Is SEO Dead in 2025?

ROI is crucial to the success of any digital campaign, including Organic Search optimization.

But with the rise of AI, zero-click searches, Google’s frequent algorithm updates, and shrinking real estate of SERPs, marketers wonder if Organic Search is still a worthy investment in 2025.

If you’ve noticed fluctuating Organic Search impressions and site traffic, you may be tempted to seek out a better bang for your buck.

After all, why would you expect an Organic Search strategy to benefit your ROI when the leading search engine has placed an artificial ceiling on your ranking ability in the first place?

But don’t get out your “jump to conclusions” mat just yet. We’re going to dive into the data and trends that tell the real story of Organic Search optimization in 2025 and why it’s still a worthwhile investment, no matter the size of your business or your target personas.

We all wish it was our own, but Google is the most visited website. On average, Google garners over 100 billion visits every month.

From Search to YouTube, Gmail, and even Google Slides, people all over the world depend on Google and its various products.

There’s no denying Google is massive, but even in the face of antitrust lawsuits, the search giant isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

As of February 2025, Google enjoyed 90% of the global search engine market share. Regardless of how you feel about that number, it’s one that digital marketers can’t afford to ignore.

Here’s another one: Google processes around 8.5 billion searches daily. For those billions of searchers, the SERP experience is far more dynamic than it once was, and that’s why some marketers have concluded that Organic Search optimization is on its way out.

When you’re looking for a weeknight recipe, a quicker route to the mall, or a store where you can grab a last-minute anniversary gift, SERPs make it easy to get instant answers.

But that means it’s more difficult for site owners to push their pages into those coveted top results, especially with so much space dedicated to paid ads, rich results, answer boxes, Google’s AI Overviews, and other elements.

That’s why, above all else, an informed, strategic link building campaign should be at the center of every Organic Search endeavor. There are some aspects of Organic Search that can help you realize a near-term boost, but there’s no substitute for an intelligent, targeted link building approach. It’s simply the most effective and enduring piece of successful Organic Search optimization.

And when it comes to link building, don’t take the term “intelligent” to include AI. To be sure, recent growth in AI capability is impressive and increasingly practical. AI has already brought significant changes to search marketing.

But as far as link building is concerned, it’s not a process that should be automated. Productive, efficient link building requires high-quality content and intelligent content syndication. These two elements are necessary for an ROI-focused link building campaign that produces results; there’s just no getting around it, even with AI.

Link building is the process at the heart of every effective Organic Search campaign. It’s absolutely essential, so accept no compromises here as you pursue Organic Search to spur your brand forward.

You can use many words to describe Google, but “static” isn’t one of them.

Digital companies, including heavyweights like Google’s parent company, Alphabet, exist in an adapt-or-die environment. If they don’t innovate to maximize value for their customers, their competitors could pounce and seize additional market share.

Nobody bats 1.000, but Google’s adaptations have overwhelmingly improved the search engine’s utility for its end users, especially with the rollout of AI Overviews and AI-organized SERPs for certain categories in the U.S.

Keeping up with these changes can be frustrating for many brands seeking to boost visibility on Google’s platforms, yet it’s absolutely vital if you want your Organic Search strategy to deliver results.

For content-centric sites, including local news publishers, that traffic is absolutely vital.

If chatbots and AI-driven search take over, people no longer need to visit your site to benefit from your content—so why would you even bother with SEO?

At this point, it’s all hypothetical. Bottom line: the future of AI as it relates to search, despite strengthening trends, remains to be seen.

But here’s something indisputable: Google’s SERPs are more crowded than ever.

We’re not talking about growing competition in a given industry, either. Google’s SERP experience has grown more dynamic, with more visual content to help you find what you’re looking for in less time, plus precious PPC space reserved at the top.

Often, the true top-ranked result—not part of a product carousel or a sponsored link—isn’t even visible without scrolling. How’s that for ROI on your SEO strategy?

