SEO isn't dead. It's just changing fast.

In our latest Growth Leader Series webinar, we sat down with Nick LeRoy, SEO consultant and founder of SEOJobs.com and #SEOForLunch, to dig into what’s really going on in search right now and what top SEOs are doing about it.

From AI Overviews in Google to the messiness of attribution, Nick outlined seven key trends reshaping SEO and content marketing in 2025. His message was clear: SEO isn’t over, but it's changing and the best teams have to change with it.

Top 5 Takeaways

1. AI Overviews Are Changing CTRs, But Not Killing Search

Google’s AI Overviews are increasing impressions but decreasing clicks. That means SEOs need to rethink what "ranking" really gets them and focus more on visibility than pure traffic.

2. Content Breadth Is More Important Than Ever

With less traffic per page, teams need to cover more ground. Nick shared that the smartest SEOs are building content libraries around broader topic clusters, targeting long-tail variations and adjacent questions.

3. SEO Is Now a Distribution Game

It’s not just about ranking anymore. Platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and LLMs (like ChatGPT) are becoming critical for organic discovery. If your content isn’t showing up where your audience hangs out, you're missing opportunities.

4. Revenue and Visibility Are the New North Stars

Attribution is messy. Instead of obsessing over exact conversions from individual pages, focus on leading indicators like impressions, brand mentions, earned media, and contribution to revenue.

5. AI Is a Force Multiplier, Not a Strategy

The best SEOs are using AI to move faster with content processes, auditing, and ideation. But AI doesn’t replace human judgment. You still need strong editorial POVs, solid workflows, and clear business goals.

Best Practices and Key Learnings

Build for AI-Era Visibility

Your audience isn’t just Googling anymore—they’re asking LLMs, searching on Reddit, and browsing YouTube. Your content strategy should reflect that.

“SEO has spent so much time focusing on obviously ranking for Google and taking any of the random clicks that you might get from Bing. And that was kind of the success tied to your individual role. I think we're in a situation now where organic search or organic visibility is well beyond just Google and that includes the LLMs.” — Nick LeRoy

Tips:

• Repurpose content into YouTube Shorts, Reddit replies, or LinkedIn posts
• Create structured data and summaries that LLMs can easily ingest

Revisit SEO basics because they still matter

Despite all the changes, fundamentals like internal linking, clean HTML, and structured data still drive results. These are the things that make your content crawlable, indexable, and trustworthy to both search engines and LLMs.

Focus on what you can prove and what matters

Clicks are declining, but that doesn’t mean SEO isn’t working. Nick encourages teams to zoom out:

• Is SEO supporting pipeline?
• Are branded queries increasing?
• Are we being cited in authoritative summaries?

These signals matter more than ever in a distributed search world.

Collaborate across teams, like with demand gen and PR

SEO no longer operates in a silo. Distribution requires partnerships with PR, paid, and product marketing. Everyone has a stake in visibility now, so make sure you're aligned.

Nick shared:

I just had a conversation with a CMO. And we were talking about how you know their informational content is down from Google, and he understands that we're not gonna potentially get it back. But he asked me...If you were in my seat like, where would you invest? Not knowing exactly what the size of the prizes for these LLMs. And I told him I would double whatever you're budgeting for PR because there's no situation where that is not gonna provide value to your company. Assuming you have a good brand product and service. But I think as a secondary value. We could see a correlation of as your brand gets stronger through more visibility and distribution. I think that's gonna have a direct correlation with Llm. Traffic and visibility as well.

Putting the Insights into Practice

To win in 2025, SEO teams must:

• Expand content coverage to adapt to shrinking CTRs
• Distribute content across non-Google channels
• Use AI to scale outputs but retain human oversight
• Track visibility and brand impact, not just traffic

The future of SEO is hybrid: human expertise + AI-powered scale.

Want to see how AirOps helps teams build smarter SEO workflows? Our expert team can help you structure, automate, and scale content operations with AI—without sacrificing quality.

Want to see how AirOps helps teams do exactly that? Book a demo or email us at team@airops.com.

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