The many LinkedIn posts about SEO’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
That was one of the key takeaways from day one of Brighton SEO’s annual gathering of search experts.
The conclusion was not that any one factor (say, GenAI, or TikTok) has single-handedly ‘upended’ search as we know it. Rather, the reality of what it means to optimise for search now is much more nuanced – and interesting – than that. Here’s why, and how to go about it.
A number of talks during the day focused on EEAT, or Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness – a framework that Google advises marketers to use in order to ensure that content is reliable and helpful.
Jon Earnshaw, co-founder and chief product evangelist at Pi Datametrics, put forward an alternative (although not necessarily contradictory) mantra: produce ‘FAST’ content. This is content that is First-person, Authentic, Social, and Trusted.
“[Online] behaviour has changed fundamentally,” Earnshaw summarised, pointing out that Google is now surfacing (in its own words) ‘more social content’ in its results, and will also be leaning more on content from influencers.
Google has also begun to feature videos from TikTok and Instagram in its results, in response to the enduring popularity of short video and its growing role in providing inspiration for activities, information about purchases, how-to content, and many other things that used to be the province of search engines only.
Ray Saddiq, global head of marketing at Rise at Seven, similarly emphasised that marketers should be catering to the new multichannel reality of search and visibility online. “Google’s pulling all of these different formats of content [into the results] to match people’s intent,” he said.
He noted that the traditional ‘three pillars’ of SEO – technical, content, and links – are now “just good housekeeping”, and that marketers should focus on offsite trust signals to succeed.
Short videos, forum results, and social content are all being surfaced in Google’s search results – and while more ‘traditional’ text-based listicles and roundups are still very valuable for brands, they’re far from the only vehicle for visibility in 2025.
Saddiq also advised marketers to stop just blaming AI overviews for pushing down their brand’s position on the search results page – because while this does play a role, there are many additional factors changing how the top results are presented in Google.
Many would point out that shifts by users away from traditional search engines mean marketers shouldn’t think in terms of solely optimising for Google. Jon Earnshaw told an anecdote in which he asked his son how he would search for a new pair of jeans – and discovered that his son wouldn’t even consider going to a search engine when he could consult his social feeds instead.
A rising number of people – more than 400 million per week at the time of writing – use ChatGPT for many things including ‘search’-esque queries, and OpenAI introduced a dedicated search feature last October to cater to these. Other AI-powered search engines like Perplexity.ai have positioned themselves as offering a superior, conversational search experience, as have generative AI assistants like Meta AI.
Amid the narratives about growing competitors, though, it’s important not to forget the sheer scale of Google, which recently revealed that it processes more than 5 trillion searches per year, and which still sends the vast majority of traffic to businesses. Ray Grieselhuber, CEO at DemandSphere, urged marketers not to “abandon the dominant traffic sources for your business to chase these trends” – at least without having a plan for how to transition from one to the other.
Grieselhuber’s talk also illustrated the extent to which tools like ChatGPT draw on traditional search engines like Google and Bing for their information. According to a data study conducted by DemandSphere that analysed 10,000 prompts across 17 industries on Google, Bing, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, ChatGPT 4o draws on Google’s index 52% of the time, and Bing’s 14% of the time.
Other studies have also pointed to an overlap between LLM mentions and high Google rankings.
With that said, a laser focus on traffic can be reductive when off-site presence is playing a bigger and bigger role in visibility, and many searches were “zero-click” long before generative AI came along. Grieselhuber recommended that marketers keep ‘multiple paradigms’ in mind at the same time – thinking about traditional search rankings as well as broader share of voice and influence.
This question could be the subject of entire essays (and was, in fact, the subject of many in-depth talks at Brighton SEO) – and it is by no means a solved problem. However, there are things marketers can start doing from today:
1. Approach search visibility in a multichannel way and ensure that you’re thinking about not just text-based content but social media, videos, and discussions as part of search optimisation.
2. Pay attention to brand: A study conducted by Tom Capper found evidence to suggest that brand authority (or lack thereof) played a key role in whether a site was negatively impacted by Google’s Helpful Content Update, particularly when there was a disparity between brand and domain authority.
Brand strength is also a more holistic way of thinking about influence and presence online – and while more difficult to measure conclusively than say, traffic or domain authority, is more responsive to shifts in the online landscape.
3. Don’t forget expertise: Whether you’re thinking about EEAT or FAST, multiple elements of these frameworks – such as authority and trust – can be achieved by drawing on experience and expertise both in-house and externally.
Rise at Seven’s Saddiq detailed how, when working with client Parkdean Resorts, the team “Let the experts tell the story … [and] work with us to write our on-site content but also work with our off-site creators.” This formed part of a multi-pronged strategy that boosted visibility both within Google and outside of it.
4. Don’t abandon what you already know works – as long as you’re also considering how to future-proof for a time when it may no longer work as effectively.
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