2025 SEO Predictions & Reviewing Our 2024 Hits & Misses

INTRO:
It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, welcome to the SEO show for 2025. It's the first cab off the rank for the year. How are you going, Arthur? Happy New Year. Nah. No? Nah, it's the 8th of January. You can't say Happy New Year. Of course you can.

ARTHUR: Nah. You can say Happy New Year up until the end of January. To people that you haven't seen, we haven't seen or spoken to our listeners in over a year.

MICHAEL: I agree with Larry David from Kirby Enthusiasm that there's a statute of limitations on how- And when, so when's the last day you can say it? Second, third of Jan, something like that.

ARTHUR: Nah. You walked into the office yesterday saying happy new year to everyone.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I was dropping them left, right and center. But yeah, happy new year. We, we're just gonna get straight into things for the year because, you know, typically in the past we've done our 20, our predictions for the next year at the end of the year before Christmas, but we got a little lazy at the end of last year. We didn't do that. So we're starting things strong in 2025 and we are predicting where things are headed in the world of SEO over the next year. And we're also gonna do a little recap on last year's predictions. Oh God, I don't even remember. And see how right or wrong we were. Well, I don't remember, but I went and had a look at… What we predicted. Yeah, our… Episode. I basically read the notes, the transcript and said, okay, so don't worry, I got that, I got that. But you're gonna have to drop some big predictions to make up for not knowing what you're talking about on the recap. Okay. So pressure. Do you want to get into things? There's a, there's a bit of a common theme to our predictions here. What is it?

ARTHUR: Um, well, the one that we're talking about before was a bigger, I guess, um, emphasis on use user signals. No. What are you talking about? Like AI, mate. Not everyone's word. I don't know. I was looking at, All right, maybe we should have prepared more. Before the show, I was just telling Michael, just record, record, we'll talk, we'll talk. And you're like, no, we have to prepare a little bit more so we know what we're talking about. And here I am wigging out. Crumbling.

MICHAEL: Hey, we've had a break. You're a little bit rusty. It's okay. It's been a long time. But basically what we did to let everyone know, we'll pull back the curtains a bit on how things work here at the FCO show. We just drop our thoughts in a Google Doc. Sometimes we use the same Google Doc. Other times we each prepare our own. This time we did our own. We did individual ones. And now looking at them both, there's a lot of mention of AI in them. So there's a common theme to it. But what do you want to do? How do you want to do this? Do you want to go one for one with a prediction?

ARTHUR: Yeah, probably makes sense. Or yeah, we'll go on for one and then we can just, if you've got that on your predictions, we can just tick that off.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm going to start with something controversial here, because I saw in your predictions, you're saying the opposite. But I am saying that at the end of 2025, Google is still going to dominate in terms of search market share, over 90%. And that perplexity and chat GPT don't have as big an impact on Google's business as everyone else seems to be predicting. So for me, if I go look at perplexity in Google Trends versus chat GPT, ChatGPT's got the brand. It seems to be dominating at the moment. Claude and Perplexity are used by fast-moving, early-adopter nerds like us. But the rest of the world out there that don't listen to the SEO show or care about AI or anything like that are using Google and will continue to use Google.

ARTHUR: Okay, I disagree. So I'm gonna talk about my experience, I guess. So over the last maybe three months, I've started using ChatGPT more and more. It's actually replaced Google for a lot of, I guess, queries, informational queries, right? So rather than me having to go search, how do I do this? I just asked ChatGPT how to do it. And it's been good because I'd say 95% of the time, the instructions that it gives me are accurate. So I don't need to go and search. And then more recently with, cause I use Apple, iPhone and Siri integrating with chat GPT, I've been using that even when I'm driving. So if I want to find out specific questions, like answers to a question, or if I want to do, so the example I gave you, I was like, I'm trying to lose a bit of weight because like everyone during the Christmas period, you just stuff your mouth full of food and drink every single day and then pack on four kilos. So I was chatting to Siri and chat GPT. Give me a plan. What should I do? This is my goal. I want to weigh this much by this date. This is how much I weigh. This is my height. This is my like activities. What do I do? And it basically will spit out all that information and talk to you. So you can go there and basically I managed to do a pretty decent like workout plan and diet plan while driving to the city and then exporting it all into Apple Notes. So this is stuff that I would typically be doing, you know, manually searching for or using different websites, different calculators. But now I did it on the drive to the city. And like we were saying before, we're early adopters, right? We would be one of the first few people that would have been using ChatGPT in this way. But speaking to friends over the break, like I have friends who use ChatGPT, they've got the app on their phone and then use it in the same way, like rather than having to, so my friend was, Here's a good example. So he had mold in his bathroom, in the ceiling. And rather than searching, watching YouTube videos, he just asked Chachipiti, I've got mold. What do I need to buy? What do I need to do? And use that as like the, I guess, starting point for him to fixing his own bathroom. He did like watch YouTube videos. He did.

