New Ways to Optimize Your Content for AI in 2025

Woohoo! It’s that time of year again when I review last year’s digital marketing predictions to see how well I predicted the future and then make my new marketing predictions for 2025.

This year, I’m trying something different.

Rather than releasing mega-long content with all my thoughts, I’m creating individual content on each trend.

Today, I’m reviewing my first 2024 trend prediction…

Optimizing for SGE and AI platforms

Last year, I predicted that people would optimize their content for Google’s AI overviews (formerly called SGE) and other AI-search interfaces, like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

This prediction was mostly correct, but as usual, the pace is slow.

For those in the SEO and digital marketing world, the emergence of AI feels like a seismic shift in our industry (and it is)…

… but the general public is relatively slow to change their behaviors, so we are still a few years out from AI search/information retrieval becoming truly mainstream.

Google has hit its lowest market share in nearly 10 years.

With the emergence of these new technologies, Google has been experiencing some market share loss.

From January 2024 to December 2024, their worldwide market share dropped from 91.47% to 89.73% – an overall loss of about 1.74%.

Interestingly, it’s mostly been Bing that has picked up the slack, whose search results currently look a lot like “old Google”.

And while yes, this drop in market share is historic (Google has not had less than 90% market share since 2015), they still process more than 40,000 searches per SECOND, or nearly three and a half TRILLION searches every single day.

To combat the changes in user behavior, Google has been gradually shifting the way they present information to users within Google search to compete with AI-Search interfaces like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

AI Overviews has already been rolled out worldwide and Google has plans to double down even more on using AI in the search results.

It’s unclear whether users are actually enjoying these changes, but Google is between a bit of a rock and a hard place here… if they don’t adapt, they’re at risk of getting left behind.

The emergence of AI Organized search results

At the 2024 Google I/O conference, Google announced that they will be gradually rolling out AI-organized search results, starting in the dining and recipe spaces.

This means rather than seeing primarily links to blog posts in the search results, they are totally rethinking the way they organize and present information to users.

In AI-organized search results, almost everything is presented inside scrollable carousels with visuals. There are very few traditional links to blog posts.

Additionally, rather than just showing content on the topic you explicitly searched for, Google uses AI to predict more specific types of content you might find useful and displays that in the search results as well.

AI-organized search results pages are rolling out slowly, but you’ll know if you’re looking at one if you see the label “Organized with AI” at the top.

Right now they tend to show up on mobile for broader queries in the dining and recipe niches.

For example, I just searched for “best date night restaurants los angeles” and this is what I see on my phone in the Google app:

1. A “critics picks” section – with links to a Reddit thread on the topic and a blog post from The Infatuation website.
2. Romantic Restaurants carousel – showing a scrollable carousel pack of 6 Google business listings with the name of the restaurant, a picture of the food, ratings, price point, type of cuisine, whether it’s currently open, and the address. You can also click a button to display them on a map.
3. Wine bars with food carousel – same thing, 6 different restaurants.
4. Local favorites section – with links to two Reddit threads about date night restaurants in LA
5. Intimate atmospheres carousel – 6 more Google business listings for restaurants
6. Rooftop spots
7. Newest openings section – links to two blog posts about date night restaurants in LA (from theinfatuation.com (repeat post from above) and timeout.com)
8. Restaurants with fireplaces
9. Tasting menus
10. A “best neighborhoods for dining” MAP – showing the 5 most popular areas with an expandable drop-down menu below. You can expand each neighborhood and see, again, Google Business listings for the top restaurants in each area.
11. Beautiful spaces
12. Chic cocktail bars
13. Buzzy date night spots – This is actually a social media pack! It shows TikTok videos, IG Reels, YT shorts, and Lemon8 videos on the topic
14. Restaurants with great ambiance
15. Outdoor dining
16. Restaurants with live music
17. A Reddit pack – 4 more threads on the topic
18. Only HERE do we see 4 traditional blog posts ranking. Again, it’s the infatuation and Time Out articles, plus blog posts from Opulist and Resy
19. What People are Saying carousel – IG carousel post and two TikTok videos (all recent, posted within the last 3 weeks).
20. Blog post from Thrillist
21. Quora forum post
22. TikTok video
23. Restaurant website link (The Little Door)

Here’s a visual of what the carousels look like:

As you can see, there is FAR less real estate dedicated to roundup-style posts from bloggers or publications.

Google is essentially using AI to curate information from around the web, bypass the middle men, and display the popular restaurants as carousels of Google Buiness listings instead. (Because of course they would.)

To augment this info provided directly from Google, they sprinkle in a few forum posts, links to a handful of blog posts, and a tiny bit of recent social media content.

In the recipe niche…

If you search for “smoothie recipes”, you’ll get AI-organized search results with the following:

1. Top Recipes – a recipe carousel with 10 smoothie recipe cards, mostly from very large and popular websites.
2. Tropical Smoothies – another 10 pack of recipe cards
3. Top Recipe Guides section – 3 roundup posts from big websites (food network, eating well, and all recipes)
4. A regular recipe blog post from Love and Lemons
5. PAA pack
6. Another recipe post from Love and Lemons
7. Explore by Ingredients section – “search by whats in the fridge or what you’re craving to find your perfect recipe.” then a scrollable carousel of pictures of ingredients that you can click to bring up new search results for recipes featuring that ingredient (bananas, strawberries, blueberries, spinach, etc.)
8. Reddit thread about fave smoothie recipes
9. What People Are Saying – FB post, IG Reels, TikTok videos, YT shorts, IG posts (the FB posts CAN contain links to your blog post, so almost like a backdoor way for visibility) – ALL posted within the last 6 days. Definitely a freshness component.
10. Recipe post from Delish.com
11. Video pack – YT short, longform YT video, and IG reel
12. Reddit thread
13. Blog post from Prevention.com

And here’s a visual of the recipe carousels:

Since recipe carousels DO link directly to bloggers’ websites, this layout change won’t have as big of an impact on traffic for content creators.

