Throughout 2024 Google introduced a number of changes within their search algorithms and results pages that impacted SEO, and not always for the better. Here is a summary of the seven most significant ones over the past year.
AI Overviews shook up Google SERPs
The newly introduced AI Overviews have impacted website rankings in different ways. These AI Overviews are now commonly seen, particularly for ‘informational’ searches, and are AI-generated responses to queries created by Google, shown at the top of the search results.
In some niches for some sites, they’ve already had a massive impact and in others they’ve had zero impact. Their impact is expanding though and for those sites that have AI Overviews in a lot of their search results, the outcomes can be varied:
- Less traffic: A page could be pushed down in search results, which would lead to less traffic.
- More traffic: Getting featured in AI Overviews may drive more traffic to your site.
- Inaccurate tracking results: Rank tracking tools are showing a page that is featured in AI Overviews (even if it’s well below the “load more” button and many searchers may not be seeing it) as ranking “#1.”
AI-generated content was created en masse
The growth of generative AI content such as content detectors, writing tools and editing services has resulted in the volume of AI content that ranks in the top 20 Google search results more than doubling in 2024.
Some of Google’s algorithm updates in the past year have been designed to filter out AI generated content pages where possible, but these can be hard for Google to identify if they are well structured and keyword focused articles that provide good information to the searcher.
Google responded to AI-generated content
Google has a site-wide signal on content quality (sometimes manual, sometimes algorithmic). By introducing hundreds of low-quality AI generated pages, a business could reduce their website quality score and thus downgraded their other ranking content.
The outcome is that AI content itself isn’t the culprit, but how well the strategy with which its implemented is thought out can be.
Search results shifted to focus on forum and tools content
As Google responded to AI content, one of the biggest shifts in 2024 (a continuation of Google updates over the last couple of years) has been how much the traffic from user-generated content (UGC) from forums and Q&A sites has increased. Sites like Reddit have seen a big increase in search visibility and traffic over the past year.
Affiliates and niche sites were hit hard by updates
Google’s Content Update impacted a lot of niche sites or small independent publishing sites focused on a specific area (frequently focused around and dependent upon Google for traffic, which was then monetised via ads or affiliate marketing).
Speculation about the reason for this includes the update penalised over-optimisation, or an overly aggressive SEO tactics, particularly for smaller sites with fewer/lower quality link domains pointed to their site (e.g title tags, headers, content, and links all using targeted keywords aggressively).
Parasite SEO gained traction
As AI content is getting better and is widely and cheaply available, Google is aggressively favouring UGC or forum content and content hosted on big brand sites.
As a result ‘Parasite SEO’ gained traction. This is the leveraging of the authority of an established website to rank for competitive keywords and is done by publishing content on the high-authority website instead of your own.
As this practice gathers increasing press and attention, Google responded with a “site reputation abuse” policy and update in 2024.
Google was recognised as a monopoly (which had consequences!)
In 2024 Google was officially ruled a search monopoly in court and next year the U.S. Department of Justice may force Google to take any number of actions, including spinning off and selling Chrome.
While this may not have had a visible impact on many sites trying to rank in search results in 2024, there could be any number of implications, including:
- Changes to the algorithm as Google has less behavioural data.
- Changes to Google’s behaviour in general as they’re under the watchful eye of the US government and have officially been labelled a monopoly.
- Impacts on things like search result layouts, search syndication, etc, as yet unforeseen consequences of the ruling that force Google in other directions.
SEO tips for 2025
These changes, trends and events in 2024 could impact many businesses at some point, so it’s worth bearing these SEO tips in mind:
– Focus on user-generated content and placement on large sites.
– Add tools and calculators onto your website: e.g. a local home services company can build cost calculators or tools to help plan out a home renovation.
– Have a strategy around AI content: Google has said they don’t explicitly penalise AI content, but without any editing or guardrails AI content can certainly get sites into trouble.
– Monitor placements in AI Overviews and AI search results: it’s important to start to understand how AI Overviews work and what you’ll want to do to rank for them as they do get introduced.
– Keep up with Google’s PR offensive and upcoming court appearance: SEO strategy should include being aware of these kinds of updates and how they’re impacting your business’s search results (whether they are, or not).
Ultimately the main thing to understand how your search results (both the rankings and the search features included in them) have changed, are changing, and may change in the future so that you can benefit from a successful SEO strategy in 2025.
If you want to know more about how being prepared for better SEO in 2025 can help your business, please get in touch.