So if the imminent proliferation of AI throughout the search landscape has you feeling bearish about the future of SEO, know this: While the specific mechanisms may be different, much of what has site owners apprehensive about AI in search has already come to pass.

From a digital marketing perspective, AI’s greatest impact on Search so far has been the technology’s role in ranking organic results. This isn’t a recent advent, either. Google started using the machine learning system RankBrain nearly a decade ago.

But in Q3 2024, Google began rolling out AI-organized SERPs. The initial launch applied only to the recipe and meal-planning categories, and only in the U.S. But this move is widely expected to become a trend and gradually affect SERPs for all queries.

It certainly isn’t the only way Google is using AI to enhance Search; consider Google Lens, Circle to Search, and plenty of other ways to find what you’re looking for.

For most users, however, their most significant interaction with AI in Search is through AI Overviews.

AIOs are an enormous value-add, especially for those seeking only a quick answer to a specific question or surface-level background information on a topic.

Of course, for digital marketers, AIOs are eating up valuable real estate on SERPs, often pushing the top organic results below the fold and overall contributing to a rise in zero-click searches, which makes a brand’s visibility on such SERPs less valuable.

And that begs a critical question.

With AI Overviews giving searchers most, if not all, of the information they need for certain queries and dominating prime space on the SERPs where they appear, publishers stand to miss out on crucial traffic.

So, if people no longer need to visit your site to benefit from your content, why would you even bother with Organic Search?

At this point, it’s still a hypothetical question and will hopefully stay that way.

The bottom line is that the future of AI as it relates to search, despite strengthening trends, remains to be seen.

It’s easier than ever for end users to discover new information, locations, and products, all without having to click a link in search results.

Instead, Google works to deliver immediate answers directly in SERPs.

The proportion of zero-click searches has risen sharply in recent years, almost entirely due to the way our search engine usage has evolved.

There are still plenty of us who go in-depth to find archived news stories or read long-form product reviews, but this group’s growth is far outpaced by the increase in searchers who rely on Google for quick results while on the go.

Depending on whose numbers you trust, about half of all searches result in zero clicks, with mobile search being the greater contributor.

Much to the chagrin of marketers everywhere, Google continues to prioritize the needs of users over site owners. However, if Google surfaces are increasingly geared toward UX at the cost of CTR, why would site owners expect to see meaningful ROI from their Organic Search campaigns?

Why does it seem like Google is actively working to make long-standing Organic Search strategies obsolete? The answer is in the search engine’s goal of serving results based on search intent above all else.

Through rich results, AI Overviews, and new ways to search, Google has reinvented itself as a discovery engine.

The overarching goal is to satisfy searchers with the most relevant results, best-of-web content, and a contemporary UX.

By no means are the folks at Google letting commerce fall by the wayside. Just look at how they’ve upgraded Google Lens and all the AI-powered solutions to make Google Analytics 4 data more valuable than ever while also ensuring compliance with new privacy regulations like GDPR and the CCPA.

But the search engine must walk a fine line.

Users simply aren’t interested in a cluttered or clumsy search experience.

This leads us to what is arguably Google’s greatest strength: its ability to evaluate search intent.

Google has transitioned from throwing out a handful of links to content searchers might be looking for to instead delivering the information searchers are after in an accessible, digestible manner.

Over the course of five years, Google developed a synonym system that delivers the content you’re looking for despite minor linguistic differences between your search and the content you would find most valuable.

This synonym system makes a remarkable difference in over 30% of searches, and it’s just one language model that helps Google evaluate your query to the fullest extent possible.

By fusing the ability to recognize locally-oriented searches, queries looking for recent results as opposed to older data, and the format (images, recipes, etc.) you’d likely find most helpful, Google expertly assesses search intent to deliver relevant results.

That includes commerce results, by the way.

