2025 has been a transformative year for SEO, and if you’re running a business website in the UK, you need to know what’s changed. Search behaviour is shifting, Google has rolled out important updates, and AI-powered search is changing how people discover information online.
Google released three core updates this year: one in March (completed 27th March), another in June (finished 17th July), and the most recent in August. The June update was particularly significant, causing major shifts in search rankings and bringing some recovery for sites that were hit by the Helpful Content Update back in September 2023.
Around 10th September 2025, website owners across the UK and beyond saw something alarming: their Google Search Console impressions dropped by 30% to 50% overnight. Some saw even steeper declines. Forums and SEO groups filled with panic.
But here’s what actually happened: Google removed the &num=100 parameter that allowed bots and SEO tools to view 100 search results per page instead of the standard 10. For years, these bots and scrapers had been inflating impression counts by triggering views for rankings on page 9 or 10 where real people rarely venture.
When Google disabled this parameter, Search Console stopped counting those bot-generated impressions. The result? Cleaner, more accurate data that reflects actual human search behaviour rather than automated scraping.
Once Google removed the parameter:
In other words: your website didn’t lose traffic. Your data just became more accurate.
This creates a challenge for year-over-year reporting. 10th September 2025 is essentially a “data reset point”. Impressions before that date aren’t directly comparable to impressions after. If you’re preparing reports for clients or stakeholders, you need to explain this context.
Remember when Google started showing AI-generated answers at the top of search results? That feature, called AI Overviews, rolled out in the US in May 2024, and by 2025 it’s become a dominant feature across search results. AI Overviews now appear in 23% of searches.
The impact on click-through rates is staggering. When an AI Overview appears, clicks to the top-ranking pages drop by 34.5%. Click-through rates fall from 15% to just 8%. Research showed that 64% of Google searches end without any clicks to external websites at all. Google simply answers the question, and users move on.
In late 2025, Google introduced something even more disruptive: AI Mode, powered by Gemini 3. Around 93% of searches using AI Mode end without a click, more than twice the rate of AI Overviews.
This means that ranking first is no longer a guarantee of traffic. Visibility inside AI-generated answers is becoming just as important as your traditional organic ranking.
Despite all the changes, Google remains the undisputed king of search in the UK.
Bing holds second place with approximately 3.94% market share, followed by Yahoo at 1.35%. For most UK businesses, this means Google should remain your primary SEO focus.
ChatGPT has effectively become a new type of search engine. In 2025:
Although figures vary depending on methodology, it’s clear that more users are asking AI tools—not traditional search engines—for answers.
AI-driven visitors also tend to be higher intent and more likely to convert, making them a valuable traffic source.
In the UK, 54.7% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, compared to just 40.6% from desktop. More recent data from January 2025 shows mobile traffic in the UK reaching 65.08% of all traffic.
96% of the UK population are mobile phone users, equivalent to more than 66 million people. 93% of UK mobile users own a smartphone, and mobile internet penetration in the UK stands at 97.8%.
Google reinforced mobile-first indexing throughout 2025. If your website doesn’t work properly on mobile devices, you’re going to struggle in search rankings. This isn’t new, but Google has made it even more important this year. Google even stated that mobile usability is a top-ranking factor in 2025’s algorithm updates.
The stakes are high: 53% of users bounce if a mobile page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Over 70% abandon a mobile cart if the checkout flow isn’t optimised. Bad mobile experience equals lost traffic and lost revenue.
46% of all searches performed on Google are for local information. For UK businesses with physical locations, this is massive. Research shows that 76% of people who search on their smartphone for something nearby visit a related business within a day, and 28% of local searches result in a purchase.
With so much focus on global trends, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of local SEO. But if you’re a local business in Plymouth, Manchester, Birmingham or anywhere else in the UK, this is where you need to focus.
Search engine reviews are playing an increasingly important role in the buying journey. 88% of customers using local search trust the reviews they read, and 49% of consumers will only engage with a business with a minimum of a four-star rating.
Google’s emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has intensified in 2025. Sites demonstrating credibility in areas like finance, health and legal services are being rewarded with higher rankings. The addition of “Experience” as a fourth pillar means Google wants to see that real people with real experience are creating your content.
This is particularly important if you’re using AI tools to help write your content – and 85% of marketers now do. Google isn’t penalising AI-generated content outright, but it needs to be valuable, original and human-like. 93% of marketers take the time to edit AI-generated content before publishing, and you should too.
Enhanced AI content detection means Google is getting better at spotting low-quality AI text. The focus remains on content quality rather than the method of production, but quality is being judged more strictly than ever.
SEO is no longer just about Google. 42% of people in the UK use search engines when looking for a product or service – that’s more than double the number that use social media. But younger adults are more likely to engage with social platforms, especially influencers, in the buying journey than older ones.
Users are searching on TikTok, Amazon, Reddit, LinkedIn and other platforms, and Google itself is pulling content from these sources into its results. Quora and Reddit are the most commonly cited websites in Google AI Overviews.
This shift means you need to think about “search everywhere optimisation” rather than just traditional SEO. Where is your audience looking for information? Are you visible there?
Voice search is reaching significant adoption, with 20.5% adoption globally and nearly 28% of mobile web traffic now originating from voice queries. Around 1.16 billion people use voice search technology, representing 27% of mobile users.
Voice search is particularly important for local business lookups. If you’re not optimising for voice search with long-tail keywords, question-based content and local SEO, you’re missing out.
A new discipline called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) has emerged in 2025. This is about making your content useful to AI systems so it appears in AI-generated responses.
Traditional SEO metrics don’t predict AI citation behaviour well. Analysis of 41 million AI search results revealed that 95% of AI citation behaviour can’t be explained by traditional website traffic metrics. Sites with effectively zero traffic sometimes receive 900+ AI citations.
AI Overviews cite an average of 7.7 sources, while AI Mode cites 9. URLs cited in AI search results are 25.7% fresher on average than those on traditional search results pages. Branded web mentions have the greatest correlation with appearance in AI Overviews.
Some predictions suggest that for digital marketing and SEO-related topics, AI search could start driving more visitors than traditional search by early 2028.
SEO in 2025 isn’t about gaming Google’s algorithm anymore. It’s about creating genuinely useful content that demonstrates experience and expertise, optimising for multiple platforms, and understanding that visibility in AI-generated responses is becoming just as important as traditional rankings.
Focus on quality, authenticity and user value. Make sure your site works brilliantly on mobile, this is non-negotiable in the UK market where mobile traffic dominates. Think about where your customers are actually searching, not just where you wish they were searching.
If you’re a local business, double down on local SEO. Get those reviews, optimise for “near me” searches and make sure your Google Business Profile is complete.
The rules and tools may have change, but the principle hasn’t: give people authentic, authoritative content and make it easy to find.