MICHAEL: Because that's what I wanted to, once you finished it, I was going to bring it up. It's not just Google that could have its market share eaten into, it's YouTube in a major way. If what you're saying is true and like the world out there at large is turning to JATCPT for this stuff now instead of Google and YouTube.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But there's always going to be queries that will require some sort of visual, I guess. So for example, hey JATCPT, show me how to update this formula or script or whatever. versus, hey, I need to repaint my bathroom because there's mold. Obviously, you want to watch a video. So for the first query, you're not going to need video. For other queries, you do. So it depends, I guess, on what the person is searching for and what the outcome is.

MICHAEL: As it pertains to predictions, does that mean you're predicting by the end of the year that Google's search market share and revenue from ads and like YouTube, like time on site views, all that stuff will be down? Because ChatGBT is- I think so, yeah.

ARTHUR: I'm not saying it's going to wipe out Google in the next year, but I'm saying I reckon it will definitely make a small dent.

MICHAEL: Okay.

ARTHUR: I think so.

MICHAEL: I think-

ARTHUR: That's a prediction, right?

MICHAEL: I think there'll be north of 90% search market share and their revenue and stuff won't really change and everything will be sort of the same as it is at the moment.

ARTHUR: So we'll see. Let's see. But that kind of feeds into the other one. We're talking about AI search overview, right?

MICHAEL: Because, well, it feeds into, I had a different angle on this AI thing. Because like at the moment, as I was saying before, chat GPT has, like it's the one everyone knows. You know, even people that don't use these tools. But where Google has an advantage, and what I think they will push more this year, is they've got Gemini. I haven't even used Gemini. I use Claude, I use ChatGPT. Gemini, when it launched and how ridiculous it was with its image generation and everything, I just haven't felt a need to use it. But where Google has the advantage at the moment is they have this search that's used by everyone. At the moment they're shoehorning their AI overviews in, but all they have to do is create a new tab called Gemini or AI whatever in search or push it in Chrome. push it in YouTube a bit. And all of a sudden people are using it that, you know, might not have actively sorted out, but because it's put in front of them, they're using it. So they've got the distribution to make maybe, you know, basically in a couple of years become the dominant player in the AI world because they already have all these users. Gmail.

ARTHUR: But couldn't you argue with Apple and Siri and chat GPT? You could. Most people have iPhones that I know. Yep. Same thing, right? If you, Integrating, like now you have to opt in to chat GPT, but in time we'll probably just integrate automatically or just be part of Siri. Potentially. So it would be the same thing, right? Potentially.

MICHAEL: Potentially. Yeah. But I don't know. I'm just thinking like people that aren't tech type people, if they just see it in search or they see it in Gmail or YouTube, as opposed to like, I don't even know, like a lot of people I know, I don't know how much they use Siri. My argument is- I saw Anthony in the kitchen when he was making coffee going, Siri, can you remind me? I just overheard him mumbling. But he works at a digital marketing agent. I'm trying to think of like the normies out there.

ARTHUR: They just activated Siri.

MICHAEL: So my prediction is going to be that Google builds its AI a lot more into its tools that it has to try and win the distribution game over chat GPT who have like the brand and I guess media hype behind them. So that's two predictions that sort of tie into each other.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

MICHAEL: All right. That's a lot of AI. What else do you have on your little list there?

