SEO & AI Update: Google Adds AI Mode Search, OpenAI’s Newest Model Released, & Sesame’s Intriguing Voice AI

Welcome to the third edition of the Previsible SEO and AI Update, where we examine the confluence of search and AI and how the two effectively mesh to improve how we search for and find key business answers.

The combined SEO and AI space continues its evolution, and this week brings us industry shifts from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, along with intriguing new AI report and survey data.

Let’s jump right in and explore the ten top SEO and AI news items of the week, and have 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.

TOP 10 SEO & AI UPDATES OF THE WEEK

Google AI Mode – It’s Here – Here Is How To Access It

Google has rolled out an experimental Google Search AI Mode and an expanded AI Overviews tool, featuring the search giant’s Gemini 2.0 AI model. Subscribers to Google One AI Premium service gained opt-in access to the new AI Mode, which searches in a different manner than both Google’s primary search and those used in AI Overviews, Google recently announced. SEO Roundtable

SEO & AI IMPACT: Google’s new AI Mode aims to surface a greater array of web content including user-generated material, using simultaneous multiple queries meant to provide ultimately more factual results. With multi-modal text, voice, and visual input support, SEO professionals will likely closely monitor Google’s latest AI rollout to see how it may impact click-through-rates (CTR) and web traffic, and where new optimization opportunities may exist.

OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 AI Model Comes to More ChatGPT Users

OpenAI’s new AI model GPT-4.5 — its largest to date — has begun rolling out to subscribers of the firm’s ChatGPT Plus service tier, with initial usage rate limits expected to fluctuate as more people begin using it, OpenAI recently announced. TechCrunch

SEO & AI IMPACT: With the newfound AI power under the hood, OpenAI has significantly increased the costs of application programming interface (API) calls to GPT-4.5, and has considered eliminating such access to the new model entirely depending on adoption rates and usage. After a series of release delays, GPT-4.5 is the firm’s latest step along OpenAI’s continuing path towards a so-called frontier AI model.

Eerily Realistic AI Voice Demo Sparks Amazement and Discomfort Online

AI startup Sesame has released a conversational voice model utilizing the firm’s Conversational Speech Model (CSM), the firm recently announced. In certain blind tests, Sesame’s AI voice tool achieved new levels of human-like conversation quality, based on a single-stage processing model similar to the voice model used by OpenAI. Ars Technica

SEO & AI IMPACT: When AI voice technology eventually advances to the point where users are more apt to use it, SEO professionals may finally see long-envisioned increased opportunities in voice search optimization, along with a new set of accompanying challenges.

4 Website Performance Benchmarks from Q4 2024 [Report]

30.9 percent of web traffic was in the direct channel during the fourth quarter of 2024 — down from 32.6 percent during the previous quarter, while organic search traffic fell slightly from 25.8 percent to 25.6 percent during the same period — two of several findings of interest to search marketers contained in newly-published survey data . MarketingCharts

SEO & AI IMPACT: AI search has continued to shake up both web traffic and how — or if — it can be accurately measured, and examining traffic trends over time will be particularly telling, as 2025 progresses and potentially more traffic never gets from AI search results to a third-party website.

Research: How Responsible AI Protects the Bottom Line

A growing recognition of the responsible implementation of AI within business has been shown to be beneficial not only to an organization’s stature, but also increasingly to its financial health, according to newly-released study data, and the Harvard Business Review recently took a look. Harvard Business Review

SEO & AI IMPACT: As search marketers look to differentiate from the near-ubiquitous implementation levels of AI technology, an approach that emphasizes a uniquely human touch has been frequently used, and now the growing recognition of so-called responsible AI (RAI) adds a further method for standing out.

Google Updates Robots Meta Tag Document To Include AI Mode

Coinciding with Google’s recent launch of its new Search AI Mode, Google has published related information detailing how the AI changes can be handled within robots.txt web crawler indexing information. Search Engine Journal

SEO & AI IMPACT: The robots.txt and x-robots-tag changes Google has outlined aim to help tailor content that can appear in Google’s AI Overviews and its new AI Mode, and included a variety of updated indexing and serving rules.

Reddit Shares Insights Into Maximizing AI Adoption for Brands [Whitepaper]

74 percent of AI users on social aggregation and discussion platform Reddit have said that they are looking for educational content about AI services and tools, according to newly-released report data. Social Media Today

SEO & AI IMPACT: As brands and their audiences alike adapt to the influx of AI technology prevalent at nearly every twist and turn in today’s online experiences, Reddit’s newest white paper takes a unique look at AI challenges and opportunities from both consumer and brand perspectives.

Google CTR Study: AI Overviews Rise As Click Rates Decline

Some 42.5 percent of search results delivered by Google included the search giant’s AI Overviews during the fourth quarter of 2024 — an increase of 8.8 percent from the previous quarter — while subsequent click-through-rates (CTR) saw sizable decreases, according to recently-published CTR report data. Search Engine Journal

SEO & AI IMPACT: SEO professionals have seen firsthand how zero-click answers to many search queries — a trend that has grown as Google and Bing have provided more AI-gathered information — have slowed click-through-rates, and the latest data from Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) offers a closer look.

It’s Not Just Us: AI Models Struggle With Overthinking

Whether it’s the latest large reasoning model (LRM) or the newest large language model (LLM), even the most powerful AI technologies share a commonality with the people who created them — overthinking. A key difference in how AI models attempt to overcome getting bogged down with overthinking may come in the form of using non-reasoning models, which have been found to be significantly less susceptible, according to newly-published research. IEEE Spectrum

SEO & AI IMPACT: SEO professionals looking to dig in to subtle differences in how DeepSeek-R1 671B compared to OpenAI o1-high when it came to efficient AI reasoning and potential AI overthinking will find details in the new data from a team including researchers at Carnegie Mellon and four other educational institutions.

Google Urges DOJ Not To Break It Up

With an April 2025 antitrust case looming, Google has voiced its preference for a less drastic remedy than a possible forced sale of the firm’s popular Chrome web browser and restricted AI ties and investments, Google recently announced. MediaPost

SEO & AI IMPACT: SEO professionals are expected to closely follow the impending litigation between the U.S. Justice Department and Google, especially the subsequent remedies which could have a large impact on the search, web, and technology ecosystem.

SEARCH & TECHNOLOGY HISTORY & FUTURE:

The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do? — Nature

AI versus the brain and the race for general intelligence — Ars Technica

Behind every great woman in science, there’s another great woman in science [International Women’s Day] — Nature

VOICES OF SEARCH PODCAST LATEST EPISODES:

Matthew Edgar, partner and technical SEO consultant at Elementive, recently sat down with our chief executive Jordan Koene to share industry insight in a new Voices of Search podcast episode entitled, “How Core Web Vitals Affect SEO.”

Steven van Vessum, vice president of content at Conductor, recently sat down with our chief executive Jordan Koene to share industry insight in a new Voices of Search podcast episode entitled, “The State of SEO (report).”

FRIDAY FIVE SEARCH MARKETING & AI FAVORITES TO FOLLOW:

• Marcus Tandler
• Cindy Krum
• Ann Smarty
• David Bell
• Purna Virji

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 found a specific 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.

Thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of the Previsible SEO & AI Update, and we hope that you will return again next Friday for another selection 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.