My son asked me yesterday how far the International Space Station was from Earth. Before, I would have opened up Google to search, and find a website to answer the question. But this time I instinctively pressed the power button of my phone to call up Gemini, which answered the question directly in seconds.
Although Gemini’s AI used data from scraping the web, as a user, I didn’t have to search through the web or even know where the information came from. In fact, the website that worked hard to rank #1 for that search query may as well have ranked #1000 as Gemini took all the credit for their work.
I guess you could call this the biggest heist in the history of mankind 🙂
This leads me to think, what will SEO look like in 2025 and beyond?
I remember back in the late 1990’s accessing the internet was very different from today. In particular, there was no Google search. Instead, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos were the equivalent of the phone book for finding websites. And I mean this literally: these were actual directories, and the equivalent of SEO back then was all about getting your website listed in the top categories for your niche.
Another quirk from this era was that directories used to be listed alphabetically from A-Z, and so a common growth hack many companies used back then was naming the website or company starting with A 🙂
A little later in the late 90’s Google was founded and quickly gained popularity thanks to its search engine, which provided a better user experience compared to browsing and searching static directories.
Instead of relying on the categorization of a website by a business, Google pioneered the idea of ranking websites based on the strength of the links they received, similar to how research papers use citations.
This fundamentally changed how businesses promoted their websites, from focusing on getting high rankings in directories to figuring out the algorithm used by Google to list websites higher in the search results.
I believe we are now at a pivotal point, similar to back in 1998 when the leading companies at the time (Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos) went from hero to zero as the rules of the game fundamentally changed.
As marketers and entrepreneurs, we are still in the early stages of this massive transition, so now is the best time to figure out where the hockey puck is heading and how you can adapt your marketing so you can rise with the tide.
🔥 Trends to watch
xAI launches Grok as a standalone iOS app and gives users access to Grok 2, xAI’s latest AI model, without requiring an existing X account or subscription.
Google is testing an AI daily podcast based on your “Discovery” feed called Daily Listen. This works similarly to Google’s NotebookLM audio overviews but focuses on trending or personalized news.
Meta has been quietly testing AI influencers, following the work they started with AI Studio last year, which enables you to create AI characters based on your interests. Is this the future of influencers on social media?
Become a 10X Marketer today
If you want to learn how to 10X your marketing and tap into AI, join my newsletter today, where I will share weekly tactics and actionable insights.
Learn to 10X your impact at:
https://the10xmarketer.substack.com/subscribe
No-fluff tactics & AI trends for solopreneurs and startups to 10X your impact.