ARTHUR: Well, on my list, I have brand search volume and multi-channel traffic. So I think that brand searches and brand search volume is going to become more important. And then the reason for that is it's going to differentiate you from other websites. Google will see that people are actually searching for your brand, for your website, and that's going to be a signal for Google that you are, I guess, authoritative. And then on the other hand, having traffic from multiple sources, so not just SEO, having traffic from social, Google ads, you know, referral, whatever, that's going to make you look better in the eyes of Google as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and this is stuff that has been seen with helpful content update analysis, where, you know, helpful content that has been made a lot of waves in the SEO world, but a lot of the businesses that have been hit by it, you know, websites that are often run by like one person, they have a couple of writers and they just churn out content. they get all of their traffic from Google. And it's all from informational queries and not necessarily from people searching for their brand. And there's been some studies done that sort of show that like brand is important. And that's gonna be like, if we're looking at like just the onslaught of AI crap out there in the world, being a real brand is going to become more and more important. So, Which is a tough one, because that means doing running ads, like marketing, being a real business. So like if you're a local service business, fine. Yeah. But like if you were a publisher running like… No one knows who your site is. Johnny's travel blog. Exactly. Basically, in that world, there's big communities of Training, you know for how to create niche websites and the like that are all shutting down now because they're sort of throwing in the towel Waving the white flag and saying our business models dead, you know The typical niche website model where you pump out content and have affiliate links in it Gone has been pretty much wiped out. Yeah instead of extrapolating out from this. It's sort of yeah, as you said Brand will be more and more vital. So if you're listening and you're not running Google Ads social ads being out there on LinkedIn and the like, it's only going to become more and more of a thing. And it might start to seep into other areas. Like yes, all those publisher-based sites have been wiped out, but maybe local service businesses are next. You never know.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Potentially.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. We'll see over the course of this year, but yeah, brand multi-channel traffic important.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, that one was part of the Yandex algorithm leak. So saying that having like a large chunk of SEO traffic could be a negative and it could actually hurt you. And I believe that for sure.

MICHAEL: Definitely a large chunk of non-brand SEO traffic.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And Google want to make money from you as well. So like my conspiracy hat, like if you're getting all your traffic from SEO as a business, they don't like that. True. They're going to hurt you. So you start investing in ads.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Potentially. It's not even conspiracy. That is, they've shown that's how they are. Like, why wouldn't they be? They're a for-profit public company with share price to keep high. The guy that runs the place is all about numbers, you know, making as much profit as possible. So that's exactly how they would be thinking.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Annoying, isn't it? You spend all that time and money building a website only to have it wiped out because you're doing too good.

MICHAEL: Yeah. What about user signals? Because I see you've got that on your list. I have it on my list too.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I think that's going to become more of a focus in 2025. And I think that kind of ties in with a lot of AI content and AI stuff just being published nonstop, it's going to get to the point where Google's going to wig out and not going to be able to assess it all and actually figure out what is good content and what is bad content without using user signals and links, I think. So two big things that are going to be a focus are going to be user signals and link building.

MICHAEL: Agree? Agree. The updates that we've seen, helpful content and everything, since then, The sites with strong brand just seem to come through these updates unscathed. The sites without strong brand, strong domain authority are getting hammered. And that's always been a part of Google's algorithm since day one, links. But like, as you said, user signals, because they've always also denied that they track users through Chrome and the like. And it's come out through these antitrust cases that they do.

ARTHUR: But then all of it's in GA4, right? They've got all the data there. They can see how long someone's spending on your site, how engaged they are, all the new engagement metrics in GA4. So, of course, they're looking at it and feeding it back into the algorithm to figure out whether or not this site, this page, is what people want to see.

MICHAEL: Yeah, flood of AI means that they're going to be trying to assess what's real and authentic for humans, not real, but like enjoyed by humans. Yeah, which is the obvious one, which is going to be hard, right?

ARTHUR: Because sometimes you can create good AI content, but. how do you make it engaging, I guess? Because if everyone's doing the same thing, if everyone's writing engaging content using AI and making it better, then everyone's gonna have the same content. So that's where I start to wig out a little bit myself. Because it's very easy to do it now. Before you'd have to do a lot of research, you'd have to have a very good copywriter, proper brief, all that stuff. It could take months to write a good bit of content. Now you could do the same thing and potentially,

MICHAEL: A couple of clicks of a button.

