Updated: July 03, 2025 By: Marios
The search landscape is constantly evolving. After Gartner’s most recent prediction that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, new opportunities are opening for interactive and smart search experiences.
Experts predict that AI-powered platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini could steal user inquiries once handled by Google. This new shift is encouraging traditional search engines to rethink their search algorithms and create a more personalised experience for their users.
The question is, what could that search landscape look like in the next few years? Stick with us as we delve into AI’s new role in search algorithms and share some of the ways AI could redefine the search experience moving forward.
Understanding The Role of AI in Search Algorithms
Artificial intelligence (AI) search has begun to transform Google’s search algorithm in recent years. In an attempt to enhance search results, AI helps a search engine produce more intuitive results that better understand user intent.
As you can see above, AI search consolidates data from sources that best match a user’s search intent and returns a concise, highlighted summary at the top of the results page. This makes it easier for users to receive an answer to their query in seconds rather than sifting through a list of web pages.
For marketers, the introduction of AI search has immediately changed the game. As keyword stuffing and landing page optimisation become redundant, AI’s impact on SEO will encourage marketers to take a holistic approach to promotion, considering factors such as user experience, search intent, and content quality.
When creating your website, we suggest using a website builder with a built-in AI SEO assistant. In fact, designing your website using an AI-powered website builder can enhance visibility in a search landscape dominated by AI, as your site’s content generation is likely to be written in a format that other AI-powered algorithms can recognise.
AI search can also sift through thousands of data sources simultaneously, selecting snippets of text from webpages that appear far below the first page of the SERPs. This could suggest that the era of SERP ranking could be over, and an algorithm shift is on the horizon. That being said, we can speculate that backlinks will continue to be a key factor in determining which content is crawled and surfaced.
The Impact of AI Search on Traditional SEO Strategies
The introduction of AI search is undeniably impacting the traditional SEO strategies that we have long been using. Marketers need to shift their focus from optimisation strategies aimed at improving rankings to adapting to how AI algorithms display content based on quality.
A focus on user intent
Optimising content with relevant keywords has long been a standard SEO practice that helps get content seen by search engines. By conducting research into the specific search terms people use and incorporating them into content, algorithms typically rank the page higher.
Nowadays, AI search is looking further than matching keywords, instead focusing on the context behind the search query. A marketer needs to ensure their content is written in a way that closely aligns with the user’s needs to provide high-quality and informative answers.
To create content that meets the requirements of AI algorithms, it’s crucial to focus on natural language that addresses a problem rather than attempting to incorporate all variations of a keyword into the copy. Comprehensive content that is well structured and follows a question-answer format will make it clearer than ever to both users and algorithms.
New ways to measure content authority
The authority of a website has long been measured based on the number of backlinks. A site with multiple backlinks, especially high-quality ones from authoritative sources, indicates to a search engine that the page is widely recognised.
As AI search moves further away from traditional SEO practices and towards naturally high-quality content, link-building tactics are said to be becoming less effective.
Instead of backlinks, the algorithms favour natural third-party mentions. Sources such as online reviews and blog posts offer a more reputable insight into how users discuss a business’s services.
Although this doesn’t mean SEO backlinks are completely redundant, it does mean that the focus needs to be on finding high-quality links that show genuine relevance.
SGE vs AEO
Currently, there are two leading forms of AI search on the web. These are the Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).
SGE is most commonly used by worldwide search engines like Google, which integrate AI into their search algorithm.
In Google’s words, “SGE is an early step in transforming the Search experience with generative AI. When using SGE, people will notice their search results page with familiar web results, organised in a new way to help them get more from a single search.”
Using SGE, Google’s algorithm is able to quickly decode complex search terms, offer personalised responses, and harvest results from niche search subjects in seconds.
Following a similar approach, we have AEO, otherwise known as answer engine optimisation. This is most commonly associated with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, as well as voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa. AEO-powered search experiences are formed with language models at their core. This enables them to understand speech and full sentences more effectively, rather than just simple search queries.
The Benefits of AI Search
Both SGE and AEO are significantly transforming the search landscape. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of AI search.
- Ease of Use: AI search can handle complex queries with ease, returning the right results to the user in half of the time it takes to sift through web results.
- Accurate Results: AI utilises contextual understanding to deliver precise results for a given search query.
