Picture this: the date is May 20th, 2025, and Google has just announced a brand new way of searching, "AI Search". For those of you who read our blogs, you may off seen one that was written on April 2, 2025, and it was all about " How AI is shaping SEOs Future", and in that blog while searching for information regarding a problem I was having, I asked AI instead of using Google.
I asked myself if this method of searching, alongside the personalisation and presentability that we get from the answers that AI gives us, and lo and behold, on May 20th, 2025, it has just announced exactly that. So in this blog, let's dive into this brand new way of searching and how it could affect your search engine optimisation.
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After releasing the AI overviews last year, Google has seen a large increase in people asking Google more long-form questions rather than short keyword-oriented searches. Google has then started to release a new way of searching, allowing you to ask Google any problem as if it were a human. While this update is going to be rolled out to the U.S. first before anyone else, it is still a promising development and could mean some core parts of SEO could start to change should more people use the AI search feature than normal keyword-oriented search.
This change is going to matter to all of the e-commerce sites. In this update, it shows the AI helping someone find some summer dresses to wear with Google shopping integrated, allowing the AI to not only track prices and update the user for price drops of that listing but also generate how the person may look in the dress. This would mean that it would be more important for e-commerce sites to get their products listed on Google Shopping to ensure that they gain the benefits of the new search.
Read More Here: Shopping on Google: AI Mode and virtual try-on updates from I/O 2025
If you’ve ever used generative search to answer a question, then you know that the answers it gives are longer and more personalised than normal searching, and Google’s new AI search does this and some more. Not only does it kick off many different searches upon you entering a query, but it also then presents it in a way that gives you information, but it also gives you images and links to the sites that contain more information regarding the topic that you asked it about.
Picture this: you're planning a holiday and you need some ideas for where to go for food, so you ask Google's AI mode and it comes up with ideas based on where you have been previously, and places you have emailed before. With Google AI mode, you can connect your Gmail, and it can use that information from previous emails to bring more personalisation into its results, further improving the experience of the user.
As AI becomes more integrated into searches, search engine optimisation is going to change a bit, and to understand where it’s going, we have to understand how AI gathers its information.
AI handles queries differently from how Google handles queries. You see if you search using Google, it uses “keywords” to find content that’s related to your query and then returns those results. On the other hand, AI uses context and topic to understand what it is you are looking for. This would mean that SEO strategies would shift from keyword-based content to topic and context-based content that offers a wide range of information.
SEO content writing has changed over the years, and I think we could be in for another shift. In the early days of Google, all that mattered was having as many keywords as you could on the page; this is now bad and is known as “keyword stuffing”. With AI mode, we could see a push for more highly relevant, deep information and contextually comprehensive content. While keywords will still play a part, it will be the content that actually makes the difference when it comes to AI.
In conclusion, while it’s only in its first stages, we could see this new version of search see the rest of the world a lot sooner than normal, meaning that SEOs should prepare to boost their content and make high-quality, reputable content that AI loves!
