2025 Content SEO: Updates, Guidelines & Concrete Ways to Action

Knowing how to create content that’s easily discoverable in a clustered competitive space can be overwhelming, so let’s pull back the curtain and get a glimpse of what will help both your content quality and searchability, shall we?

I hope this gives you the confidence you need to take more content risks and a voice to speak your content plans into existence. 💫🔮

The State of SEO in 2025 

There are four key ideas to keep in mind when creating and optimizing content for organic search in 2025.

1. AI SEO ≠ SEO

If there’s a buzzword to take with a grain of salt in 2025, it’s AI SEO. AI SEO isn’t a strategy. AI assists in executing a process for a strategy.

The good news is your approach to SEO won’t fundamentally change by incorporating an AI tool into your content operations. At best, it may help speed up the in-betweens of content creation like meeting documentation and communication between content stakeholders.

💡SEOs are responding to this by: 

✅ Using content AI tools like Claude or Jasper AI for project management purposes only like: sending sound recap emails to coworkers and clients, writing meeting minutes, and so on and so forth.

✅ Continuing to create content that’s written by humans for humans.

2. People can search on more channels

TikTok, and most recently, ChatGPT search are part of the wave of platforms people can use to search for information, products, and services apart from native search outlets like Google and Bing. 

ChatGPT’s search function was released to the public on Thursday, October 31st, which means that ChatGPT has the power to automatically search the web if your question might benefit from information on the web and serve up a link to the website that best covers the query (link to article). 

Remember though…even with links to websites that provided the original content, people still need to take an extra step to google that same information after searching it through ChatGPT in order to fully trust it. This means that ChatGPT’s search credibility and usability hasn’t reached its full potential.

Why does this matter? Because Google reigns as the most reliable search platform.👑 People will continue to search on Google and Bing until the day they can buy anything they need or answer any question they have via ChatGPT. 

💡SEOs are responding to this by: 

✅ Optimizing content for ChatGPT search the same way that you’d optimize content for traditional organic search – by focusing on long tail keywords, knowledge gain, natural language, and content quality, not quantity. 

✅ Making sure ChatGPT traffic isn’t grouped with referral traffic. It should be categorized as organic traffic in GA4. 

✅ Make sure you aren’t blocking scrapers and crawlers. Link to list of GenAI user-agents. 

3. Google’s EEAT principles still matter 

Google’s content guidelines tell us that providing evidence of expertise, authority, and trust through helpful, reliable, and people-first content is more important than ever, full stop. 

Why? Because of the impact from the introduction of Generative AI results in the SERPs. 

According to Search Engine Land study, almost 60% of Google searches end without a click as of July 2024. Meaning, almost two thirds of Google searches end without a click thru to one of the blue links in the SERPs. 

People are getting the answers they need without clicking into websites and the chunk of generic information Gen AI results provides fuels that flame.

So how do you entice them to click thru to the blue links that live under the Gen AI results?  

With more original and helpful content than ever that’s backed by trusted thought leaders. 

SEOs are also being tasked with delivering a more concerted effort to build a content strategy that promotes loyalty actions like bookmarking a website or subscribing to a newsletter, confirmed by Momentic. 

Site revisits aren’t a ranking factor per se, but they’re still an indicator of how much users trust your expertise and hold you accountable to solving their problems or answering their questions. 

It’s also important to note, EEAT doesn’t technically = performance. Following EEAT’s principles is not a ranking factor, but they are good guidelines to consider when creating content and have many benefits. 

💡SEOs are responding to this by: 

✅ creating thought leader bio pages and linking thought leader bios to published content 

✅ creating a content strategy that recaptures user attention and brings them back to the site time and time again.

✅ writing content that triggers knowledge panels to enhance reputation and increase chances visibility in the SERPs

Not only do we need to be wary of Gen AI taking up space in the SERPs, we also need to be cautious of SERP results that offer similar types of information, or high-consensus content have increased dramatically. More on that below.👇🏻

4. High-consensus content is rampant across the SERPs

I work at a market research firm that sells market data and consumer data, so as an example, let’s say I Google “best company to buy consumer data from.”

Notice how similar the SERPs are? First Gen AI takes lists some generic, over-simplified steps (and takes up about one third of the above-the-fold real estate). 👇🏻

Reddit and the People also ask sections to represent the other two thirds of the above-the-fold real-estate. 

It isn’t until you’ve scrolled nearly halfway down SERPs page one that you see individual websites from huge, highly recognizable brands like Asana, Hubspot, and Coursera or trusted entities with URLs that end in .gov (U.S. Small Business Administration), seen below: 

Notice how all of the page titles and meta descriptions are exhaustively similar across all of the individual brands? This is what’s referred to as high-consensus content, which is essentially the fancy way of saying all of the content on the page (whether it’s the metadata or body paragraphs) is formulaic and unoriginal .

So does that mean unless you’re a big name brand with high domain authority or have a killer backlinking strategy that with other domains that give you credibility, your s*** out of luck to rank for this query? It does not.

In order to break through the noise of unoriginal content you have to write with an original POV.  💭

Enter information gain.👋🏻

Develop a content process that’s rooted in information gain philosophy

In SEO, information gain = a website’s original content contributions to a topic compared to all of the other pages that talk about that same topic. 

An information gain score = Google’s way of looking at all of the pages indexed across a topic on the whole and determines what pages provide new information to that existing discussion. 

📢Google says here,

“An information gain score for a given document is indicative of additional information that is included in the given document beyond information contained in other documents that were already presented to the user.”

💭Put in layman’s terms, 

it’s important for a webpage or piece of content that’s been indexed to to give uniquely helpful information to the user. 

📝Why does this matter? 

Google builds on individual’s user journeys, which is why user journey’s need to be thought about holistically. 

💡SEOs are responding to this by: 

✅ Making SME interviews a top priority when writing content

✅ Doubling down on user journey mapping through semantic SEO.