Google’s reorientation as a discovery engine doesn’t exclude quality products, especially if shopping is part of a user’s search intent. Just don’t expect your e-commerce shop to enjoy the same visibility and funnel effectiveness that it would on certain social platforms.

If you’re thinking this robust, refined functionality would be a boon for site owners implementing informed Organic Search strategies that focus on creating quality user experiences, you’re right on the money.

Any brand publishing helpful, original, user-focused content, and doing the technical SEO work to optimize their site, stands to benefit from Google’s ongoing transformation.

Frankly, most of the racket you’ve heard about the death of Organic Search comes from people who’ve been doing it the wrong way and getting away with it for far too long.

They aren’t interested in creating outstanding content and making legitimate contributions to the digital ecosystem. Instead, they see Organic Search optimization as a “hack” or nothing more than a series of tricks to manipulate Google into improving page rankings.

But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

What’s the point in trying to make low-quality or unhelpful pages rank higher? These are typically the pages that see the highest bounce rates anyway.

If your site exists to benefit you without providing any value to your users, what makes you think any of those users would convert?

Yes, of course, you need to rank as highly as possible in SERPs to acquire traffic and gain new users. But don’t miss the forest for the trees: The whole point of Organic Search optimization is to increase conversions, blow past your KPI goals, and build long-term brand loyalty.

Cloaking, deceptive redirects, publishing thin content, and keyword stuffing used to be relatively effective means of snatching better rankings for a moment, but they do nothing to improve your site or benefit your users.

In the old days, maybe there was a benefit to employing “black hat” SEO techniques. But search engines caught on a long, long time ago, and in 2025, practices that go against search engine guidelines are far more likely to get you penalized than yield the results you need to grow your business.

You’d be upset, too, if Mom and Dad cut up your credit cards or yanked your driver’s license. That’s how many black hat folks feel these days, and it’s no wonder they’re making spurious claims about Organic Search’s deathbed.

But any surprise on their part is unjustified. Google’s updates and revisions don’t constitute some abrupt course reversal. Google’s published guidance on Organic Search practices is also abundant and clear.

Not to shock you, but the most effective way to improve your page rankings is to simply follow Google’s straightforward guidelines.

It might sound vanilla, but the plain truth is that Google rewards sites and apps that create genuine value for their users.

To succeed, you need original, user-focused content (remember the Helpful Content Update?) coupled with solid on-page SEO to resolve and avoid technical issues such as long loading times.

In truth, Organic Search is more valuable than ever. Thanks to algorithm updates along with deeper advice from Google, it’s never been simpler to follow white hat Organic Search practices and achieve stellar results.

Anyone just beginning to dabble in Organic Search could understandably find the dynamism of this industry intimidating. But digital marketers who’ve been around for a few algorithm updates will tell you this state of change is constant and is foundational to our medium.

Focusing on white hat SEO techniques is critical to achieving the visibility your business needs to grow its user base.

There’s about a 180-degree difference between this new reality and saying, “Organic Search is dead.”

It would be far more accurate to say Organic Search optimization is different in 2025, but that’s because Google Search keeps working to become its best self for the benefit of everyone.

While there are plenty of old Organic Search practices to abandon, there are also plenty of new tools and approaches that can help you thrive as Google keeps growing.

But be judicious and keep these best practices in mind.

There are plenty of other Organic Search practices to follow to make gains in 2025, but these are the big ones.

Organic Search optimization is far from dead, and a data-driven Organic Search strategy is one of the best investments digital marketers can make to crush KPIs and achieve tangible, long-term results.

Google keeps delivering new ways to search, and AI has entered the chat, but there’s no substitute for expert research and a tailored digital strategy to drive your organic growth.

As a Google Partner, VELOX stays ahead of the curve. Our team of SEO experts is ready to help grow your brand through an elevated keyword strategy, quality link building, and world-class content.

For Organic Search optimization as it should be, contact VELOX and get an enterprise SEO audit today.