ARTHUR: Yeah, under 30 minutes. And then anyone can do it. And anyone that knows SEO, anyone that's good at content can just produce the same content. So it's going to be hard to make it different.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it won't be different. And there's just going to be a tsunami of this content being published. Yeah. There'll be a lot of sites publishing content where it just goes on there and gathers dust because they don't have the authority. So this is another place where authority will be so important. The stronger your domain is, the more links you have, the more trust you have, the more likely it is that Google will index this content that you'd pump out. But if you're some new business that's just churning out hundreds of pages and different things, you'll probably find they just sit there and don't crawl, but not indexed in Search Console.

ARTHUR: Yeah, like those thin subweb pages that people would make, all that AI rolled out stuff. Yep, exactly. So basically, link building. That's always. We love link building. So 2025 is a big year of link building.

MICHAEL: Yeah, always. Always. It's not going to change. But user signals, I think, is an interesting one. So that's going to be like, how good is your site? What's your design like? Are people clicking through it? Do you have internal links to other pages or good call to actions that encourage them to move through? spend longer on the side or whatever, like there's going to be all of that factoring into it more and more. So we'll see, at the end of the year we'll look back and look at studies and see, but it seems like a pretty obvious one because we're going into this almost like a hellscape where it's just everyone's churning out content. But what was the 7.5 million blog posts published daily is the stat I have here.

ARTHUR: That's insane. Which I find, no actually that's not that hard to believe. No. Now at the moment with all, yeah, all these tools.

MICHAEL: Of course, but like, what's that? That's billions and billions and billions of pages a year that Google, they've like, is it in their interest to crawl and index all of that? Yeah, I don't know.

ARTHUR: No, it's not really. Well, it's not, no, but I'm just thinking like, I was like, always go back to the dead internet theory, how it's just like, there's this whole part of the internet just that doesn't exist because it's all just garbage. And it's only like, you know. A couple of pages, a couple of webs. Anyway, going off topic.

MICHAEL: Well, the entire Internet is becoming dead. Well, that's it. Yeah, it's becoming more dead. YouTube as well. Like we're talking before off air about how YouTube is being swarmed with AI content of just junk. And there's so many people out there incentivized. Yeah, Instagram. So we're talking about the publisher sites, right? Their business model was to pump out content, put affiliate links in them, rank for informational searches and make money that way. Those sites are now dead to the point where big educators in that space have sort of waved the white flag and have pulled out. But there's other avenues that have opened up, like that Instagram page that we were sharing around the office recently, where they use an AI avatar, just an off-the-shelf one. So this person, person in inverted commas, it's an AI-generated person, can be used by anyone that uses this tool, but this Instagram page has got her and she's talking about different medical things. And in one video she's an expert on one thing in medicine, on the next video she's an expert in another, you know, talking about her 13 years experience as a, whatever, podiatrist. And all of the videos ultimately funnel people through an Amazon affiliate link to Amazon to buy stuff. And they do the videos as like UGC style, where she's talking over like B-roll and stuff. And it's got like 600,000 followers. The videos get millions of views. People in the comments are confused. These are all like the normies that don't understand that it's AI. There's a big portion of those people that would be clicking through. So this is like the brave new world of affiliate markets. Super spammy, super junky, but there's so many people out there that are incentivized to pump this stuff out now with how easy it is and the rewards that are on the table. that like, where is it heading? Like I can see things like YouTube and Instagram being in big trouble.

ARTHUR: Well, the thing is, I was going to say the YouTube video I watched that I saw over the break was like a Mustang 2026 review, right? All completely AI generated. It looked, it looked bad because I know what AI looks like, but I can see like the average person watching it and thinking that it's actually a proper review. Like the videos were like all like, pixelated, but that, you know, that AI kind of like merging and blurring and stuff like that. I know cars as well. I know that wasn't the legit car, but that sort of stuff. I think that video had about 9,000 views, which isn't a huge amount of views, but if you just keep pumping that out on your channel, you're going to start getting monetized and start getting revenue from that until Google picks up on the fact that you are producing AI rubbish. So again, YouTube looks at engagement metrics, right? How long someone's watched a video, like comments, likes, all that stuff. So it will be hard to manipulate it, but it can be done.

