Welcome to our final Digital Digest of 2025!

This year, we’ve seen:

• The rise of AI search
• The introduction of zero-click searches
• The fragmentation of the search journey
• The importance of AI-optimisation
• The soaring value of visibility and authority

And much, much more … and now, with just a few days left of 2025, it’s time to find out what final developments December has brought.

Gartner’s 2026 Strategic Predictions  

Concerns abound that ‘a surge of lazy thinking’ could result in global loss of cognitive skills. 

Last month, the IT research and consultancy firm, Gartner, released their strategic predictions for 2026. As is to be expected, AI was the main talking point … and not always for the right reasons.  

The first of their 10 predictions warns that an overreliance on AI will result in an ‘atrophy of critical-thinking skills’ throughout the upcoming year, with consequences that will be felt across all sectors and institutions. Anticipating that the ability to think, research, and form opinions independently will become rare, Gartner predicts that 50% of global organisations will respond to this challenge by introducing “AI-free” skills assessments to verify these abilities in individuals.

The December Core Update 

The latest and (presumably) final Google core update of the year.

One final month, one final update! The last Google core update of 2025 was released on December 11th and the rollout could take up to three weeks to complete.  

This latest update is the third of the year, with the previous updates being released with the aim of cracking down on low-quality pages and ‘unhelpful’ AI-generated content. Google has defined this one as a ‘regular update’ to improve the relevance of its ranking systems and has also confirmed that it updates its search algorithms more often than we originally believed, with several ‘smaller core updates’ being made (but not announced) each year.

Don’t Over Rely On AI Search 

Are you prioritising AI search optimisation to the detriment of your other SEO efforts?

2025 may have been the year of AI, but visibility in AI search is not the be-all-and-end-all marketing tactic. Whilst ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews have dominated digital discourse this year, industry insiders continue to warn that those who prioritise AI visibility above all else could be leaving equally high-value opportunities open to those who are willing to optimise for them.  

Google Search remains the largest search engine in the world, and despite its best efforts to push AI Overviews, users are skipping these AI-generated summaries and finding the results they want further down the results page. YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world, whilst TikTok has well over a billion monthly users globally, so make it your new year’s resolution to diversify your optimisation efforts and increase traffic from a variety of sources.

The Importance of Technical SEO

Even the most well-designed website can have hidden performance issues.

Core Web Vitals scores, including page load times, server timeouts, and other such metrics all impact SEO, and if any of these errors occur whilst Google is attempting to crawl or index your website then this can impact your long-term ranking position. The recent CloudFlare outage has got businesses across the globe thinking about the technical infrastructure of their websites, so now is the time to assess yours before the start of the new year.  

We also recently explored the damage that can be done to a website that prioritises AI content over human-written insights. AI content does not perform well in search results, and ones which rely solely on AI for content generation risk losing their visibility in both organic and AI search, so bear this in mind when reviewing your website before the Christmas break.

What’s New For 2026? 

SEO success isn’t just about visibility – it’s about authority, authenticity, and credibility.

As SEO moves further and further away from the established playbook and towards new distribution channels (think chatbots, video platforms, and AI models), here are the core marketing priorities that you should focus on in 2026:  

• Establishing a presence across multiple search and answer engines.  
• Adapting performance metrics for brand visibility.  
• Structuring written content for machine learning.  
• Following more natural conversational patterns.  
• Optimising for voice and video retrieval models. 

The Digital Digest

That’s all for 2025! We will be back next year with a brand new Digital Digest each month exploring all the latest developments from across the digital marketing industry, so don’t forget to come back soon.  

We are only ever a message away if you want to talk to us about any of the topics raised in this month’s Digital Digest, or any of our previous Digests. For now, we wish you a very happy new year, and we will see you in 2026!