What changed in search in 2025, and what comes next

In 2025, Google put more and more answers right on the results page. AI Overviews kept growing, and AI Mode, the conversational version of Search, launched in the US in May and reached more than 200 countries and territories by October. For a small business, the basics stayed the same. What changed most is how you measure what search brings you.

What happened, in short

On May 20, 2025, Google announced that AI Mode was rolling out to everyone in the US, no Labs sign-up needed, as a new tab in Search and in the Google app. The same day it said that in its biggest markets, the US and India, AI Overviews were driving an increase of more than 10% in Google usage for the kinds of queries that show them.

On October 7, 2025, AI Mode expanded to more than 35 new languages and more than 40 new countries and territories. Google says that brings it to more than 200 countries and territories in total.

In plain terms: a share of the simple questions ("what are the hours for...", "how do I clean...", "what's the difference between...") now get answered without anyone visiting a website. Questions that end in a decision, like a booking, an order or a quote request, still lead to a specific business.

What Google says you need to do

The official documentation is short and clear: there are no additional requirements and no special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in regular Search.

That's good news. You don't need to buy a separate "AI SEO" package on top of regular SEO. You need to do the same things, with more care. In May 2025, the Google Search Central team published its advice for the new features, and most of it will sound familiar:

• useful, original content written for people;
• pages that load fast, with the main content easy to find on any device;
• pages Google can crawl and index;
• structured data that matches the visible text;
• good images and videos next to the text;
• an up-to-date Business Profile and Merchant Center.

If you want to limit what Google shows from a page, the controls are the same as before: nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex.

What changed in measurement

Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in your regular Search Console reports, under Performance, search type "Web." It isn't broken out separately. So if you see fewer clicks for the same number of impressions, it's not necessarily a problem with your site.

Google says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality: people spend more time on the site. It also explicitly recommends measuring the value of visits, meaning sales, signups and inquiries, not just clicks. For a local business, that means counting calls, messages, submitted forms and bookings.

What to do in 2026

We're not going to guess what Google announces this year. Here's what works either way:

1. Put the answers to the questions you hear on the phone every day on your site, as text, each under its own heading.
2. Keep your Google Business Profile current: hours, phone, photos, services.
3. Give each important service its own page: what's included, who it's for and how to order it.
4. Track what matters: calls, forms, WhatsApp. Look at them monthly, not just at visits.
5. Once a month, check which queries bring you impressions in Search Console. They're the best content ideas you have.

We went deeper into how to get cited in AI answers in our January 2025 article. And if you'd like someone to handle this for you every month, see what's included in SEO for AI search.