By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

“I’m excited but exhausted by so many changes,” Victor Pan wrote in a HubSpot Slack channel just before dropping half a dozen links to the latest AI news. He’s a product SEO here, and he sounds like he needs a hug.

And no wonder. Even in tech, an industry that thrives on rapid change, AI is accelerating everything it touches by orders of magnitude. AI-powered search engines like Perplexity are gaining mainstream momentum, SearchGPT is securing deals with publishers to sidestep copyright issues, and your friendly neighborhood SEO is pinching the bridge of their nose.

For the scoop on search trends you should know about as a marketer, AI-powered and otherwise, I talked to SEOs here at HubSpot and around the world.

But before we look ahead, let’s go back to the 1990s and take a quick look at how search has changed in the last three decades.

How the Search Landscape Has Changed

An entire generation has grown up never knowing a time before Google.

Image Source

Image Source

To get a broader perspective on the evolution of search, I turned to Mikkel deMib, a Denmark-based SEO who has been doing SEO since before it was called SEO.

“The first few years, we called it ‘search engine positioning,’” he tells me. I was alive and using the internet then, and I still feel like a kid listening to a bedtime story about the land before time.

I ask deMib about some of the major turning points in the last 25 years that might provide some context for understanding the future of search. The switch to mobile, he recalls, was first prophesied around Y2K, shortly after the introduction of wireless application protocol (WAP) that allowed mobile devices to connect to the internet.

“And of course it totally failed,” deMib says, because “from a usability point of view, it was terrible.”

It was another decade before Google adopted a mobile-first philosophy and content publishers adopted mobile-friendly UX. Now, deMib sees upwards of 90% mobile traffic in certain verticals, like women’s fashion — a number that’s not likely to surprise HubSpot readers.

The Evolution of Search in 2024

Rory Hope, Head of EN Growth at HubSpot, echoes Pan’s exhausted excitement.

“There’s a lot of chatter in the industry,” he says, “about Google essentially thrashing between different priorities.” And that’s “causing a great deal of stress for the SEO community.”

Pan takes a long view of all this AI-activated change, cautioning marketers to focus more on the grounding principles of good content rather than trying to optimize for every single update.

When I asked him how SEOs were figuring out how to optimize for Google’s AI Overviews, he reminded me that “there was a time” — October 2015 — “that Google really pushed forward a new format called …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron