The State of SEO: July 2025

TL:DR

• Context Over Keywords: MUVERA prioritizes content relevance, semantic depth, and intent matching — not just exact phrases. Build content-rich pages that deeply address specific search intents.

• Brand Signals Matter: Top-ranking brands dominate because they have a strong online presence and are consistently mentioned across the web. Build brand authority, not just backlinks.

• E-E-A-T Everywhere: Google's systems reward Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. Make sure your site content, social media, forums, and even offline branding reflect these values.

• Know Your Audience Inside-Out: Success means understanding your ideal client — their pain points, search behavior, and decision journey — so you can map search intent across personas and sectors.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever changing process of optimizing a website in order to increase its position on Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs). While search engines are constantly evolving, Google has recently undergone multiple larger scale updates that are fundamentally changing the way that search engine rankings work. 

Previously, optimizing for keywords-first was the primary ranking strategy. Identify keywords that your target audience might be searching for, create a page or content that targets that specific keyword, gain credibility and trust  in search engines through engagement, and begin to rank for that keyword phrase. Over time, your site would become highly visible for a number of topics related to your business, generating traffic, leads, and revenue.

Now, the MUVERA update, the introduction of AIO, and brand trust, are changing the landscape of SEO into a topic-first model. Targeting “fan out” and having a strong brand presence or now mission critical components of modern SEO strategies. Here are the highlights of the newest major changes to SEO, and how to account for them. 

MUVERA Algorithm

What It Does: MUVERA (Multi-Vector Retrieval via Fixed Dimensional Encodings) is a new algorithm developed by Google that enhances search speed and accuracy, especially for complex searches.

Shift in SEO Strategy: The emphasis is increasingly on semantic relevance rather than exact keyword matches. Pages must align with search intent and contextual meaning to rank well.

Content Optimization: Move beyond keyword stuffing. Instead, optimize for topical relevance and semantic relationships—e.g., include related terms and contextual depth.

Structured, Intent-Focused Pages: Use content that closely matches user intent (e.g., “sell my house fast in Dallas” should show pages that actually offer solutions in that locale).

Adapt to AI-Era Search: Traditional SEO tools focused on keyword density may lose value. Invest in semantic SEO strategies, content clusters, and NLP-driven content audits.

In a nutshell, the MUVERA update puts an emphasis on contextual matches, and uses content relevancy and depth of knowledge to create better, faster, search results. Adapt by creating content rich pages that target specific intent with depth.

AI Overview (AIO)

What It Does: Google’s AI Overview is a search engine feature that provides AI generated results to searchers in an attempt to get their queries answered at the top of the page. Google’s MO has always been to provide the most relevant and useful results possible. How they’ve done that has changed over the years. First it was keyword based. Then it moved more towards providing the most relevant and local results to the top of the page. AIO is the latest iteration of top-of-page results aimed at solving a query as quickly as possible.

Higher Impressions, Lower Clicks: 70% of AIO readers only read the first third of the AIO (basically just the part above the AIO fold), and a good portion of users (mostly younger) are willing to take the AIO answer at face value. This leads to websites generating impressions by being a part of the AIO, but not getting clicks because the first answer is widely accepted. 

Brand Trust is Key: The brands that occupy the majority of the top positions in AIO have a large online footprint that paints them as credible. That’s branding at work. Having a strong brand profile (not a backlink profile, actual mentions of your business name) is important for building trust. 

Shift in SEO Strategy: With brand reach being important to both AIO and general SEO, your business should be active both online, and in the community. Participate in forums and discussions that your business has insight on. Work towards creating an experience that causes people to post about your brand’s expertise. Sponsor community events, or speak at local meet ups. Anything that drives search traffic online looking for your business by name.

Brand Authority

What it Does: Brand authority online is the trust and credibility that your business has in your industry, and with your target audience. It’s also now a primary ranking factor for your business and its online assets. Google is still focused on relevancy and locality, but brand authority seems to be a new primary ranking factor, essential for long term sustained rankings. Google’s brand bias is foundational.

Build Trust with Your Brand: E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, is a framework that Google uses to assess the quality of content and its creators. The more that your site content, social posts, forum posts, and even offline marketing reflect E-E-A-T, the better chance your business has at ranking highly and showing up in AIO results. Start by targeting subjects you can speak with authority on. Authority originates from your business, and flows to other trustworthy sites.

Target Topics vs Keywords: Topic-first SEO approaches content through the lens of the real-world solutions your brand provides through your products and services. Instead of targeting keywords specifically with content, target the topics that you’re the most versed in. 

Plan for Fan Out: Query fan out in Google refers to Google using topics related to a search query in order to create a more comprehensive answer. For example, an AIO answer to the query “best house buying company near me” might first provide context about how the cash buying process works, followed by companies that provide those steps to home sellers.

The Overlap

The overlap between these three updates centers around authoritative content. Click value is at an all time high. AIO is providing answers to questions without clicks, which means that any clicks that make it to a website automatically have a much higher value attached to them. High quality clicks happen in high trust moments, and that trust is built through being an authority on a subject, and letting your potential customers know about it. 

Understanding who the ideal client is, and what their search patterns are, is more important than ever. Knowing different personas, intent types, pain points, industry sectors, and searches is a necessity for businesses looking to rank, because it allows you to map out the search query fan out for each persona. It’s surgical search engine marketing. 

For companies with established brands, there won’t be any really big changes. Businesses with no brand footprint online? Now is the time to start looking at building authoritative content, and become the go-to resource for your industry.