Google held two big events at the end of May: Google I/O and Google Marketing Live. Announcements made during these events seem to be monumental and they have certainly created a lot of panic within the SEO community.
The main news is that AI Mode has been added to search results in the US, but the underlying concern is that Google seems ready to switch from traditional search results to AI-generated responses like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Such a decision would radically change SEO.
In the meantime, traditional search results are still the main source of traffic for websites, and it remains important to follow ranking in current Google search results.
Google ranking volatility in May 2025
Before looking too far into the future, it is worth remembering that the large majority of searches in Google still have no AI-generated responses and feature the familiar 10 blue links we associate with SEO. Ranking in the top 10 organic results on Google is still the biggest source of free traffic for web sites and we know that the higher you rank in the top 10 results, the more traffic you are likely to get. Unlike AI Overviews or other LLM generated results, organic results are ranked fairly consistently in the same order every time Google answers the same query.
You should use a tool like SEOPress Insights to track your site’s rank over time for your keywords. Other tools – like SEMRush, Accuranker, MozCast and Similarweb – offer these features (but not in WordPress) and also provide trends based on samples of very large numbers of keywords. You should follow these trends to see if Google was volatile on dates that your ranking changed too. This can help you understand what caused rank changes. Was it something you changed, or something that Google changed.
There were no official updates from Google in May but, using rank trackers mentioned above, we can see what looked like unofficial updates affecting ranking from May 1st to May 17th and then again around May 21st and May 29th. As ever, Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable remains the best source of analysis on Google ranking updates and he says he thinks these may be tremors before a big update.
Add rank tracking to WordPress with SEOPress Insights https://www.seopress.org/wordpress-seo-plugins/insights/
AI Mode launched in US
Launched in March 2025 as a beta, AI Mode was released for all US users on May 20th. This was announced during Google I/O by Elisabeth Reid who also penned the blog post “AI in Search: Going beyond information to intelligence”.
AI Mode is a chatbot style interface to Google search. It is available via a button on the Google.com home page and as a tab at the top of all search results. Using AI Mode is optional. But because it is being touted by Google as “the future of search” (a term used by Elisabeth Ried during her presentation), many people have taken this to mean that it will become the default search result for Google in the near future.
AI Mode results are also destined to be more personalized, multimedia and agentic (meaning that you will be able to ask Google to accomplish a task such as reserve theater tickets through AI Mode).
Early testers, like SEO Lily Ray, have shared screenshots showing Google AI Mode giving bad answers and getting very confused about dates. Lily also shared her opinion that “AI has been prioritized above all else, including search quality.” She also wishes that Google would announce new systems for compensating content creators and talk about the environmental impact of AI Search.
If AI Mode becomes the default Google, it will mean a radical change for SEO and this is why a lot of reaction within the industry has been panic-stricken. In the video The Future of Google Search & SEO released on May 23rd, Barry Schwartz says “This is much more than a change to the algorithm… Search as we knew it is going away right before our eyes”.
Watch the presentation from Elisabeth Reid as well as demos by Rojan Patel and Vidhya Srinivasan to get a glimpse of AI Mode and hear the rhetoric that has so many SEOs worried.
What should you do? We don’t think SEOPress users should worry too much about organic search results or SEO going away anytime soon. Google hasn’t said that AI Mode will become the default search mode. Google is just being very bullish about its own AI technology and wants us to consider it the best AI out there. Better than ChatGPT.
We consider Google’s AI Mode like a new search tool that will probably have similar usage to other IA tools like Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity (although increasingly popular, these tools are nowhere near as popular as regular Google in terms of users). That said, you can start looking at these AI tools as a new opportunity for visibility and traffic.
A lot of what you do for SEO now will also help you feature in AI-Search. In general, if you are ranking in traditional Google results, you should also be featuring in Google’s AI Mode too (although this article by Mike King suggests that things may not always be so simple).
See advice below from Google and Bing for optimizing sites for AI.
AI Overviews launched worldwide (almost)
Comparatively to AI Mode, Google’s AI Overviews are much more of a current issue for website owners worldwide. AI Overviews can show up at the top of any Google query (a recent study by SEMRush says it shows up for 13% of queries in the US) and Google says it the feature now has 1.5 billion monthly users.
Elisabeth Reid said during her presentation at Google I/O that since being launched in May 2024, AI-generated search results have created a profound shift in the way people are using Google – increasing the usage of Google by 10% in the US and India.
She also announced that AI Overviews was being updated. It will use Gemini 2.5 technology to make answers more reliable and will be made available to more countries. Google said AI Overviews will be available in 200 countries and territories and 40 languages at the end of May. Is that worldwide? No. France, for example, still does not have access to AI Overviews.
Optimizing for AI experiences – advice from Google and Bing
Following the announcements at Google I/O concerning AI Mode and AI Overviews, John Mueller from the Google Search Relations team published the blog post “Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search” as well as new Google Search Central documentation “AI features and your website”.
In his article, John stresses that Google’s long-term advice for ranking on Google is still relevant for new AI experiences: focus on visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content. He points to existing resources on creating helpful content, understanding page experience and using generative AI content as good starting points. Because Google AI experiences allow multimodal searches involving images or live video, he suggests that websites should support textual content with high-quality images and videos. He also adds that website owners should look into fully exploiting Google Merchant Center (for e-commerce sites) and Google Business Profiles (for local businesses).
He also says that for AI it is important to share information in a machine-readable way by using (and validating) structured data. This makes pages eligible for certain features and rich results in classic search and AI Mode results. With SEOPress PRO you have a feature to add structured data markup content easily.
You can use SEOPress PRO to markup content with structured data for AI https://www.seopress.org/features/structured-data-types/
John wisely concludes that AI experiences like AI Overviews are just another evolution in search results that continues a long list of improvements Google has made since the original ten blue links launched in 1998. He makes no suggestion that these classic search results are going away.
Another helpful article published by Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan of Bing, “Mastering AI-Powered Search: Next Level Strategies for Marketers” is also a great resource for those wanting more pointers to optimizing websites for AI search.
As well as giving similar advice on robots and structured data, Bing also offers a really useful plan for AI Search including an audit of content, creating a content calendar and targeting high intent queries.
It heavily suggests that keeping content fresh and using the IndexNow protocol is important for AI search performance. SEOPress lets you add IndexNow to WordPress to help you quickly notify search engines of updates you make to your site. You should look into adopting this if you are interested in optimizing for Bing’s Copilot and ChatGPT search (as this uses Bing’s index).
IndexNow is supported by SEOPress Free to help you improve IA search performance
