SEO & AI Update: Google’s In-Context LLM Future, SEO Data Overcomes Top Challenges, & How Researchers Use AI

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Previsible SEO and AI Update, where we’ll explore the growing intersection of search and AI — with an eye towards how the two are combining to make a stronger business impact and elevating the SEO industry.

It’s no secret that the convergence of SEO and AI is causing a sea change in how we seek answers and how optimization meets the needs of the world’s businesses, as our co-founder and chief executive Jordan Koene explored in the “Previsible AI Manifesto,” and as our co-founder and chief operating officer David Bell examined in “The Rise of LLM Traffic: An AI SEO Study About the Future of Search.”

I’ve been a part of the online communications community for 41 years, with search roots that stretch back to the early years of SEO — including haven written more than 1,000 articles for Search Engine World — and am honored to continue providing timely coverage of an industry that never rests here at Previsible, especially when it comes to the fusion of search and AI.

I hope you’ll find professional benefits in the ten top SEO and AI news items of the week, and enjoy taking a peek at a few of the areas on the fascinating periphery of the two, including looks at both the history of search technology and its future.

Let’s jump right in.

TOP 10 SEO & AI UPDATES OF THE WEEK

The Future of Marketing Jobs in the Age of AI: Insights from LinkedIn’s Chief Economist

Establishing the right balance of measurement strategy and metrics to show an impact on the bottom line at business organizations was one of the top challenges for the next year, according to data in Microsoft-owned LinkedIn’s latest B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, which also saw the implementation of AI technology as a top business priority for the coming year. LinkedIn

SEO & AI IMPACT: The data used in successful SEO efforts can play a crucial role in solving one of 2025’s top business challenges, and when combined with savvy human-led AI usage it can also help businesses achieve their AI-implementation goals.

Jeff Dean: Combining Google Search With LLM In-Context Learning

At any one time, today’s top AI models are able to function with and take into consideration the equivalent of 50 research papers — comprised of millions of data tokens in a large language model’s (LLM) so-called context window, however future models that will be able to deal with trillions of tokens are envisioned, according to Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research. Dean recently joined Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and Gemini co-lead at Google DeepMind for a video interview. SEO Roundtable

SEO & AI IMPACT: Glimpses of the sizable computational challenges Google has faced in scaling its AI models show both how far the technology has come in a relatively short time and how far it has to go before LLM context windows will become anything close to comprehensive. SEO efforts by necessity have to be pliable and able to change as Google and other top AI organizations gradually expand their public offerings.

How Google Search Uses Speculation Rules

Google has shared new information about the site prefetching technology it rolled out to desktop search users in September of 2024, which has shown significantly swifter load times through a special scheme that prefetched the first two search results for users using browser cookies. Google Chrome for Developers

SEO & AI IMPACT: With each millisecond cumulatively more important in search than ever in 2025, the technology Google has shed additional light on explains more about the inner workings of the search giant’s key pre-search-click period, which can offer SEO professionals new information to consider in campaign efforts.

Research: How AI Helped Executives Improve Communication

The ability of AI tools to help business executives with communications skills was recently studied, with results shared by the Harvard Business Review showing that while not a replacement for human interactions, AI tools and companions have improved to the point where they can provide practical business communications improvements. Harvard Business Review

SEO & AI IMPACT: As more business executives experiment with AI in a greater variety of areas, the technology that has increasingly dominated the past five years continues to hold new sway over our lives, and SEO professionals can expect to see the results of AI-tuned business communications in the content they optimize and that of competitors.

YouTube Incorporates Google Veo AI Video Generation Tools Into Shorts

Google-owned YouTube has rolled out Veo 2 — Google DeepMind’s latest AI video generation model, including the ability to create prompt-automated video clips for the firm’s Shorts content, expanding on its previous AI solution that was solely able to generate backgrounds. Social Media Today

SEO & AI IMPACT: Google search results are likely to feature an increasing amount of YouTube Short video content using the new DeepMind Veo 2 technology, offering an additional avenue for optimization efforts, and another reminder of how SEO professionals face an ever-moving target.

