2025 Wrapped. AI, SEO & AEO Testing.
2025. What we have been describing as the most turbulent year in SEO for at least a decade. Search intent and your target market has changed, in addition to traditional search, your ideal users are now typing/stating their questions into ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity and their other favourite AI assistants & LLM’s. Zero click searches are up hugely, but the silver lining here is that user engagement, for users coming from AI like ChatGPT, is double that of those searching via Google traditional search (based on Jan-Jun 2025 testing across multiple industries).
The Challenges, Solutions & Hundreds of Hours of Testing
For an SEO agency, the instability with even what to call optimising for AI search, has been massive. There were agencies claiming AEO doesn’t exist, it’s just SEO – now fortunately the bulk of SEO companies realise that testing for AEO (like we do with new SEO techniques) is non-negotiable if they care about their clients’ ROI and conversions.
We started testing at the tail end of 2024 with AEO with our domain aeoagency.co.uk, and by mid-year we were able to release AEO as a service with SEO strategies. But it wasn’t easy, hundreds of testing hours racked up, changing our entire business model to offer combined AEO/SEO strategies, whilst keeping everything bespoke for our clients, and also pushing our clients’ appearance further whilst we were testing. But here we are at the end of 2025, with proven techniques and the majority of our clients seeing revenue and enquiries coming from ChatGPT and Google AI Mode in additiona to Google search of course.
Digital Landscope as a company, has also seen challenges even beyond the AI search era, with more instability in the market than ever before as UK company marketing budgets get tighter. Moving into 2026, we are focused on delivering a message, to educate companies on what SEO is really all about, the importance of AEO and adapting to it, and highlighing that AEO and SEO is not just a backlink game. In 2025, our small team from Paisley, has done 20+ expos and marketing events, given talks at many of them, and in 2026 we’ll be holding our own free training events and a huge free digital marketing event later next year (details will be released in the coming months on that), all to communicate in-person with business owners, directors and marketing professionals about SEO and AEO, to break down the jargon and show what really works.
The good news is, that the full-service, “we can do SEO for a 100 quid a month” companies, who don’t actually do anything, have been massively caught out by AEO. We’ve had minimum 5 of these digital marketing agencies per month trying to book calls with us to figure out how we have such a great handle on AEO.
2026
2026 looks great. After a hugely turbulent year for SEO, we’re armed with AEO and SEO techniques, testing logs, our 2025 AEO and SEO data, to help push our current clients and new clients to the next level with bespoke strategies and implementation. We’ve got many events planned and booked, including our very own free AEO/SEO training events, to help spread clear and concise knowledge, that actually educates businesses on AEO and SEO.
Here’s to a rollercoaster of a year in 2025. Myself and the team at Digital Landsccope are looking forward to 2026.
By Chris Glynn (26/11/2025)
Director of Digital Landscope
