The world of digital marketing is always an exciting, fast-moving place and 2024 has been no exception.
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…
TL;DR
- AI has dominated the headlines, finding its way into almost everything.
- AI Overviews (AIO) have been prominent in the search results.
- Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) has evolved as an offshoot of SEO for generative AI search results.
- Standalone AI tools, including for search, are becoming increasingly useful.
- Google core updates have focused on surfacing helpful, quality content, and supressing abusive practices in scaled content, reputation, and expired domains.
- Bluesky has become a popular alternative to X (Twitter).
- TikTok is huge, especially amongst younger demographics – in fact it’s the biggest search engine in the world now. Yes, really!
2025 is going to be an interesting year…
The Dominance of AI (Artificial Intelligence)
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 Overviews (AIO)
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.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
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.
Standalone AI and Other Search Tools
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.
Google Updates
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:
- March 2024 core update
- March 2024 spam update
- June 2024 spam update
- August 2024 core update
- November 2024 core update
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:
- Scaled content abuse: Automatically generated, low-quality, or unoriginal content created to manipulate search rankings has been a key target of this policy.
- Site reputation abuse: Some websites with their own high-quality content have also been hosting low-quality, third-party content that has piggybacked on the host site’s reputation (also called “parasite SEO”). The spam updates have reduced such instances of poor search results content, at times targeting high-profile offenders like Forbes with pages for “CBD Gummies”.
- Expired domain abuse: One spam tactic has been buying up expired domains from dead websites with lots of historical backlinks and a strong authority. Replacing earlier content with their own inferior quality, and often irrelevant work, spammers have gamed the system. This no longer works, thankfully.
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.
X-odus and the Rise of Bluesky
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.
Ignore TikTok at Your Peril
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.
And what’s next for 2025?
We don’t usually like to make predictions but here’s what we think will be happening in 2025:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to be big. It will still be useful for content and research, but marketers need to be careful that they’re not relying on AI generated content; search engines (and humans) can detect it, and people are still wary of it, despite the attraction, to those watching the pennies, of rapdily produced content. Remember, there’s a price for speed vs. quality.
- AI Overviews are still in the experimental phase, so we don’t know where they’ll settle, but they work for some search intents and less so for others. Standalone AI tools and AI search tools will continue to evolve and mature.
- Zero click searches have increased with the adoption of featured snippets and now AIO in the SERPs. Marketers will need to continue to conduct high quality SEO but also be unique and imaginative in their approaches to digital strategy.
- Trust and verification will be huge in 2025, especially with increasing levels of misinformation on social media. Formed in 2023, BBC Verify is a team of journalists dedicated to fact-checking. “The Beeb” has a duty to provide accurate information and the Verify team is an example of just how important this has become.
- Privacy and security will be top-drawer concerns for users, businesses, and agencies alike. Knowing who has your data and how it is used are paramount, especially with AI’s Large Language Models (LLMs) being trained on publicly available data. As for security, threats are increasing in a changing world, so everyone needs to take cyber much more seriously.
- The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has been around since 2018, but June 2025 is the deadline for it to be integrated into national legislation. Whilst the UK is no longer part of the EU, if your website sells products and/or services to the EU, then your website will need to be accessible. Conduct accessibility audits and familiarise yourself with The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. We’re already offering this service to our clients.
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!