What Are the Best AI Tools For Fesearch? Nature’s Guide

Professional researchers have often taken a more reserved approach to utilizing the newest AI tools, however a recent rundown of how some top researchers have experimented with AI tools in the journal Nature compared the relative merits and shortcomings of OpenAI’s o3-mini, DeepSeek, Llama, Claude, and Olmo. Nature

SEO & AI IMPACT: As AI tools enter the echelon of the world’s most rigorous traditional research, SEO professionals can learn from the measured approaches that researchers take when using the same tools that many in the search industry may use every day.

Google Search: Find Results Based On Images You’ve Viewed

Google has begun testing the ability to generate a new variety of search results that are based on a searcher’s recently-viewed images within Google Image search, using algorithmic data to provide what it calls asset-audience recommendations — a feature that is also among several new Google Ads capabilities. SEO Roundtable

SEO & AI IMPACT: The new feature also allows for immediate refinement of the custom results, which may offer SEO professionals a new glimpse into how Google determines search intent and interest — insight that could impact optimization performance.

Despite Financial Pressure — or Because of it? — Tech Stacks are Actually Expanding Again [Report]

On the heels of declining software as a service (SaaS) usage totals during 2022 and 2023, newly-released 2024 data showed a surprising rebound, as SaaS technology stacks grew by some 2.2 percent last year. Business units and departments bring 70 percent of SaaS into organizations, with those in information technology accounting for 26.1 percent, while unapproved or so-called shadow-IT segment was responsible for 33.6 percent. Chief MarTech

SEO & AI IMPACT: A slew of AI tools were among the top shadow-IT SaaS expenditures, including those from ChatGPT and OpenAI, while the overall 2024 increase in the number of tools used in the average technology stack has been a sign of the industry’s return to SaaS expansion.

Bing Tests Knowledge Panels With Related Searches Box

Microsoft’s Bing has recently undergone testing of a similar vein, with a change in how its search result knowledge panels are displayed, offering a segment of searchers involved in the test a list of related searches. SEO Roundtable

SEO & AI IMPACT: Should this test be rolled out to all Bing users, SEO professionals will have potentially helpful new insight into what Microsoft’s search engine considers to be relevant related search terms — information that would likely help with SEO content creation efforts.

US Online Media Spend in 2024 and the Outlook for 2025

When it comes to online media spending in the U.S., the search segment accounted for some 14.5 percent during 2024 — a figure that was expected to fall to 12.2 percent in 2025, according to newly-published media spending forecast data of interest to search marketers. MarketingCharts

SEO & AI IMPACT: The drop in search advertising spending expected in 2025 may be the latest sign that organic SEO efforts have continued to provide greater return on investment than several traditional advertising formats, such as social media spending, which was expected to drop from 19.6 percent in 2024 to a scant 13.2 percent in 2025.

SEARCH & TECHNOLOGY HISTORY & FUTURE:

The Lost Story of Alan Turing’s Secret “Delilah” Project — IEEE Spectrum

A ‘Teleportation’ Breakthrough for Quantum Computing Is Here — Wired

New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection — Quanta Magazine

Brain-inspired Computing Is Ready for the Big Time — IEEE Spectrum

FRIDAY FIVE SEO & AI FAVORITES TO FOLLOW:

• Akvile DeFazio
• Cindy Krum
• Barry Schwartz
• Motoko Hunt
• John Mueller

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR THE LATEST SEO & AI UPDATES

Learn more about Previsible‘s mission to unlock scalable organic growth with AI search optimization.

Have you come across a key news item exploring the intersection between SEO and AI that we haven’t covered yet? If so, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Thanks for taking the time to join us for this week’s inaugural edition of the Previsible SEO & AI Update, and we hope that you’ll return again next Friday for another array of the most up-to-date and relevant SEO and AI industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us on our LinkedIn page for even more timely insight.