MICHAEL: I'm going to drop another prediction here in that businesses. we'll be doing it too. So like they'll churn out like 100% AI generated, like thought leadership content in inverted commas where they have avatars, could be like the people in the business as an avatar, or it could just be a made up one. And a lot of social media for companies will just be these people talking about different things and none of it's real. So that's, yeah, that will scale up massively over this year. Cause these tools are pretty good at the moment. They'll be amazing by the end of the year. That's scary. How good some of them can be.

ARTHUR: I get these weird reels of like, just like Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, like before the fight. And instead of like punching, they kiss each other. And it looks real. It looks real. And it's only going to get more realistic that I think just outside of SEO and marketing, it's scary to think what sort of stuff they can make.

MICHAEL: What's the end game for that? Because if you go on Instagram and every post you see is all fake stuff, do you think people just won't care as long as it looks real? Or will they start to pull back from it?

ARTHUR: I reckon people will pull back, I think.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Pull back.

MICHAEL: I hate seeing it. Like when I see it, you can tell, but once you can't tell.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess it depends on what the content is, right? If it's funny, if it's good, if it's clever, I don't care how it's made. Like with Google's guidelines, I don't care how the content's made as long as it's good. Use AI to make good content, good videos, good reels. But if it's just people churning out garbage to get views and whatever, that's when it becomes problematic. Google, like Meta and all those other platforms will start picking, start to pick up AI content if they haven't already and not monetize it because it's going to like, like you said, it's going to incentivize people to do it, which they probably don't want. They want real creators. They want real content creators, not people churning out garbage.

MICHAEL: It's like the Wild West days of SEO back in the 2000s where people were using content spinners and stuff just to pump out trash. They make a lot of money, but it's a finite time while that works before it gets ironed out.

ARTHUR: Google's, I mean, sorry, YouTube's not going to let people publish garbage forever. They'll eventually put a stop to it. They'll put guidelines around whatever AI stuff that you create. It might be that it's not monetized. So if you're using like AI generated videos and like voiceovers and stuff, it could be cool. You can publish it, but it's not going to get monetized. In which case people will be like, well, if I'm not getting monetized, I'm not going to publish it. So that's a big deterrent for them. As long as they can always detect that it's AI. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Which, yeah, well, yeah, true. Anyway, not really a prediction, but interesting talking point there. I'm going to go on with a prediction, right? Everyone's whinging about Reddit, the amount of traffic that they're getting from Google for free and or predicting, well, I've seen other people out there predicting that they're going to get hammered at some point and lose some of that traffic. Yep. My prediction is that they absolutely won't this year because Google did the AI deal with Reddit where it's training its Gemini on data on Reddit. So it's in Google's interest to funnel traffic through to Reddit. So people write content for their AI. So there's that. And then the conspiracy theorist in me says that Reddit IPO'd in the last year. And with Google having done this AI deal just before that, there'd be a lot of senior people at Google that probably bought stock in the IPO that don't want Reddit to lose all that traffic. So I'm going to say, I don't think Reddit's getting clapped anytime soon.

ARTHUR: The thing that concerns me about Reddit is that there's a lot of bots on Reddit. And it's also politically leaning to one way, basically every subreddit. So if they're using that information and you're like crawling all that data, it's gonna be biased. So I don't like that.

MICHAEL: And it could be like nefarious actors can go just pump stuff onto Reddit to feed Google's training. So not just bots, I guess that's sort of what you're saying, isn't it?

ARTHUR: Do you remember that subreddit that was built for bots just to talk to each other, to like learn? No, this was maybe like two years ago. I'll find it and I'll send it to you. But it was very interesting to see like a whole community of just bots speaking to one another, posting just to learn. And then basically they'll go out there and be let free to post on like different subreddits. It's insane. And they can obviously detect bots. but they allow it. Same as Twitter, same as any kind of social media platform. I don't know whether or not they're afraid that their numbers will go backwards and it looks bad for them. Do you know what I mean?

