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You know, I’ve been kicking around this whole SEO thing for, what, over two decades now. Feels like a lifetime some days, looking back to when keywords were just keywords, and backlinks were, well, they were everything. Used to be you could tweak a title tag, throw some keywords in a paragraph, maybe fix a broken link, and you’d see a bump. A real tangible bump. Now? It’s different. Real different. The air feels… electrified, I guess you could say. You feel it, don’t you? This shift that’s happening, especially with all the talk about AI Overviews and how it’s shaping search in 2025. Yeah, “From Technical SEO to AI Overviews – Shaping Search in 2025,” that’s what we’re all wrestling with. Every damn morning.
My brain sometimes goes back to, say, 2010. Remember that? When it was all about site speed, canonical tags, server logs. The nitty-gritty stuff, the technical SEO that made the gears turn. We’d spend hours digging through Google Search Console reports, squabbling over crawl budget, fixing those pesky redirect chains. It felt like playing a very specific, somewhat predictable game. You had your rules, your plays, your clear wins. Now, it’s like someone threw a whole new set of dice, and they’re kinda… glowing. You even wonder if they’re loaded.
The Old Guard: What Used to Keep Folks Up at Night
Back when I first started, and for a good long while after, what really occupied my time, and the smart folks I worked with at places like Seer Interactive, was that pure technical stuff. I mean, the bones of a website. Is it fast? Is it secure? Can Google even find all the pages it’s supposed to? We’d be in there, deep, looking at server response times. Checking those robots.txt files, praying we hadn’t accidentally blocked the whole damn site from the crawlers. Happened once. Not good. I won’t forget that phone call. It still makes my palms sweat a little, thinking about it.
We talked a lot about structured data too, long before it was everywhere. Getting those little schema markups right for recipes or products or events. Trying to get rich snippets. It was a precise kind of work, like a watchmaker. Every tiny cog needed to be just so. You’d get this flicker of satisfaction when a client’s star ratings showed up in the search results. A small victory, sure, but a victory. And it helped you know? It helped search engines sort things out. It still helps. Does it help as much with AI Overviews on the horizon? That’s the rub, isn’t it? That’s what’s got everyone asking.
Crawl, Index, Rank – The Holy Trinity
Seriously, those three words, crawl, index, rank, they were the mantra. Still are, to an extent, I guess. You had to make sure Googlebot, or Bingbot, or whatever bot, could actually get to your pages. Then, that it understood what your pages were about well enough to put them in its index. And then, and only then, you had a shot at ranking for anything. Everything else was fluff if those three weren’t sorted. I saw so many sites from well-meaning small businesses, even big ones, that just messed up the very basics. Like trying to run a marathon on a broken leg.
It’s a foundational thing, this crawl budget. I remember arguing with developers, bless their hearts, about unnecessary redirects. “But it’s just one redirect!” they’d say. “Yes,” I’d tell them, “but you’ve got ten thousand pages, and those redirects compound! It’s like having to open five doors to get into your own house every time.” The bots had a limit, a finite amount of time, processing power, for your site. You didn’t want them wasting it. You really, really didn’t. Are we wasting our time on old worries when AI Overviews are taking over the top of the SERP? That’s what you wonder. That’s what I wonder.
AI Overviews: The New Sheriff in Town
And then, boom, Google drops these AI Overviews. Generative AI summaries right at the top of the search results page. It’s like a whole new layer got painted over everything we thought we knew. I saw it coming, you know. Knew something big was on its way. All the chatter about large language models, the capabilities of things like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, what Google DeepMind was doing. You couldn’t ignore it. It was like a rumbling in the ground, getting louder and louder.
Now, it’s not just a rumbling, is it? It’s here. And it changes everything for “From Technical SEO to AI Overviews – Shaping Search in 2025.” It just does. Because if a user gets a quick, concise answer right there, without even scrolling, without even clicking, what does that mean for your carefully crafted content? For your blog posts, your product pages, your service descriptions? What’s the point of all that work you put in if the answer is just… given? Right there.
I’ve had plenty of conversations, yelling matches, even, about this with the guys at agencies like Built Visible over in the UK. They’re smart people, trying to figure out this puzzle too. We’re all in the same boat, trying to paddle without drowning.
Content Creation: From Clicks to… What, Exactly?
So, what happens to content when AI Overviews are the first thing people see? Does it just become a source? Fuel for the machine? I ask myself this every day. Does it have to be even more factual, more authoritative, more comprehensive, so the AI picks your stuff? Or does it need to be something else entirely? More unique, more opinionated, more human, so people want to click past the overview?
