SEO

In February 2016, the team behind GOV.UK rewrote its driving test content. The driving test itself hadn’t changed. There were no new rules or processes. What had changed was how people searched for it. After reviewing user feedback, Google Analytics data, and input from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, the team found that people were searching for different things than they had four years earlier, and that the original content design no longer matched how it was being used.

In April 2024, Vercel and MERJ tracked how Googlebot handled nextjs.org, a JavaScript-heavy site that mixes static pre-rendering, server-side rendering, and client-side rendering. Every indexable HTML page they tracked was fully rendered, including content loaded through API calls. For anyone worried that JavaScript sites can’t rank, that was good news.

U.S. shoppers spent $257.8 billion online between November 1 and December 31, 2025, according to Adobe. That’s a record, and $44.2 billion of it came in the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. When that much spending is packed into a few weeks, a seasonal page that isn’t ready on time has very little room to catch up.

A company decides to sell in Germany, or Japan, or Brazil. Someone translates the homepage, swaps the currency symbol, and calls it international SEO. Six months later, the new market isn’t converting, and nobody can say why. The pages read fine, the offer is competitive, yet something underneath isn’t working.

Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT, all of its competitors, and eventually Google’s AI Overviews, the SEO market shifted. As more and more clients look for AI visibility, SEO agencies adapted to fill that demand.

Today, pretty much every SEO agency also sells Generative Engine Optimization services, or GEO, and claims results.

Most traffic drops after a migration aren’t caused by Google punishing anyone. They’re caused by someone forgetting to redirect a URL, or assuming a redesign and a domain change could happen at the same time without consequences. The site looks better, but the rankings don’t come back for months.

A spreadsheet full of keywords and search volumes used to be the deliverable. Now, it’s often just the raw material. Ask an experienced SEO analyst what changed and they won’t say the tools got faster, though they did. They’ll say the job stopped being about collecting keywords and started being about explaining what a group of keywords actually means to the person typing them. 

Image SEO has a reputation for being pretty simple. Add some alt text, make sure the file isn’t huge, and move on. In practice, that’s where things start getting more complicated. Alt text tells Google what one picture shows. It says nothing about whether that picture is slowing the page down, sitting too far from the content it’s supposed to support, or hidden from crawlers entirely because of how it was loaded.

Mention backlinks to most business owners and they probably picture an agency sending hundreds of cold emails, paying for guest posts, or asking for specific wording in every link. It’s not a completely unfair impression. A lot of link building has been done that way, and Google has spent years trying to limit tactics such as paid links, excessive link exchanges, automated link building, and guest posts created mainly to influence rankings.  

Website owners usually do not notice indexing issues when they happen. A page is published. The team moves on. Everything looks fine from the outside. The page loads, the design works, and visitors can see it. Then someone checks Google and realizes the page is not there.