SEO is changing in front of us: genAI reduces the cost of content creation to (basically) zero, whilst offering the first real challenge to Google’s monopoly and giving Google itself a new way of ordering search results through AI Overviews.
Your SEO strategy must evolve to succeed in 2025. It is a huge risk to continue business as usual. Fortunately, Ellipsis is a world-class SEO agency and we can share the insights we’ve brought to our clients recently.
Content quality, from “goog enough” to exceptional
At the core is Google’s long-standing content quality problem: it can’t determine if content is actually good or just “good enough.”
Google uses Machine Learning to rank content based on user engagement signals, but it’s been unable to determine if a user clicks on the URL because it looks good or it’s actually good.
Low-quality content from big brands gets clicked on (because people recognise the brand), and the algorithm learns that people want low-quality content. As a result, entire categories — just try and buy a new phone — are useless due to low-quality results from big brands.
This is the “goog enough” problem. It’s what caused The Verge to argue that the SEO industry is ruining the internet. And it’s what — when ChatGPT came along — made searchers receptive to a different information source. Sure, ChatGPT hallucinates, but at least it isn’t stuffing affiliate links down my throat.
If your content is not excellent, it is part of the problem. A reckoning is coming for “goog enough” content, as genAI improves Google’s understanding of page content. 35% to 55% of AI Overviews results aren’t from the first page, and ranking #1 only gets a 53% chance of inclusion. Google’s Gemini seeks content that satisfies experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
For your SEO strategy to succeed in 2025, it must be underpinned by excellent content quality. You need to deeply understand search intent and what searchers are looking for, and offer them quality and expertise they cannot get anywhere else.
Your content should be so good that a subject matter expert learns from it. This is hard to pull off. But for your SEO strategy to succeed, you need to be differentiated and better than the competition.
Content quality is crucial for a successful 2025 SEO strategy. If you don’t have this, fix it first before continuing to read. If you have it, we can move on.
The opportunity in uncertainty with AI search platforms
This is a huge blindspot for the industry. There are no benchmarks for tracking performance with genAI search, AI overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, or other novel AI search providers.
The SEO industry’s general response has been to bury its head in the sand and declare it’s business as usual. This is a terrible idea.
The lack of standards requires you to figure this out yourself. This creates a wonderful opportunity to win whilst others are not paying attention.
The first step is accurate measurement. Consider your users, their search methods, and which platforms to track. Do you need to focus on AI Overviews? Or Perplexity? Or ChatGPT? Free or paid?
You probably don’t need to track all platforms as each has a different user profile. ChatGPT free is more B2C, whilst Perplexity is more tech-focused B2B. Semrush’s One2Target socioceconomic data shows that 28% of Perplexity of users are in the “High” income bracket versus ChatGPT users:
But there are fewer Perplexity users. This requires attention.
Next, decide what to measure. There are no search volumes for ChatGPT, so understand your customers and their likely search behavior. For many, this will focus on top revenue keywords. For Ellipsis, we can take: “who are the top SEO Content agencies?”
Then, measure. There are a handful of new products that will measure presence in AI overviews and ChatGPT rank tracking, but there’s no single source of truth. You may need to cobble together different solutions or, as we’re choosing to do, roll your own tracking and reporting.
We’re a 20-person agency with mostly content roles, but hired our first Lead Developer 6 months ago. We understand the need to do things differently, and this new role is an example of us investing in that future.
You are either eaten by the AI threat, or you evolve with it. The lack of standards presents a gap and opportunity for your SEO strategy in 2025.
Urgently track different things, differently
Ellipsis is a world-class SEO agency. For years, we reported clicks to the URLs we’d worked on only. This isolates our work and lets clients see the direct impact. Indirect impact was a bonus.
In 2024, we realized this was unhelpful and incomplete. Our SEO strategy thesis is that our content work helps the whole site’s performance, so we need to measure and improve this rather than treat it as a side-benefit.
With AI Overviews for more queries, tracking URL clicks misses crucial engagement. Searchers may get information from AI summaries without clicking through.
For 2025, your SEO strategy must track:
- Traditional URL clicks
- Presence in AI Overviews
- Source attribution in AI responses
- Brand mentions within AI outputs
Without these metrics, you’re flying blind. The traffic you think you’ve lost might actually be engagement happening in a format you’re not measuring.
Maximizing content ROI by making every piece work harder
We discussed content quality and its role in a successful SEO strategy in 2025. If your content is good, it’s a disservice to publish it once on your blog and tweet it a few times.
Get value from each piece of work in multiple ways. And you can do this because your content is good.
The strategy we’re leaning in to is taking the written content and extracting different angles for different platforms. This is not straight repurposing or summarization. It’s finding winning angles that work native to each platform you’re repurposing to.
You could take a single blog post and turn it into 3 LinkedIn posts. Each post focuses on a specific point in the blog post and offers standalone insight.
You’re not just trying to funnel traffic to the blog post: because you’re taking a holistic view of SEO strategy in 2025, you’re happy for potential customers to see your brand wherever suits them best.