MICHAEL: God bless you. I think it's like, well, when Reddit first started, their entire team used to sit on there just talking to themselves, replying, using different logins to get that snowball effect going. And it's probably just a bigger version of that. the comments and the activity.

ARTHUR: The same as like live streaming. They know that there's view bots, but like Twitch and Kick, they don't want to get rid of it because it looks like, makes their platform look more appealing to advertisers. So you see some guy there that's on a stream to like 7,000 people, only four people are talking in the chat. Advertisers, they pump their ads through it, thinking that they're getting authentic 7,000 people watching that stream, where really it's like 30 people. But why would Twitch or why would any streaming platform get rid of it?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Money. Exactly. Well, um, yeah. Prediction for 2025 Reddit traffic maintains.

ARTHUR: And then I had here, I guess that kind of feeds into it is, um, AI search overview. So I reckon that's going to continue to take a large chunk of SEO traffic from a lot of websites. Similar to, I guess, Reddit, because Reddit obviously ranks really well. All the sites previously would get traffic, now it's all going to Reddit. I feel like a larger chunk of that's going to go to AI Search Overview, because basically replacing position zero for a lot of informational search queries just takes all the information from multiple sources and just pops it up the top, making you not have to go to any of the websites to find out whatever you're searching for. I'll be honest, I'll search for something and if the answer's there, I'm not going any further.

MICHAEL: Of course, for an informational. That feeds into the next point, local SEO continues to work great. So all of these updates… Whether it's helpful content update, whether it's Reddit hoovering up all the traffic, whether it's AI overviews being put into the search results, they're hammering big publishing websites. So like travel blogs or tech blogs. Recipes. Recipes, whatever. They're being smashed. If you, you'd be forgiven for thinking that is entirely the world of SEO with the amount of chat that's been going on on Twitter and LinkedIn and different SEO blogs about that. But there's a whole massive part of SEO, which is there's two other big parts. I would say there's like e-com and then there's local SEO. So like services, that sort of stuff. And that world isn't being hammered, particularly the local SEO. And I think that over 2025 is going to continue to be the case. So. Updates, Google is going to keep releasing updates throughout the year, and they're going to keep smashing all these publishers that put all this work into their sites and hammer their traffic. But Reddit isn't stealing traffic from local service businesses. Neither are AI overviews, really. And they're not being hammered, like in these big updates, the sites aren't just suddenly going from, you know, thousands of visits to nothing. If you're a real local business. That's going to continue to be the case this year, I feel. You're in a good spot if you're a real business, providing real services to people in a real city. Not so good if you're just a digital publisher. Yep, agree. The other one I have here is LLM optimization. Yep. Just to keep the AI theme going. Yeah, very, very AI-heavy. LLM optimization, really it's going to be mainly, for now, chat GPT, and then also Gemini, like Google, trying to influence AI overviews. Yeah.

ARTHUR: But that's basically, for people that don't know, is optimizing your site so it appears or appears in basically ChatGPT or all those AI tools.

MICHAEL: Yeah, figuring out how to influence your performance in those tools so that you get some sort of visibility, some sort of traffic from them potentially. To be honest, this is a brave new world. I know with ChatGPT, if you ask it like, what is the best restaurant near me? It's going to go search the web and then pump out some results. And they're largely driven by Bing. So, Bing has been something that we've generally, when I say we, SEOs, don't pay much attention to because Google has like 90-95% of the market share. If you wanted to have a presence on Bing, you would normally just run your Google Ads account on Bing as well. it's a bit more important that you show organically on Bing, because that's going to be the first cab off the rank in trying to influence ChatGPT and how it, this results. Yeah. Yeah. I just think over this year, 2025, LLM optimization will be, you know, this is part of SEO. Yeah. And it's going to be more of a important area. So I agree. Yeah. Ranking and Bing, we're going to have to roll up our sleeves and do a lot more work on that. Cause it's an area we've typically not cared about really.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, typically if you were optimizing for Google, you were optimizing. I, in my mind also for Bing, cause it would be the same things that it looks at links on page.

