2025 marked my 15th year working in the SEO industry, and it was easily the most volatile year yet. We faced an industry-wide identity crisis triggered by the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and competing AI assistants like Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. For the first time in a long time, Google faced serious competition and a legitimate threat to its business model. ChatGPT’s exponential growth kicked off in late 2022, when it became the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, reaching 100 million monthly active users within 2 months of its launch. By March 2025, ChatGPT’s growth had reached new heights, with weekly active users doubling from 400 million in February to 800 million by the end of March . It seemed that Google was initially blindsided by the viral success of ChatGPT, which is somewhat ironic, given that it was Google’s own researchers who wrote the 2017 ‘ Attention is All You Need ’ paper, gifting the world the Transformer architecture that ultimately led to the creation of ChatGPT.…