GenAI can help here. Claude in particular is very good at summarization and following instructions. You can combine the 2: create a custom project in Claude that lets you paste in a full blog post, and it will return your requested standalone social content. Repeat across different platforms.
The theme is that attention is increasingly valuable and you should take your content to potential customers wherever suits them. That may be traditional blog content, social content, or a newsletter. I have not used it extensively, but Every’s Spiral is a good example of this idea.
We keep coming back to newsletters and have launched a string of these for our clients in recent months. You can’t beat a high-quality newsletter for reliably reaching your customers. Aside: subscribe to Searching for Growth!
There’s a pragmatic brand success story here, reaching your customers where’s best for them. But there’s a cold efficiency argument: the more reach you get to your content and brand, the more value you create, and the further your budget goes. Both are important for SEO strategy in 2025.
Fighting for the next click (user experience as SEO strategy)
E-E-A-T was a nice theme for 2023 and 2024, but the antitrust case showed it’s for show: impressing Google with your E-E-A-T didn’t matter, but impressing the reader did. This shows up in rankings through user engagement signals.
When a reader clicks on your site from search results, you’re immediately fighting for the next click. You can get the next click by offering a delightful user experience, wonderful content, and differentiated experience. The bland-ification of the internet is unacceptable.
You need an engaging tone and visuals! You need to pass the “remove the logo” brand test: if someone sees your site later with the logo covered, can they recognize it as your company’s website?
It’s often felt nebulous to me how brand is related to SEO. This is how it’s related: you need to ensure the next time the reader sees your brand on the search engine results page, they have a positive association with it that they seek it out.
This creates a powerful cycle: better brand recognition leads to higher click-through rates, which improves rankings, increasing visibility. We discussed the “goog enough” problem with low-quality content. This is the inverse, and for a 2025 SEO Strategy you can exploit it.
The brands that will win in 2025 are those that understand this virtuous circle and invest accordingly. Instead of chasing algorithm updates, focus on creating memorable experiences that make users actively seek out your content.
Ask yourself: “Would someone bookmark this page?” If not, you haven’t differentiated enough to survive in the increasingly competitive search landscape.
You must embrace the possibilities of a genAI and DeepSeek world
You can find joy in the possibilities. A successful SEO strategy in 2025 means adapting to technology rather than resisting it.
One of the best ways to do this is to leverage the cutting-edge of genAI developments. Last year, Ellipsis built our own topic coverage feature into our FALCON AI.
We built this because Anthropic launched a caching feature that cut our cost from $10/run to $0.5. Wonderful! And it gives us insights into searchers’ needs.
DeepSeek offers similar benefits, reducing genAI costs. We’re exploring increasing genAI efficiency and crunching more data to do things that weren’t possible weeks ago.
For a really practical example: the flow shown below helps with competing content research by sorting competing content into one of Google’s 8 “refined query semantic classes” (Short fact, Yes/No, Other, Instruction, Definition, Reason, Comparison, Consequence).
You can see I switched the model from Claude 3.5 Sonnet to Gemini 2.0 Flash, and achieved a ~30x cost reduction:
This is more nebulous for SEO strategy, but I’d recommend subscribing to SimonW’s newsletter for the latest technical information, and then Every (AI boomer!) and Ed Zitron (AI doomer, for balance!) to keep up. How you use it is up to you.
The key is finding your own balance with AI tools – using them to augment your expertise. For SEO in 2025, leverage AI for data analysis and content ideation while maintaining your unique voice and perspective.
Consider how DeepSeek and similar technologies can help you uncover new keyword opportunities or analyze competitor strategies more efficiently. The brands that thrive will be those that harness these tools strategically while still prioritizing genuine human connection and value creation.
The SEO strategy path forwards
In 2025, SEO success demands:
- Exceptional content quality that stands out from the “good enough” crowd
- Strategic measurement across traditional and AI search platforms
- Maximizing content through strategic repurposing and distribution
- Brand differentiation that fights for the next click
- AI adoption that enhances rather than replaces human expertise
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Organizations that implement these strategies will capture market share from competitors using outdated SEO tactics. We’re witnessing a complete redistribution of organic visibility and the traffic it drives.
This moment is critical due to two forces: Google’s evolving quality standards and the rise of AI-powered alternatives to traditional search. The genAI moment is reshaping how people discover information.
The organizations that will dominate through 2025 and beyond share a common trait: they’re treating SEO not as a technical checkbox but as a strategic business imperative demanding executive attention. They’re investing in content that delivers genuine expertise, measurement systems capturing the full spectrum of search engagement, and brand experiences that earn the next click.
At Ellipsis, we’ve helped forward-thinking clients navigate this transition, resulting in traffic growth that defies industry trends. The playbook is clear for those willing to adapt.
Will you capitalize on the opportunity the search change presents? The window for gaining first-mover advantage is closing. It’s time to evolve your SEO strategy.
In Q1 2025, companies are switching to Ellipsis. Find out why: get in touch for a no-obligation strategy discussion.
