SEO in the age of AI: What still works

BY Nathan Jolly

May 28, 2025 5:03

Last month marked the first time since 2015 that Google had less than 90% of all search traffic, marking a major shift away from the traditional mode of internet search.

YouTube, Tiktok, Reddit, and — most importantly — ChatGPT have all improved their search offering, and this disruption looks likely to accelerate as artificial intelligence tools enter the mainstream, and new competitors emerge.

Andrew Raso and Mez Homayunfard co-founded Online Marketing Gurus in 2012. As they explained at the Mumbrella 360 conference on Wednesday morning, the last major disruption to search happened during the pandemic, when everyone moved online, and the supply and demand models around online advertising changed.

Mez Homayunfard and Andrew Raso

“Everyone started online businesses, and paid media absolutely skyrocketed,” Raso explained.

“The cost per click on different paid media channels went through the roof. The amount of people bidding increased competition, and therefore to advertise on different paid media channels, like Google or Meta, pricing just went crazy.”

Inflation and continued demand has driven this cost-per-click higher, while the cost-of-living crisis forced smaller businesses to look toward cheaper marketing options.

“They can’t spend all their money on paid media channels, and they need a better way they can get clients without spending a bomb – and that’s around SEO.

“So, SEO right now is becoming a huge important part of getting clients and businesses’ marketing channels across the board.”

How does SEO work in 2025?

OMG conducted its own research, looking at 125,000 different data points, as well as implementing similar third-party studies from SEO expert Brian Dean, former of Backlinko, and Semrush. They found that Google search results come down to three key areas of fluency.

The first is what Homayunfard calls “technical SEO”, or “the nerdy part of SEO”.

In 2025, this is not just about meta descriptions and title tags, but also includes optimising for Google’s new AI Overviews tool. OMG’s research found that Google search results with an image next to them can increase click rate by between 15-20%.

A lot of search terms, especially those that tend to involve shopping links, result in Google indexing images on the search results. “Search results that have an image next to them get a significantly high click-through rate,” Homayunfard said.

Marking up the images, with clear meta-information and tags helps bolster their site images in Google’s SEO results.

Site structure is key, and the broader your offering, the better the results.

“Think of your site structure as your fishing net,” Homayunfard suggests. “The broader it is, the more fish you can go and capture simultaneously. A lot of times when SEO projects plateau, it’s because the site doesn’t have enough breadth. So we found site structure is super important.”

So is URL structure. “Short, concise URLs with the keyword in there have been consistently shown as a strong ranking factor,” he continues, explaining how tests ran by OMG recently found that condensing keywords and URL structure greatly increases SEO ranking.

Raso adds a laundry list of considerations when looking at the user experience of your website.

“Does the flow of the website make sense? Is the website fast? Are there issues on the website? Is there spelling errors on the website? Does the flow from the top to the bottom make the user experience great?

“Now, you have to remember, Google is a search engine. They don’t want you sticking on their servers. The longer you can’t find what you’re looking for, the more they hate you,” he jokes.

“So your site needs to be structured very well, and give a lot of insight and good information to that customer.”

The next key area is links – both backlinks to other, reputable sites, as well as having others link to your site.

“This is still a major ranking factor,” Homayunfard notes. “All of our studies showed a really strong relationship between the quality and volume of links and ranking in the top three spots at Google.”

This includes establishing your site’s own expertise, which involves adding either an author page, or author biographies to articles.

“This is why a lot of these big educational websites are going crazy as well,” notes Raso. “They’re actually smart authors. If you’re linking to other websites that hold a lot of authority, Google loves that as well.

“It’s important not to spam that, and to send links to a lot of other sites,” he warns.

The final factor in SEO success is content – both quality, and length.

A recent study by Brian Dean looked at the relationship between content length and ranking in the top ten spots on Google.

“What it found was that the average length of a piece of content at position one [in Google’s ranking] was just shy of 2,000 words. It seems that Google is favouring content that’s more in-depth these days. 2,000 words is a lot more than the general rule of thumb when people say, ‘oh, put 500 words of content’. It’s actually almost four times that.”

Despite this penchant for longer form writing, Google does also punish walls of content on websites that don’t provide a decent user experience.

Raso points to the recent Google API leaks, where engineering documents were accidentally released online, as providing programmers with a trove of useful insider information to utilise.

“These [leaks] were around the search algorithm, and different aspects that it looks at when ranking websites – and usability factors actually have significantly increased. They don’t just want 2,000-word essays. They want images, they want video. It has to be interactive.”

Google also doesn’t necessarily count the amount of blog posts on a website as a positive, despite popular advice that would have creators pumping out regular short posts in order to game the system.

“It’s not about just volume and repetition,” Raso notes.

Should you use AI to generate content on your website?

“The short answer is: If it’s for SEO purposes, the general answer is no,” Homayunfard said.

“You don’t get a lot of unique content produced by ChatGPT. Google does favour heavily unique authorship and unique content. So, there is always that danger if you’re just taking stuff straight out of ChatGPT, and copy-pasting it onto the website that it’s going to be thin or duplicate content. You’ve got to be really, really careful.”

In fact, the pair have noticed that sites like Reddit, where all the content is unique, and user-generated, have rocketed in Google rankings as the amount of AI-generated content increases.

“This is how you stand out,” Raso explains. “Everyone right now is just using ChatGPT to create the content for them, but the people that are actually writing unique content, they’re the ones really pushing up the page.”

A March 2024 update to Google also punished so-called ‘unhelpful content.’

“People who are trying to spam the search engine, people who are just trying to bust out unhelpful, rubbish content, they’re the ones that are penalised,” Raso says.

“And especially with AI coming out, it’s very important that it’s got to be unique.”

Raso and Homayunfard had a client who was a barbecue retailer. They managed to rank them in position one for the search term ‘bbq’, by optimising their site for SEO.

“What we did, specifically, was beefing out their ‘collection’ pages to make sure that we had better, more descriptive content that answered more questions,” Homayunfard said.

“We did technical markup on the page so that the meta descriptions were written effectively and URLs were structured in the shortest ways possible. And, we managed to outrank websites that had much higher domain rating, simply by honing in on those factors.”

In 2025, smart SEO can be the ultimate democratisation tool, if used correctly.

“It goes to show that if you do the right things,” Raso concludes, “it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is – you can outrank some of these bigger retailers.”