The AdNews end-of-year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
Nick Grinberg, Head of Strategy, Next & Co.
In 2010, Next&Co was just two search nerds obsessed with ranking sites and reverse‑engineering the Google algorithm. In order to win business, I spent a lot of time cold‑calling small businesses from the Yellow Pages and making the same pitch over and over: “Do you keep paying to be in the Yellow Pages, or do you give this Google thing a go?”
It was scrappy, unglamorous and unbelievably fun. We lived for crawl budgets, canonical tags and the little dopamine hit of a ranking jump overnight. Since then, search has shapeshifted a thousand times. Panda, Penguin, mobile‑first, RankBrain, BERT, Helpful Content. Each change mattered, but, in hindsight, much of it was iterative. The interface stayed a list of links; the game was still authority, relevance and speed.
2025 felt different. What’s arriving with AI/LLM‑led search feels like the first true platform shift since people moved from the Yellow Pages to Google. The result set is no longer ‘ten blue links plus ads’ - it’s an answer synthesised, contextual, and often conversational.
Whether you’re in Google’s “AI mode,” inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or your assistant of choice, the front door to discovery now talks back. And that changes how people search, how brands get found and how we measure impact.
We’ve watched behaviour migrate in real time. Queries read more like briefs than keywords. People ask follow‑ups, sanity‑check decisions and push for nuance. In some cases, an LLM has become a customer’s closest digital confidant. You can see it in the downstream signals: where we can observe assistant‑primed journeys, intent is high and conversion follows.
The acronyms are already settling GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AEO (answer engine optimisation). Different labels, same reality: you’re optimising to be cited, summarised or woven into an AI‑generated response, not just to appear as result #3. The emerging playbook blends the old with the new: create answer‑grade, source‑of‑truth assets; show your work with evidence, authorship and first‑party data; structure content so machines can parse it; and publish unique things worth citing.
There are, of course, watchouts. When LLMs summarise the web, they can also confidently get things wrong. That’s tolerable for a “best brunch in Fitzroy” query; it’s unacceptable when the topic is medical, financial or legal. We’ve all seen the headlines: AI summaries reshaping publisher traffic, controversy over hallucinations, and the risk of misinformation slipping into confident‑sounding answers. This is something we must be increasingly aware of as an industry that presumably heavily uses AI.
Fifteen years on from cold‑calling plumbers from Yellow Pages, I still love the craft. The channels evolve; the job stays the same. Whether it’s 10 blue links or an AI answer, when someone asks, “Who should I trust?”, the response should still be “you”.
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