- Personalisation: AI search is constantly learning. Therefore, as users continue to interact with its features, the algorithm learns to search preferences over time and generates personalised answers relating to previous searches.
- Enhanced Evaluation and Thinking: AI has deeper reasoning and evaluation capabilities. This enables an AI-powered search engine to produce more comprehensive, immersive search results.
“An AI search algorithm is programmed to act like a human and decide what the best content for any given search query is,” says Pavel Israelsky, Founder & CEO of Angora Media. “The algorithm is trained to take into account different factors such as word choice, readability, and length in order to provide accurate results.”
Challenges Associated With AI Search
Although there are undeniable benefits involved with AI search, this doesn’t mean it is free of drawbacks. Several challenges arise as the landscape begins to evolve.
- Data privacy concerns: Since AI search is based on the behaviour and search history of users, there are worries about the amount of personal data that is stored. The way the data is collected sits on a fine line between user consent and privacy breaches.
- Biased results: If there are biases in the data that is being used to lead search results, this can inaccurately push a narrative that isn’t representative of all groups and opinions.
- High implementation costs: AI search is reliant on highly skilled professionals who are trained in the field. As this new territory is growing rapidly, finding workers with the necessary expertise can be a challenge.
- Ethical worries: There have been various concerns over how the data is collected and presented and whether it is feeding users information that may not be backed by evidence. This can lead to an over-reliance on machine-generated information.
How Is AI Crafting A Smarter Search Landscape?
AI is contributing to a much smarter search landscape. With the ability to transform the search experience, it won’t be long until large search engines like Google and Bing make AI search a permanent feature on their platform.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at how AI plans to redefine the online search process in 2025 and beyond.
The Era Of Personalised Search Experiences
As AI learns more about search behaviour, it’ll get better at understanding search intent and the individual preferences of each user.
One of the best features associated with Google’s SGE is the level of contextual understanding. With the ability to interpret and analyse the context of each query, AI ensures that the results delivered are fine-tuned to a user’s specific needs and written in a way that matches the language style of the inquiry itself.
Gone are the days of simply matching keywords. AI search considers a broader, more complex context, such as location, previous search queries, age, and gender, to deliver a set of tailored results that align with a user’s preferences.
By providing a user with a personalised search experience, AI enables consumers to cut through the noise, eliminate the paradox of choice, and retrieve the answers they are looking for with little to no effort.
Enhanced Evaluation Capabilities
AI search engines can also automatically analyse and assess large databases full of information. This allows the search engine to deliver a set of rich results consolidated into snippets of texts and links for easy consumption.
As we step into the future of the AI search landscape, these enhanced evaluation capabilities are likely to expand to broader sources. With the ability to go beyond a search engine database and tap into other platforms online, AI search tools will be able to return with a more comprehensive set of answers from a wide range of sources.
This reduces search engine bias and enables the search engine to continually learn from multiple sources, providing a more accurate search experience.
The Rise Of Voice Search
Lastly, let’s take a look at how AI is transforming how we input a query online.
Voice search is currently on the rise, with 90% of people finding voice search easier than typing out a search online.
As AOE search models build upon their natural language processing capabilities, AI search assistants are becoming increasingly popular in the search landscape.
“As AI models improve, our devices will process our requests better and, in turn, deliver more accurate responses and actions,” says Megan Phillips, Lead Content Strategy & Content Marketing Consultant at WebFX.
“In 2025 and beyond, I expect our voice assistants to be able to handle more complex queries and requests, along with an expansion of what operations they’re able to perform on our devices.”
Whether you’re cooking, asking about the weather, or generating ideas in a group meeting, voice assistants take AI search to the next level with a hands-free experience.
What’s Next For An AI-Powered Search Landscape?
AI-powered search is only in its infant stage. While we have taken a significant leap forward, there’s still more to come from artificial intelligence in the search landscape.
With the ability to deliver richer content results, hyper-personalisation, and voice-based interactions, AI will continue to enhance the search experience for users.
As a business, it’s up to you to adapt your SEO strategy to adhere to a new era of SERP ranking and pour focus into quality content that accurately answers search intent rather than just a keyword or phrase.
AI is constantly learning, and so are we, meaning that tomorrow’s search landscape will continue to evolve for an intuitive experience like we’ve never seen before.