MICHAEL: It does. But like if you, if you search a keyword, It's different for sure. Yeah.

ARTHUR: So the algorithms obviously very different, but I guess the core things that looks at would probably remain the same.

MICHAEL: Right. And then like, do you want to focus on optimizing for Bing to try and show in chat GPT or does it make no sense because Google is still driving an absolute metric?

ARTHUR: At the moment, I think it makes no sense. But I still believe that the onsite and all the SEO work you're doing to try to rank on Google will apply to Bing as well, because they're obviously going to be looking at the same ranking signals. It's obviously just the algorithm that's going to determine where you're ranking. So I assume that if you search for, for example, like a lawyer or something, you're still going to see similar results. It's not going to be exactly the same. I haven't done that search, so I couldn't tell you.

MICHAEL: But there's other aspects to it. Like I have played around with those searches in ChatGPT. Yeah. And I've seen interesting things where, let's say you search for best lawyer. Yeah. If you as a law firm on your blog, right. best lawyer article, and list like 10 of them, and put yourself as the number one one, obviously, but then all of your competition, just have really concise, easy to read and parse info. So, like when you're optimizing for like the featured snippets in search, you need to have it like structured in a way that's very easy to read and short, concise language. I have found that when I search those terms, best whatever, some of those things are being pulled in even on sites that aren't necessarily ranking well in Bing or in Google. So, it might be the case that every bloody business out there starts publishing like the best SEO agency in Melbourne and they just list themselves at the top and they list all of their competitors beneath them. Maybe. They don't get traffic to it. No prospects or customers ever really see it, but it is something that the LLMs pull from when. Interesting. So that might be stuff to play with. Theme here is we're going to play with this stuff over 2025 and reveal, pull back the curtains on the SEO show as we go. If we find anything useful.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, like a lot of this is again, very AI focused, which is to be expected.

MICHAEL: Before we wrap things up, let's just do a little recap on 2024. I'll tell you what we predicted. First, Parasite SEO. We had for a couple of years been predicting that Parasite SEO was going to be cracked down on. So last year we said that they're going to crack down on Parasite SEO in 2024. Surely Google need to do a big public shakedown like they've done in the past with things like eBay. So they're going to pick sites like SFGate or Outlook India and just obliterate them out of the search results. That did happen in 2024, but Parasite SEO still works really well. Those sites, some sites got blasted out manually by Google, but their algorithm cannot handle Parasite SEO because it values authority so much. So strong domains are still being used for Parasite. Lots of forums. Reddit. Yep. Reddit's being used for it. So Parasite SEO is still a thing, but that prediction did come true.

ARTHUR: Yep. Nice.

MICHAEL: Google updates. We said Google will continue to just roll out updates without clear reasoning, leaving SEOs perplexed. That's very true. That's not a hard prediction to make. It continued to happen.

ARTHUR: Non-stop.

MICHAEL: We said AI's role in SEO is going to be made as we foresee an explosion in AI generated content that may overwhelm Google's ability to index efficiently. Well, that's happened, I guess. Yep. We'll put that down as a yes. Yeah. We said authority and user experience are key factors in determining content, which again we're making as a prediction and has come true, like authority more than ever right now is vital in the search results. I push skepticism about Google search generative experience, predicting that it will be pushed aggressively but a belief that users prefer traditional. I gotta say, the big reason I've been so against this SGE is when Bing released it, you had to sit there and watch it time it out so slow, whereas SGE is much quicker. It is better than I gave it credit for at first. And I've definitely find scenarios where I just look at that, like you say, and move on. So that one, I'm going to say we're probably a bit wrong. Like it seems to be going okay so far. Time will tell. Our prediction, well, my prediction this year is that Google's going to even give new tabs just for its AI and its search results, even more so than just AI overviews to distribute its AI models more than It is at the moment and try and, you know, close the gap to chat GPT, so we'll see. The other thing we said was Panthers to 4Pete and Kale and Tyra to win Love Island. Well, Panthers did 4Pete. And they won Love Island. So we were pretty good. You're an oracle.

ARTHUR: Pretty good, really.