I’ve seen some folks at places like Epsilon, big marketing outfits, scrambling to figure out their content strategies for this. They’re thinking about how to write in a way that’s “AI-friendly” but also “human-compelling.” It’s a tightrope walk. You write for the bot to get noticed, but you write for the human to get clicked. Is that even possible, consistently? It feels like trying to speak two different languages at the exact same time. It’s making my head spin, trying to explain it.
I reckon you still need to write for your audience first, always have. But now you also gotta think, “Is this the kind of information that an AI would pull out and summarize accurately?” If your answer is wishy-washy, probably not. If it’s rock-solid, well-supported, maybe. Maybe you’ll get quoted. But then, is getting quoted enough? Or do you need the click? See, it gets confusing pretty fast.
Google’s Role and the Big Search Players
Google, obviously, is driving this whole thing. They are the market. They make the rules. And Microsoft, with Bing and Copilot, they’re not far behind. Apple too, they’re always lurking, doing their own thing, keeping their cards close to their chest. It’s a bit of a high-stakes poker game, isn’t it? These big companies, they’re shaping the whole digital world, for everyone. They say it’s to make search better, more efficient for users. Fine, I get that. But it also changes the whole economy of the internet.
What about those long-tail keywords we used to chase? The really specific questions people asked? If AI Overviews just answer those directly, without any fuss, then what? Do we still aim for those? My gut says yes, because people are always asking specific questions. But the reward, the payoff, that might be different. That’s the real question facing everyone trying to figure out “From Technical SEO to AI Overviews – Shaping Search in 2025.”
The Shifting Sands of User Behavior
You know, users, bless ’em, they just want answers. They don’t care how complicated the backend is. They don’t care about our canonical tags. They don’t care about our feelings! They just type a question and they expect an answer, fast. And now, AI Overviews give ’em that. A lot of the time, anyway. That’s probably the biggest thing here. People will get used to getting an answer right there. That instant gratification. Who can blame them? I do it myself.
Will people even bother clicking through to articles as much? I don’t know. Some will, sure. The ones who want more depth, more perspective, more human voice. The ones who are skeptical of the AI’s summary. But how many? And for what kinds of queries? It’s not just an SEO problem, it’s a human behavior problem. A big one.
Agencies and the New Landscape: Adapt or… What?
So, what does an agency do? A big one like iProspect, or a boutique firm that specializes in content? Do they just throw their hands up? No, of course not. You adapt. You always adapt. We’ve been adapting for twenty years. Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, RankBrain. Every few years, something new came along and made us all scratch our heads. This is just the biggest head-scratcher yet.
I believe it means we gotta get even smarter about what we do get people to click on. It means branding, reputation, authoritativeness – those soft, squishy things that were always important but now feel essential. If your name, your brand, is recognized as a leader, then maybe people will seek out your full article, even after seeing an AI summary. That’s a whole different kind of SEO, though, isn’t it? Less about keywords, more about trust.
What’s still needed from technical SEO in this AI world?
A lot, actually. I mean, the AI still needs to find your content, right? So, site speed? Still matters. Secure site? Still matters. Structured data? Absolutely, because that feeds the AI good, clean information about your content. Google isn’t just pulling stuff out of thin air. It’s reading the web. So, making the web easy for it to read, that’s still the gig. Just… maybe more important now than ever. You gotta make it easy for the machine to understand you.
I often wonder, and I get asked this a lot, is AI going to replace SEO entirely?
My take? Nah. Not really. It’ll change it, sure. It already has. But replace it? No way. Someone still needs to build the machines that read the web. Someone still needs to figure out how to best feed those machines good information. Someone still needs to interpret what the machines are doing and how they’re affecting user behavior. It’s just a new set of tools, or maybe a whole new workshop, for the same core job: connecting people with information. It’s “From Technical SEO to AI Overviews – Shaping Search in 2025,” not ending it.
The way I see it, the people who really get this, the ones who can blend the old technical savvy with an understanding of these big language models, those are the folks who’ll lead the charge. It’s not about abandoning what we knew. It’s about building on it. About understanding how a search engine, now supercharged with AI, still needs those good foundations.
The fear, I think, for a lot of us, is that we lose the art. That everything becomes so automated, so sterile. That our words, our thoughts, become just data points. I don’t want that. I think the human element, the unique voice, the distinct perspective, that becomes more valuable, not less. It just has to shout a bit louder to be heard over the AI Overviews. Maybe a lot louder.
You know, it all comes back to a core idea that I’ve carried with me forever. What are you trying to do for the searcher? Are you helping them? Are you giving them good stuff? If you keep that at the heart of it, no matter how much Google changes, no matter what AI does, you’ll probably be alright. Probably. The future’s always murky, isn’t it? But we keep going, keep learning, keep adapting. Because what else are we gonna do? Stop? That’s not in my vocabulary, never has been. Not for folks like us who’ve been doing this for so long. We’ll figure it out. We always do.
