Share this post
From the explosion of generative AI tools, big changes to Google Search, and hot social media topics, to deeper nuances like authenticity and conversational content creation, this year has been yet another fascinating experience. But how have the changes and advances in digital marketing and technology, affected you and your marketing, your business, and your digital activity? Here’s what the team at Clever Marketing has seen…
Once again probably the biggest, most impactful force in the digital universe has been the huge prevalence of AI. This year AI has been used extensively to generate content, and we use it ourselves to do research and create frameworks for certain work. However, we’ve seen some cases where certain website builder platforms have included AI tools to “supercharge your SEO”. As a result, we’ve seen, for example, AI-generated title tags, meta descriptions, and image ALT attributes which have not matched the quality we’d expect at a marketing agency with all our years of experience.
It may be tempting to just “press a button” and get an instant result, but our extensive experience in SEO instantly flagged these as “cheap tricks” that unfortunately will not enhance your web pages. In fact, they could do completely the opposite, they can cause a lot more harm than good to your rankings and conversions.
And now that Google has been upgrading SpamBrain, its AI-based system to detect and nullify spam, simple generative AI techniques are easy to detect and could keep your webpages out of search.
AI has become increasingly prevalent in search results this year too. Originally called Search Generative Experience or SGE, Google has used its AI systems to generate more intelligent search results. Sometimes replacing the featured snippets, AI Overviews are built using generative AI to directly answer search questions in a more comprehensive and conversational manner.
Where once we had lists of ten websites to peruse at our convenience, now the AI results are built on the fly, creating summaries of the search results using information from multiple sources.
A typical AI Overview result includes synthesised information and provides a small handful of the top resources that were used to produce the result, including links to those sources.
It’s worth remembering AI Overviews are experimental and not always 100% accurate. Also, field data about them is still coming in as to how, why, and when they appear. What we do know though is that they are more relevant to long-tail queries and conversational searches.
As an offshoot of SEO, the term Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) was coined as a discipline to optimise for appearance in AI Overviews (AIO) and these generative AI results. Since Google Gemini’s results are still in the experimental phase, GEO works, for now, but there’s an acute risk that it may not be as big as people think it is.
But what is GEO? It’s quite simply optimising, just as you do for SEO, except that we’re seeing long-form, comprehensive content and more conversational styles of writing performing well in the AI Overviews. Impressions have increased massively, with a slight increase in clicks, so GEO and AIO are potentially good for increasing brand awareness but not necessarily for driving traffic to your site.
The term may be out of vogue this time next year, but for now, we’re simply treating it as a specific approach to optimisation.
Google has become ubiquitous with search, and the verb “google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. After 26 years, Google has become the dominant search engine, with a UK market share of around 93% in November 2024.
However, that could be slipping as users start to adopt standalone tools such as ChatGPT Search, Claude, or Perplexity. These tools perform search through unique interfaces such as webpages or their own apps and they’re increasingly useful, generating concise, comprehensive results for conversational queries.
Then there are the voice search tools like Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. Or how about just using TikTok? Gen Z are allegedly much less likely to “google” anything these days. Ultimately, the future of search depends on how much we trust AI.
Getting away from the dominance of AI in 2024, Google Search is still highly relevant, and the company is doing its utmost to ensure that it delivers quality results for users. We’ve had a few major Google updates in 2024, and thankfully the naming conventions are more sensible:
The three core updates this year have been released to continue to improve the quality of the search results. These have been broad updates without any specific target websites or pages. They’ve also been released with the aim of reducing unhelpful content and displaying content written for humans rather than just to “game” the search engines.
The spam updates have been to counteract web spam, or low quality, mass-generated pages that reduce the standards of the search results. Google no longer releases the figures for how much web spam they detect but with the mass adoption of AI to generate content, we suspect the number to be in the trillions per day.
Unlike the broad core updates, the spam updates have been more specific in their roles. This year they focused on:
Google has been proactive in trying to suppress the bad and promote the good this year, which is music to our ears. Ultimately, how do publishers and marketers stay in the good books during these updates? Well, obviously, don’t generate anything spammy, and absolutely make sure that your content is high quality, original, and written for your audience of human beings. It’s that simple.
Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk has completely changed the once friendly social media platform. OK, maybe it hasn’t always been such a wonderful place, but it has, in the experience of many users, become so much worse under his tenure.
The new owner laid off an estimated 80% of the staff, slashed the moderation teams, and told some big-name advertisers “where to go if they didn’t like it” – and off they went! And so have a lot of other loyal users.
There have been previous threats to abandon Twitter from some quarters, but it has become louder and more regular of late. The election of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the USA and the use of account data to train the platform’s Grok AI tool have been too much for some of the Twitter faithful.
And then of course there was that clumsy re-brand. Taking the old globally recognised blue bird and replacing it with a cold, clinical, retro letter X was… quite bizarre to say the least. But then that’s the new owner for you. Maybe it wasn’t just his love of the letter X, but a subtle hint that it was an ex-liberal place to be and a place for Musk’s world view of “free speech absolutism”, where anyone can say anything they want, even if it is hateful, or just plain wrong. Who knows? We’re just speculating here.
The last point, about allowing X to be a place where anyone can say what they want, seems to have emboldened the less savoury elements of society. The restoration of accounts of controversial and previously banned personalities has also played a part in turning good people away from what was once Twitter.
Alternative options that have sprung up include Mastodon, which didn’t attract too many ex-Twitter users; the mighty Threads, with the backing of Mark Zuckerberg; and now the Jack Dorsey side-project Bluesky. The latter social media platform really does feel like Twitter did in the early days, and it has attracted a veritable deluge of new users in late 2024.
But is Bluesky the place to be for your business? Only time will tell.
Maybe we should also mention Instagram Reels here, and Facebook videos, but TikTok has been dominant this year. Even browsing through X (formerly Twitter) recently, TikTok videos have been shared there too. And, TikTok has 2 billion monthly active users.
Short-form videos are particularly effective for certain products, like fashion-wear, gadgets, and food, particularly with younger audiences. If that’s where your clients are and your products suit the format, then TikTok is well worth considering.
We don’t usually like to make predictions but here’s what we think will be happening in 2025:
At Clever Marketing, we’re an intelligent and insightful group of professionals, so we’re acutely aware that digital is an ever-evolving situation. Whatever your concerns or aspirations for 2025, we’d be happy to discuss your next project with you.
Whilst we can’t fully predict what will happen next year, we’re a dynamic and responsive agency, so we’ll do whatever is necessary to achieve results for you. But we can tell you know we know it;s going to be an exciting one for us here at Clever Marketing!
Clever Marketing
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Latest digital industry insights & Clever news