MICHAEL: Some of those predictions were very easy, admittedly. Yeah. But I don't think they were easy. Saying that Google are gonna do updates that leave people- Well, that's easy, yes.

ARTHUR: But everything- The Love Island one, wow. And the Panthers for Pete.

MICHAEL: Yeah, to be fair, I tried to say Broncos would win.

ARTHUR: Let's do an NRL prediction. All right. Who do you think?

MICHAEL: I'm gonna say Melbourne.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I was gonna say Melbourne.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: And- Melbourne versus Broncos. No chance, no chance Broncos. I reckon grand final probably Panthers Melbourne maybe.

MICHAEL: Panthers have lost a few, so.

ARTHUR: Yeah, but I still think they're unstoppable. They lost a few of the year before, they lost a few of the year before, they just keep coming back. As long as they've got Cleary and Edwards, I reckon they're sweet.

MICHAEL: Yeah, maybe.

ARTHUR: But I can see either Melbourne Panthers or, Can't really think of anyone else. Roosters are gone. Yeah, roosters are gone.

MICHAEL: Bulldogs aren't good enough in the spine.

ARTHUR: Who was the top four?

MICHAEL: I can't remember. Storm, Panthers. Roosters? Doesn't matter. Yeah. So anyway, we're going to both say Melbourne to win. What about in the AFL?

ARTHUR: I don't know enough about AFL. I'm going to say Swans finally win one.

MICHAEL: I think so too. Finally. I don't know AFL. NFL? We'll see. That's for 2025, the Chiefs to win their third straight. How are they doing? Extremely well. Yeah. Are they like- They won like 15 games of the 17 in the regular season.

ARTHUR: So now they're in playoffs, yeah?

MICHAEL: Yeah. They skipped the first week of finals and they're straight into the two games.

ARTHUR: Because of how high they were. Yep. And then it's just, it's the two bottom teams in that kind of thing.

MICHAEL: Like the wild card round and then they do divisional conference and then Superbowl. So what do you think, what's the Superbowl?

ARTHUR: Chiefs and?

MICHAEL: Lions maybe. Okay. And everyone will want the Lions to win. No one wants the Chiefs to win other than Chiefs fans, but I'd know the Bills could go all right and knock the Chiefs out.

ARTHUR: Well, that's something we can reveal in a month.

MICHAEL: Pretty soon.

ARTHUR: Pretty soon. When's the Super Bowl?

MICHAEL: Like the start of February? Around then, yeah.

ARTHUR: Nice.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right, let's wrap this one up. Because no one wants to hear what we think about NFL. Maybe some do. But wasn't enough AI chat at the end there, so people are tuning out.

ARTHUR: Yeah, maybe we can ask AI to see what the predictions. We'll get AI to predict who's going to win each one of those, and we can see if it's right.

MICHAEL: As in, you want to do that right now? I'm going to pull up Claude. Okay, do Claude.

ARTHUR: And then we'll just say like, who do you predict is going to win the Superbowl? 2025 Superbowl.

MICHAEL: Who is going to win the Superbowl? And it'll be like, sorry, I'm not trained. Since this question is about an event that will take part after my last knowledge, blah, blah, blah.

ARTHUR: Okay, I'm going to use ChatGPT because I'm curious and just proves ChatGPT is better.

MICHAEL: I'll just pause and we'll come back once you've done that.

ARTHUR: Okay. So I just did a search for who will win the 2025 Super Bowl in your opinion. So here we go. Predicting the winner of the 2025 Super Bowl is highly speculative, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, based on recent trends in team strengths, guess who's number one? Chief. Yep. Kansas City Chiefs, followed by the San Francisco 49ers. Well, they're not even in the finals, so it won't be them.

MICHAEL: OK, well, Philadelphia Eagles. Yeah. Cincinnati Bengals. No, they're knocked out too. Oh, come on. Come on, AI. So yeah, Chiefs versus Lions, let's call it. Do not use AI to do anything. To gamble. All right, let's wrap it up. That is the first episode of The SEO Show for 2025. We'll be back with another episode at some point. Very soon. Very soon. But until then, happy AI SEOing. Bye bye. Bye.

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