Search Engine Land’s roundup of the most-read SEO columns of 2025 highlights a year of accelerated change. From the emergence of GEO to the growth of AI Overviews and practical standards like /llms.txt, the list points to what senior marketers and site owners must prioritize for visibility. The roundup (compiled on Dec. 29, 2025) makes one thing clear: SEO is expanding beyond traditional site optimization into multi-platform, AI-aware strategies.
Key themes that dominated 2025
Search Engine Land’s list of top columns includes pieces on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), new crawling and ingestion standards like llms.txt, the mechanics behind AI Overviews and AI Mode, and data-driven looks at how AI platforms are changing traffic. The most-read columns were written by a group of subject matter experts and compiled by Danny Goodwin in “Top 10 SEO expert columns of 2025 on Search Engine Land.” Together they signal three interrelated shifts:
1) Search is multi-platform and multi-modal
GEO reflects a world where discovery happens across search engines, AI assistants, maps, and agent-driven interfaces. As Search Engine Land summarized, “GEO isn’t the death of SEO. It’s what happens when search becomes multi-platform, multi-modal, and powered by AI.” That line captures the transition: the tactics that once worked solely for organic SERPs now must be adapted for conversational answers, citation-driven overviews, and channel-specific placements.
2) AI systems demand clearer, LLM-friendly signals
Several columns pushed practical responses to an AI-first indexing environment. The proposal for /llms.txt — a simple Markdown file that guides LLMs to the most useful, concise content on a site — has gained traction as a way to present authoritative context without diluting page experiences. As llmstxt.org puts it, “We propose adding a /llms.txt markdown file to websites to provide LLM-friendly content.” Implementing this format gives you a curated, parsable place for the facts and documents AI agents are likely to use.
3) Visibility is now measured by citations and position in AI outputs
Columns that analyzed AI citations and the mechanics of Google’s AI Overviews emphasize a new KPI: being cited in AI responses. Pages that feed into AI Overviews, featured snippets, and agent replies get high-quality referral value even when they don’t drive clicks. That shifts focus from purely click-driven metrics to authoritative context, structured data, and excerpt-friendly copy.
Analysis: What this means for your SEO roadmap
These trends require both technical and editorial changes. Technically, teams should audit their site architecture for AI-readiness: provide clean HTML, canonicalized content, accessible metadata, and machine-readable signals that agents can easily consume. Editorially, content should be framed to answer concise prompts and offer clear, citable facts that AI Overviews can reference.
Start with the low-effort, high-impact tasks: create an /llms.txt that points to canonical markdown versions of key pages, audit structured data markup (schema), and produce short, authoritative summaries for cornerstone pages. Next, test how answers derived from your content appear in conversational interfaces — are the facts accurate, well-attributed, and up to date?
Implications for measurement and strategy
Traditional ranking reports remain useful, but they should be augmented with AI visibility tracking: monitor where your pages are being cited, which snippets or Overviews include your content, and how that presence correlates with brand queries and conversions. Diversify KPIs to include citation share, excerpt prevalence, and downstream engagement metrics for searches that start with AI agents.
Agencies and in-house teams will also need to shift resources. Expect more work in content structuring, canonicalization of authoritative content, and cross-channel optimization (e.g., maps, app surfaces, and chat interfaces). Tools that can simulate agent queries or expand llms.txt into LLM-friendly context will become part of the toolkit.
Actionable checklist
- Create a basic
/llms.txtat your site root that lists canonical markdown versions of important pages and short summaries. - Audit and expand structured data where it helps clarify facts (product data, organization info, FAQs).
- Write concise, citable summaries for cornerstone pages to increase the chance of being used in AI excerpts.
- Track AI citations and snippet prevalence as part of your visibility KPIs.
- Test how your content performs in voice and agent interfaces, and iterate on phrasing and structure based on results.
Search Engine Land’s roundup is a useful prompt: the many top columns of 2025 are less a list of separate topics and more a connected roadmap. Implementing small, structured changes now will make it easier to earn visibility across the expanding set of discovery surfaces.
Quote attribution: As Search Engine Land’s compilation puts it, “GEO isn’t the death of SEO. It’s what happens when search becomes multi-platform, multi-modal, and powered by AI.” — Danny Goodwin, Search Engine Land. For practical guidance around AI ingestion, the llms.txt proposal recommends: “We propose adding a /llms.txt markdown file to websites to provide LLM-friendly content.” — llmstxt.org.
Read the original Search Engine Land roundup: https://searchengineland.com/top-10-seo-expert-columns-2025-466636
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