AI has arrived, and it’s probably not going anywhere.
We’ve been bracing for AI’s impact on SEO and digital marketing for a few years, and 2025 was the year we finally saw its full impact. AI has gone from an emerging trend in the hi-tech industry to a central pillar of how people search the internet and how marketers reach potential customers online.
SEO also saw significant shifts, such as Google’s change to search engine results pages (SERPs) that removed a user’s option to display 100 results on a single page. So let’s dive into the most significant changes in search and how they might impact SEO and SEM in 2026.
The AI Overviews Era
Google started experimenting with AI Overviews as “Search Generative Experience” back in 2023. In July 2025, during the peak of Google’s experimentation, these overviews appeared in roughly 15% to 25% of search queries. By November of 2025, AI Overviews only appeared in about 16% of searches. Considering the volume of searches done on Google each year, this is still a substantial amount of AI usage for search engines.
As AI Overviews gained traction mid-year, click-through rates across industries declined by an average of 7.31 points. AI Overviews and other zero-click searches don’t mean you won’t be visible online. Still, it just means you have to switch up your 2026 SEO strategy and KPI metrics by adding tactics to be cited in AI Overviews to maintain visibility with potential customers.
Google also launched AI Mode in 2025, which shifts the algorithm’s focus from keywords to relevance based on user intent. Going into 2026, we highly recommend adapting your SEO strategy to focus on topical authority (i.e., thought leadership) and matching high-quality content to user intent.
Core Updates and Algorithm Shifts
Google is constantly making minor, core updates to its search algorithm. However, Google rolled out three named updates in March, June, and December. The big three included:
- March 2025: This update changed the core ranking system to prioritize relevant, helpful search results.
- June 2025: This update focused on displaying more useful search results and gave some websites a chance to recover traffic lost during previous updates. It also included an announcement about the MUVERA algorithm, which enhances search speed and generates higher-quality results for complex search queries.
- December 2025: This update continued Google’s focus on quality content and E-E-A-T (check out our article on strengthening EEAT in 2025).
These updates aim to improve the user experience by connecting searchers with helpful, relevant results and clean AI-generated spam from search results. Although these updates are well-intentioned and necessary, they can wreak havoc on your search engine rankings. As we’ve experienced firsthand, many websites are still recovering from the September 2023 “Helpful Content Update,” which was integrated into core ranking in March 2024. However, let’s move on from that tricky period in the world of search and keep focusing on the AI world ahead of us.
Google Ads Gets More Automated
On a positive note, Google made changes to different Google Ads features to benefit customers and advertisers. The company made major updates to Performance Max (Pmax) to give users more control and transparency. PMax now features more reporting tools and in-depth machine-learning powered metrics that help you understand what is driving performance. You can see search partner network data and age/gender exclusions, for example.
Google also launched AI Max for search campaigns. It features multiple targeting and creative features that match your ads to the right audience. It helps you expand your keywords to reach a larger network. In 2025, Google also made it possible to integrate ads into AI Overviews. Look for an article in 2026 that dives deeper into the new features of AI Max and how they can apply to your PPC campaigns.
AI features in Google Ads make it easier to measure digital ads across the marketing funnel with automation and machine-learning tools. As we’ve seen over the years, Google is requiring less manual input and analysis to help Google Ads experts make informed decisions and do less grunt work. With a broader reach, smaller companies and advertisers have started experimenting with diverse formats, including video, to appeal to a broader range of audiences.
New Tools and Features Worth Noting
Your 2025 toolkit includes new Google Search Console features, including:
- Query Groups: This feature automatically groups similar queries into a group to show you the total number of clicks. You can also see your performance in different query groups. Think of these as keyword groups, or keyword ‘clouds’, nicely bundled together to get an idea of what topics bring you traffic, rather than specific keywords.
- Branded Queries: This feature shows how you performed in searches for your brand name and its variants, including misspellings and queries for related brands. As part of Google’s use of advanced AI and machine learning, branded queries have been updated and improved in accuracy.
- Social Performance Data: This feature presents a single view of your performance across social media platforms. We expect this feature to improve and expand throughout 2026.
- Future Dated Annotations: Use this feature to add notes to your performance report for future reference. It’s helpful for tracking how site changes and updates impact your performance.
The new “Preferred Sources” feature lets users choose their favorite news sources to filter out irrelevant results. Users can also take advantage of agentic search in AI mode. This feature can book restaurants, events, and appointments.
A Glimpse at What’s Coming
AI continues to gain traction across digital marketing, and we’ll see it become increasingly embedded in both media buying and SEO strategies. Features like AI Mode will likely expand, while ad platforms introduce more automated campaign management tools. While these automations help users find what they need faster, they could put additional pressure on your traditional click-through rates as AI-generated answers satisfy queries without requiring clicks.
The rise of alternative search options: Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity, and others, means your SEO strategy can no longer focus solely on Google. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect the focus will shift from simply ranking in search engines to optimizing for visibility across all AI-generated answers, regardless of the platform serving them.
Closing Thoughts
The most important lesson of 2025 was that change is constant, and you need to stay adaptable. The ‘future’ many of us envisioned with automation, robots, and technology helping our everyday lives is coming quicker than most thought. However, it’s not a complete shift in what has worked.
Keep the fundamental components of SEO: high-quality, authoritative, and relevant content, and build on them. Continue to work on the best practices of PPC, using effective targeting, customer personas, personalized messaging, and all other tried and true marketing strategies.
Understanding how to adapt your existing building blocks for the future will keep you on top of the competition. We stay on top of trends and developments in SEO and SEM to help you adapt your strategy to new developments. Looking for someone to partner with? Contact us today to learn more.
