyers use search as part of their decision-making process. This sounds obvious, but I have seen SEO programmes built for categories where the actual buyer experience runs almost entirely through referral, direct outreach, or offline channels. If your buyers are not searching, ranking is not going to move your commercial needle.

Second, you have the patience and the budget to invest over a meaningful time horizon. SEO programmes typically take six to twelve months to show material organic growth, and that assumes a clean technical foundation, consistent content production, and active link acquisition. If you need revenue in the next quarter, paid search will serve you better.

Third, you have genuine expertise or a differentiated perspective to put into your content. In a world where AI can produce competent generic content at scale, “competent and generic” is no longer a viable content strategy. If you cannot articulate what makes your content worth reading over the ten other results on the page, you are competing on optimisation alone, and that is an increasingly thin margin.

For businesses that meet those conditions, SEO in 2025 is still one of the most cost-efficient acquisition channels available. The cost per acquisition from well-established organic rankings is typically a fraction of what paid search costs in the same category, and the asset value of a strong organic presence compounds over time in a way that paid media does not.

The Complete SEO Strategy hub goes deeper on how to structure an SEO programme that is built around business outcomes rather than channel metrics, which is worth working through if you are evaluating where SEO sits in your acquisition mix.

What Honest SEO Measurement Looks Like in 2025

Measuring SEO honestly is harder than it used to be, and most organisations are not doing it well. Attribution models that rely on last-click or even linear touch are systematically undervaluing organic search because a significant portion of its contribution happens earlier in the buyer experience, in the research and consideration phase, where it rarely gets the conversion credit.

The most useful measurement framework I have seen combines several layers. Organic traffic to commercial pages, not just overall traffic. Assisted conversions from organic, not just last-touch conversions. Share of search across your priority keyword set. And where possible, revenue influence modelled across the full path to purchase.

None of these are perfect. Analytics tools are a perspective on reality, not reality itself. But they are more honest than a rankings report, and they give you a basis for making better resource allocation decisions. If you are presenting SEO performance to a CFO or a board, you need to be able to connect the channel to commercial outcomes in language that makes sense to them. “We moved from position four to position two for this keyword” is not that language.

I have managed marketing programmes where the SEO team was producing genuinely strong results by any channel-specific measure, but where the business was allocating budget elsewhere because nobody had done the work to translate those results into commercial terms. That is a failure of communication as much as measurement, and it is avoidable.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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