2025 Year End Digital Marketing Review
2025 was a year of big adjustments for both digital marketing and businesses in general. With AI tools drawing major attention, Google redefining their search operations, and slowed economic growth, digital marketers have had a lot to keep up with. It has meant paying attention and getting very scrappy.
In this review, we’ll take a look at what the major marketing themes were in 2025—covering what worked, what didn’t, and what lessons we all need to take into 2026.
AI Tools
Nobody should be surprised this is on everyone’s 2025 wrap up lists. Heck, TIME’s 2025 person of the year was “the architects of AI.” AI trends have been everywhere. Digital marketing departments have been looking at how to automate tasks, optimize campaigns, and integrate new tools. Pretty much all major marketing technology have started to deploy features heavily influenced by the AI wave. But teams have also learned some hard lessons:
Not all AI features are created equally. Some are still underdeveloped and unreliable.
Understand your needs and choose features and tools catered to them. Don’t change your needs and goals to fit the tools.
Have a rollout and change management plan—AI can be big investment and your people need to know how to use it.
Slapping “AI” into your own marketing campaigns only works if it fits your customers needs, they understand its value, and you can back it up.
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode (GEO/AEO)
Google made some maaaaajor changes in 2025 that hit quite a few businesses hard. Although AI Overviews technically rolled out in 2024 (we’re not counting Search Labs in 2023), it greatly expanded in both depth and country scope in the first quarter of 2025.
The rollout disrupted search as most of us know it. On average, CTR for both paid and organic search listings dropped dramatically. Zero-click searches increased. And many businesses lost control of their brand sentiment. Digital marketers have had to:
Change existing KPIs—shifting away from traffic for high funnel education and towards search visibility.
Reconsider traditional SEO tactics adjusting them for AEO.
Revamp their content strategy entirely. We’ll cover this as the next trend, but some brands discovered that their historical approaches to content were not working in this new landscape.
Diversify traffic sources and channel approach because channel balance shifted.
Dig deeper into brand authority and brand sentiment to shore up weaknesses.
Content Reuse and Overuse
Mentioned above, but worth its own callout—content marketing has seen a reckoning in 2025. The Google algorithm updates in spring and fall of 2025 meant big wins or big losses for a lot of brands. Here were some of the big hard content mistakes that caused traffic drops and left many businesses scrambling to change their approach quickly:
Spreading content too thin across too many channels
Taking one topic and trying to make it into too many content pieces.
Serving content that users didn’t actually need, want, or use.
Creating content that was only tangentially related to a brand’s business area just to boost website size and quantity (not quality) of traffic.
Bluntly, just creating junk content.
Headless Architecture: The Need and Struggle is Real
Headless isn’t new, but both the need for it and the learning curve needed to manage it came to a head this year. Headless is a powerful architecture option for many large businesses. If you need flexibility, scalability, personalization, and consolidation across multiple sites or tools, then headless is probably the right choice. But going headless has caused a lot of friction in 2025. Here’s the key lessons what we’ve seen:
Do you really need headless? Know your needs and goals and pick the tool right for them. Not the other way around.
Plan. Your. Architecture. Switching to headless usually means rethinking your entire front end, back end, and business logic approach. Make sure you really have a clear approach to data movement, maintenance, versioning plans, and failure fallbacks.
Ensure your headless is editor friendly. Devs might love headless, but your content managers might be overwhelmed. Make sure your headless is editor friendly.
Schedule regular security audits. Some companies have faced some significant security concerns. Dependency on APIs increase some data risks. Have an approach to manage.
Cookie Changes and First Party Data Collection and Cookie Changes
Marketers have continued to examine whether third-party cookies are going away completely. Third-party cookies have been the cornerstone of digital ads for… decades. No exaggeration. But the focus on data privacy and stricter regulations has meant this dominance can’t last.
While Google rolled back its plan to immediately deprecate third-party cookies, Safari and Firefox still have them blocked by default. The writing is on the wall (and has been for a while), third-party cookies are a historical artifact. This has meant a huge rise in first-party cookie deployment. Our key lessons this year have been:
Use a consent management platform for obtaining and managing user consent for data collection.
Be transparent and clear about your data collection policies.
Focus on strategies that result in customers knowingly and willingly sharing data with you.
Leverage contextual targeting for ads.
Empower your analytics by relying on first-party data where you know where the data is coming from. Clean consistent data means more trustworthy analysis.
Semi-Finalists
We have a bunch of semi-finalists that just didn’t make our top of the top 2025 cut, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them. Here’s a quick list of some of those semifinalists:
Short form video is everywhere.
Voice search optimization has grown dramatically, and businesses are slow to catch on.
Email marketing had some comeback, but it has required hyper-personalization.
Social selling continues to rise in effectiveness and popularity.
What else did you see as your big trends in 2025?