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This is a beginner’s guide to SEO in 2025. It’s probably the most uncertain time in the 15 years that the Hallane team has been doing SEO. We’ve been told for a few years that AI is going to destroy digital marketing, and that AI is going to make our jobs much easier, and a whole host of other doomsday predictions about our industry that have yet to come true.
So what has really changed?
Nothing really.
The rules of SEO are all still the same. Granted, it is much easier now for someone with no SEO experience to come into the market and put together content that will help them rank on search engine results pages. It hasn’t changed technical SEO in the slightest.
Search engines haven’t changed their requirements. The fundamentals are all still the same and Google is still looking for the same things. There’s not a whole lot of point in me telling you what so many other people have already said. So here is a video from Ahrefs, one of the leading voices (and tools) in the SEO industry, explaining the exact impact (or lack thereof) of AI and SEO.
We’ve been in the SEO game since 2009. Over the years, the rules have shifted, the tools have evolved, and the competition has grown. But for the first time in over a decade, the landscape feels uncertain in a different way.
AI has arrived, loudly, disruptively, and in some cases, destructively.
For months now, we’ve heard the usual chorus of predictions: AI will destroy digital marketing. AI will automate SEO into irrelevance. AI will either replace us or make us unstoppable. Depending on who you ask, we’re either doomed or obsolete or just waiting to be disrupted out of our jobs.
But here’s what we actually see, and what we strongly agree with in this excellent breakdown from Ahrefs:
SEO is not dead. But lazy, low-effort SEO is.
AI has made it easier than ever to produce content, any content. With the click of a button, anyone can generate an article, rephrase a competitor’s blog, or mash together some search-friendly text using nothing but prompts and guesswork.
And guess what? Google knows. The search results are flooded with mass-produced, generic AI content. In response, Google is cracking down harder than ever before. Entire websites, some of them legitimate, have been wiped from the index. Traffic is vanishing overnight, not because people aren't searching anymore, but because Google is tightening the rules on what deserves to rank.
And still, search remains essential. Google processes over 5 trillion searches per year. That’s not going away. In fact, it’s 100x more than the total conversations ChatGPT is expected to have this year. SEO hasn’t died. It’s evolved.
Despite the chaos, one truth remains: the core principles of SEO have not changed.
People still search using keywords. Google still crawls, indexes, and ranks content based on relevance and usefulness. Backlinks still count. Technical SEO, site speed, structured data, crawlability, is just as vital as ever, and maybe even more so as Google raises the bar for what it considers a quality experience.
What has changed is that simply understanding the fundamentals is no longer enough to stand out. The bar is higher. The field is more crowded. And AI, ironically, has raised expectations for what “average” content looks like, which means your content has to be better than average to compete.
What the Ahrefs video drives home, and what we’ve experienced ourselves, is that doing the basics is now table stakes. The difference between ranking and disappearing comes down to your ability to move beyond mechanical SEO and actually serve the user behind the search.
We all remember the old SEO playbook. You’d search for a keyword, copy the top-performing content, add a few extra points, sprinkle in the right headers and keywords, grab a couple backlinks, and boom, first page.
This approach worked for a long time. But over time, it created a world where everyone was saying the same thing in slightly different words. Content became templated. SEO became robotic. “Writing for search engines” became a strategy in and of itself.
Now AI can mimic that strategy in seconds.
And that’s exactly why it’s failing. The thing AI can replicate perfectly, bland, generic, templated content, is precisely what Google is pushing against. Google has always wanted to surface the most relevant, helpful, human result. It hasn’t always succeeded, but its intention is clear.
Which is why we’re not surprised to see that writing “for SEO” doesn’t work like it used to. And frankly, we’re okay with that. It’s better for users, better for creators, and better for brands that want to build trust.
This is the heart of it. And it’s why we think the advice in the Ahrefs video is some of the best we’ve heard on this topic.
If you want to rank in 2025, you can’t just think about keywords, you have to think about people. Real people, with real problems, real questions, and real goals.
Let’s say you want to rank for “how to start a YouTube channel.” The outdated approach would be to look at the top-ranking content and replicate the structure. You’d make sure to include gear recommendations, tips on thumbnails, advice on niches, and maybe a monetization section.
But that doesn’t go far enough.
Instead, you should be asking: Who is searching this, and what are they struggling with?
Is it a student looking for a creative outlet? A business owner hoping to drive leads? A content creator trying to turn a hobby into income? The answer to those questions shapes not just the information you share, but how you present it, whether it’s a checklist, a tutorial, or a story.
When you get this right, you don’t just rank, you connect.
You keep people engaged. You earn their trust. And you build a site (and brand) that Google wants to rank.
It’s easy to blame AI for all of SEO’s current instability. But AI is not the problem, how people use it is.
Most of the AI content flooding Google is junk because it was created by people who don’t understand SEO, content strategy, or even their own audience. They expect AI to do the thinking for them. And it does, badly.
The truth is, AI is an incredible assistant, if you know how to direct it.
Use it to brainstorm. Use it to outline. Use it to refine tone, find gaps, or analyze SERPs. But don’t hand it the keys and expect it to drive. If you’re doing keyword research, audience research, and competitive analysis yourself, you can feed that insight into a tool like ChatGPT or Claude and get useful output.
But without that expertise, the AI just reflects your own lack of clarity back at you.
This is where we see alignment with Ahrefs’ advice. They stress that AI should not replace human strategy, and we agree completely. It’s a tool, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re good at SEO, it can make you better. If you’re not, it will just help you fail faster.
The last point in the video is arguably the most important, and the least discussed.
If you rely entirely on Google for traffic, you’re putting your business on shaky ground.
We’ve seen what happens when algorithm updates hit. Sites that were thriving one week fall off the map the next. That’s the reality of building on rented land.
But here’s the upside: the skills you build while learning SEO are transferable.
Search optimization isn’t limited to Google. You can apply the same principles to:
Every platform that sorts and surfaces content based on search queries follows similar principles. And if you’re good at understanding users and optimizing for their intent, you’ll be able to adapt your skills wherever the audience goes.
SEO in 2025 is not about doing more. It’s about doing better. It’s about rejecting the noise, resisting the shortcuts, and obsessing over how you can actually help the people who find you.
The AI revolution has made one thing clear: copying what already exists is not enough.
You need to be worth finding. You need to deliver value that a language model can’t synthesize in 10 seconds. And you need to treat SEO not as a hack, but as a way to build real, lasting relationships with your audience.
We agree with the message of the Ahrefs video completely: SEO is still one of the best marketing channels in the world, if you respect it, adapt with it, and do the work.
If you want to dive deeper into the fundamentals, we recommend their free SEO course for beginners. It’s an excellent place to start.
And if you’re already on your way but unsure how to adapt to this new landscape, feel free to get in touch. We’re here to help marketers and brands do SEO properly, not by gaming the system, but by understanding it better than anyone else.