But since the layouts are incredibly visual, good food photography and using proper recipe schema have never been more important.

It feels like Google wants to become the SOURCE and/or CURATOR of information directly, rather than sending people to websites to find info.

I predicted this a few years ago when they first announced AI in search (and also included it in last year’s predictions post), and it finally seems to be happening….

I mean, it makes ZERO sense that they would show information curated by AI at the top of the search results and then just show links to blog posts with the same information below…

… I theorized that they would instead show OTHER types of content that are complimentary to the AI answers (like social media videos, forum discussions, expert commentary, etc.)

This DOES appear to be what’s happening, but obviously, the way they do it in the dining and recipe space won’t translate 100% to all niches…

If this test goes well, they will likely attempt to use AI to organize the search results in other verticals as well.

This will have a HUGE impact on how we strategically create content if our goal is to gain visibility through search platforms like Google.

If Google doesn’t WANT to show blog posts in your niche anymore, then you need to be doing regular deep dives into what they DO want to show in your niche so that you can keep up to date and produce content in the preferred formats that are actually getting visibility.

I will say that most of my predictions were correct about the types of content they want to show.

• Short form video, forum discussions, and “trending topics” in the form of “what people are saying” carousels are really taking off.
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• Images are still holding steady in many types of search results, and Google Business listings are critical for anyone with an in-person business.
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• Long-form video is actually getting comparatively less visibility in the search results, but still takes up more total space than short-form.
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• News stories aren’t a relevant feature for most smaller creators since we aren’t news channels
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• Web stories are basically dead now and Google does NOT appear to be prioritizing blog posts from niche experts (I guess that one was wishful thinking haha).​
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• They DO want to show opinions, but at the moment, they seem to be prioritizing showing those on social platforms and forums rather than on individual websites.

However, this IS highly niche dependent, so DEFINITELY do your own boots-on-the-ground research to see what’s happening in YOUR niche specifically.

I also predicted that less SEO-optimized content might perform better in search…

I do think this is true and is linked to what happened with the Helpful Content Updates.

In fact, my old food blog, which I largely published before I knew anything about SEO, more than doubled its traffic in 2024 and is now getting 20-25k sessions every month.

I hadn’t touched that site in over 5 years, so it was purely something algorithmic that gave me that boost.

My theories are:

• My name being a known entity to Google (the website url is my name)
• I previously ran a private practice on that domain and it was linked to an in-person Google Business listing (good authority/trust signal?)
• Almost none of the content was SEO optimized or targeting keywords (less likely to be seen as “gaming the system”?)

In contrast, the one website I had that WAS a pure SEO play:

• 100% keyword-driven content
• No branded searches
• No audience on any other platform
• No clear reputation online, etc.

Got demolished by the March ‘24 core update.

So, I do think it’s worth taking a critical look at your website and content strategy and asking yourself how similar your site looks to one that’s designed purely to rank and bank.

Then think about what you can do to set yourself apart from those types of sites, which absolutely may include things like publishing more content that is NOT created with SEO in mind!

But what about ranking in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other AI tools?

At the moment, from a sheer numbers standpoint, Google is still far more relevant.

However, I do believe that the use of tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information will continue to grow and should not be ignored.

In fact, you can prove this to yourself!

Simply log into your Google Analytics account, go to “Engagement” → “Landing Page”

Click the (+) next to “landing page” under the chart to add a secondary dimension.

Choose “Traffic Source” → “Cross Channel” → “First user source / medium”

This will add a new column in the chart below that shows WHERE your users came from for each piece of content.

Then in the search bar, you can type “chatgpt” or “perplexity” or “ai” to see how many people are coming to your pages through those channels AND which pieces of content they are discovering via AI tools.

It’s likely that not ALL of your content will be a good fit to be cited or featured in AI responses or searches…

… so this information is a goldmine for trying to understand what these tools see your brand as an authority in and the type of content that is getting visibility via AI.

Then you can look for patterns and test hypotheses for additional types of content you can create to get more AI features and citations.

For example, for The Unconventional RD, I got:

• 25 sessions from ChatGPT in 2024
• 68 sessions from Perplexity

Both picking up in the 2nd half of the year.

That’s a relatively small number (0.25% of all my traffic in 2024), BUT in 2023 I only got 5 sessions TOTAL over the whole year from AI, so that’s still an almost 20x increase year over year.

My recipe site got far less traffic from AI, just 21 sessions total, which is 0.008% of my annual traffic.

So it does seem like my “informational” content gets more traffic from AI than my recipe content.

This could be related to the way people use AI, or it could be that I am not seen as an authoritative recipe source and am simply not getting featured much (definitely possible).

Many experts are theorizing that getting featured in an AI answer will be less about driving traffic and more about brand and authority building.

If the AI tool is already giving people a satisfying answer to their query by summarizing information from around the internet…

…. users may not see a compelling reason to click into the cited sources unless they want to know more…

… or if the AI prompts them to check out a specific resource or set of resources to learn more, which it sometimes does.

So we need to rethink our perspective around being included in AI responses.

It likely won’t be all about driving traffic back to your website, but rather being seen as an expert/authoritative source within these language models.

Getting featured may have larger-reaching positive effects (like people performing branded searches, looking for you to follow on other platforms, recommending you via word of mouth, etc.), but that will probably be hard to quantify.

The Verdict: CORRECT, just moving slowly.

Hope you enjoyed this review of my trend predictions!

In the next one, I’ll be talking about diversifying away from the publisher model.

Did content creators make this shift in 2024? And if so, what did they pivot to?

Stay tuned to find out!