“Your No. 1 Strategy? Diversify!” – Ivana Flynn on SEO Changes Coming in 2025

How would you describe 2024, considering Google’s policy updates?

In 2024 we saw several big core updates that were targeting quality. It started in March 2024 with Google releasing a kraken of an update targeting AI content abuse, Programmatic SEO abuse, expired domains, PBNs, and much more. This update cleared up the SERPs of many poor and manipulative results, but at the same time, was a bit unfair to younger and newer websites that were removed from the SERPs only for being new.

It continued in May 2024 with Site Reputation Update – as well known as Parasite SEO clean up, when Google started to hand out more manual penalties than I could ever remember.

It worked a bit on English-speaking markets, but after all, it had very little impact. In 2024 we as SEOs adopted the idea of volatile being the new normal.

Towards the end of the year, Google went back and cleared up a bit more parasitic SEO practices and we saw massive websites in the iGaming niche such as techopedia or business2community being handed manual penalties. This sparked a whole community on LinkedIn obsessively studying how the sites would react and who would be penalised next.

I think after 2024 we are more prepared for volatility, penalties, and stricter Google rules. Of course, this does not mean that SEOs suddenly stopped poking Google, but it created 2 opposing groups: SEOs that are trying more than ever to play by Google’s rules and play the long-term game and SEOs that are willing to risk it all with blackhat SEO approach and tactics to rank faster even if it means losing long term.

A topic that definitely cannot be overlooked here is AI. How has Google’s approach to AI-generated content changed?

Google accepts AI content as long as the content serves purpose and quality. Sadly, the way we create AI content using AI tools is not correct, in most cases.

We use tools to scrape the web and recreate whatever is already out there, without data and fact-checking, without providing a value. AI tools and AI content generated with these tools are only as good as the content we humans have created. If we just keep stealing existing content and repurposing it without adding anything new to it, we are victims of repetitive and unoriginal content. AI tools are hallucinating many times and without humans to check them and edit them at the end of the process, we are serving below acceptable quality. But we are serving it fast and cheap…

But is it really cheap? Any good AI tools are becoming costly, so the question is how much AI is good, how cheap is cheap enough, and how low of a quality are we able to stomach? A fool with an AI tool is still just a fool.

How have all these changes impacted the affiliate market? Last year, we heard a lot about layoffs and cost-cutting. To what extent, in your opinion, were these effects driven by Google’s actions?

AI content and Google updates had a massive impact on iGaming and mainly the affiliate part of our business for several reasons:

Many companies tried to replace humans with AI = layoffs

Google punished this lazy approach and many affiliate websites disappeared completely or were deranked though the crazy update year = more layoffs

Affiliates and affiliate SEOs are always pushing the rules a bit too far, mainly because they have more assets to spare. Many have 2-3 flagships, they usually protect these but would risk crazy tricks like 301 redirects of expired domains, bot traffic, AI content, cloaking, and much more on their smaller projects. If these are lost due to heavy breakings of Google rules, sites are lost and this could mean more layoffs.

Do you think the affiliate market might be in trouble, or are we rather looking at typical fluctuations to which it is inherently prone?

Affiliate marketing might suffer some bruises as Google is stealing more and more affiliate traffic from the websites itself. We know that zero-clicks are growing, now in certain markets and niches this is up to 60% of traffic leading to no click to any websites! Meaning only 40% of searches result in actual click on a top search result. This is very scary! As SEOs and marketers, our job is to drive traffic and bring these clicks to our websites.

With AI overviews, people-also-asked, and more, this job is becoming more and more difficult. But every threat brings a new opportunity!

AI overviews are coming, ChatGPT is here and we use it to find answers, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Reddit are growing in importance and people simply like to search and interact with the results differently than 10-12 years ago.

It is more important than ever to build a brand and appear in the feared AI overviews or be a recommended source in ChatGPT.

We know that Google is training their AI agents on Reddit, hence the 60-million dollar annual deal, on YouTube and Wikipedia, therefore you must include these in your strategy going forward to stand a chance in the everchanging search game.

In your opinion, will the dynamic variability of the SEO landscape increase? How might this affect companies heavily reliant on organic traffic?

This sounds a bit like the ever-so-popular question ‘Is SEO dead?’ Companies should rely and invest in search traffic, of course! SEO is not dead, neither is dying. But it is massively changing. It is bigger and more difficult than ever. Time ago we were optimising for Google and all we wanted was to have a text link in the top3 results. The game has changed and it keeps changing. For the first time in the last 15 years, Google search market share dropped under 90%, and that’s big!

We now need to know how to optimize for YouTube, and how to work with Reddit, how to appear in ChatGPT results as a source, how to appear on AI overviews, how to grab the attention in different formats, and how to stay relevant and ahead of the game. SEO has become a science and not an easy one! So if you want to stay on top of the game, education, experimentation, and constant improvements to your approach are important.

How do you see the development of LLM SEO, and to what extent will it ultimately be connected to traditional SEO, or will it evolve into a separate field?

LLM is a big question for us all and it is here and it is changing the game. As I already mentioned, AI overviews are taking away many clicks from the websites and this is the reality we need to understand. We will need to rethink the attributions model to correctly measure the impact of marketing activities as traffic in the traditional way is not going to cut it any longer.

LLMs are a big opportunity, we need to learn how to work with them and how to win in the new, changed visibility game. For now, the basic rule is that whatever is in top 10 of Google/Bing is appearing in the AI overviews and is cited by ChatGPT as a good source.

So for now, the traditional SEO work is here to stay – good technical, good content, good links, high engagement metrics and so on.

But this does not mean that it is enough and that you should not be working on a new approach into your strategy such as having YT channel, be active on forums such as Quora or Reddit or building a strong brand.

If you were to give three key pieces of advice to companies relying on organic traffic for 2025, what would they be?

Your no. 1 strategy must be to diversify!

Google is not the only place we like to search, in fact, it is dropping in importance. The new generation loves TikTok and Insta – they love video results and pictures and their attention must be captured within seconds! Can your website and your results do that?

We all are consuming more user-generated content, it is not just because Google said that UGC is cool, it is us starting to be tired of AI abuse and we are craving real human results. Are you and your products reviewed and talked about by real humans? Are you genuinely represented on big forums, are you sparkling a conversation?

Are you giving your users what they actually need or are you producing the same casino and product reviews with little to no value?

I think there is a lot to think about when preparing for 2025 and beyond. The game has changed, have you?