BrightonSEO Wrapped, April 2025

Introduction

Last week SEOs from across the world flocked to brightonSEO, seeking refuge in The Brighton Centre from the sunny spring weather.

Once again, and to no surprise, AI took the centre stage throughout the event, but what else was covered? And what was left out?

In our first edition of BrightonSEO Wrapped, we reflect on the key moments of brightonSEO this year and what you need to know as an SEO.

The AI Revolution in Search

Key themes: LLMs | AI-generated SERPs | The Future of SEO Visibility

SEO in the age of AI and Generative Search was a major talking point this year. Fortunately, we found ourselves treated to a variety of perspectives, niches, and advice encompassing the subject. This year’s presentations touched on the trajectory of SEO in the age of AI, the pros and cons of AI traffic, and how to adapt to the change.

How is AI Affecting SEO?

Perhaps what most SEOs want to know is is my industry dying? The consensus is roughly what we expected - SEO is not dying or dead. Instead, AI Search is driving an evolution of SEO strategy.

Josh Blyskal’s talk on the future of Search helped put data behind what we think we know with regards to GEO, thanks to a large-scale analysis of AI search results. His presentation also gave us a few key insights into AI Crawlers, particularly that they tend to be “lazy” in their crawling, ignoring any JavaScript and extracting only HTML. While this is unlikely to affect most sites, it’s clear that it’s evermore important to not hide key content behind JavaScript, something substantiated again by Will Kennard’s talk further below.

A dive into how AI-generated search differs from organic by Marcus Tober touched on how it’s taking over some results, including featured snippets. AI search is “shifting the playing field”, preferring smaller, niche sites while Google still promotes big brands. Marcus also adds how younger users are embracing AI platforms and social search (TikTok, Instagram, ChatGPT), whereas older demographics are sticking with Google.

Ray Griesel Huber’s pitch highlighted how we’re now in a zero-click world - only 36% of US searches result in a click - but also that the SERPs are still a blend of LLM and conventional search. CTR is falling in some queries, so one should optimise for impressions, not just clicks.

But AI traffic is risky business, cautions Baruch Toledano, who notes that while AI-origin traffic has a great potential (it refers 14 times more traffic than it receives, and its traffic is more engaged) it is also unstable; LLMs don’t guarantee clicks. AI platforms also tended to link to homepages, rather than deeper pages as found on Search.

How can SEOs Stay Proactive Around AI?

Marcus’s presentation on the difference of AI-generated search pointed out that keywords are still essential for both LLMs and traditional engines. They reflect intent, and optimising for them is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. The solution is to diversify strategy.

Baruch advises to focus efforts on optimising homepage experience and user retention, since these are more important for AI-origin traffic, but he also notes to not abandon Google.



And Josh’s point on AI lazy-crawling makes it very clear to focus SEO efforts on static page content. A nice tie-in to our next section, tech SEO.

Technical SEO Tactics

Know Which Tech Tools Matter

Don’t be blinded by the lighthouse. That’s how Joshua Clare-Flagg sets up a passionate talk on the significance between Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores, what data they use, and why one metric can score well while the other doesn’t.

Unlike Lighthouse, CWV forms part of the page experience ranking factor, meaning it directly contributes to page ranking.

But CWV, which is calculated from field data, is only reported after reaching a minimum threshold of real user data. Before that point, Lighthouse score, which is calculated using lab data and does not factor into ranking, is generally the only alternative.

The trouble is that the two scores can vary wildly, and relying on a Lighthouse score can be misleading. A report from The HTTP Archive, which measured the two scores from a large dataset, highlights this.

Joshua’s solution is to collect Real User Metrics (or “RUM”) and avoid the pitfalls of Lighthouse when CWV is not available. There is a range of third-party options to choose from to help implement RUM tracking onto your site. The picks of the bunch from Joshua’s talk were request metrics, CWV wordpress tool, rumviion and debugbear with different tiers for you to explore.

Advanced SEO Techniques

Perhaps one of the only homages to International SEO this year, Nick Samuel introduced many of us for the first time to XML Hreflang Sitemaps. While the majority of websites embed hreflang within page HTML, Nick highlighted a few use-cases for the XML route instead:

• Your HTML doesn’t update dynamically when new language variants exist.
• Your HTML updates dynamically, but generates an hreflang link to every “possible” page, regardless of whether it exists or not.
• You operate different domains on different CMS’s.

Next up, Jan Caerels gave a masterclass on how to (and how not to) use .htaccess for SEO. Using this file on Apache web servers, administrators can bulk configure redirects and removals, prevent indexation of pages, and even block desired bots and user-agents (although for ethical bots, using robots.txt’s “user-agent” field is preferred). You can even use regular expressions to streamline multiple redirects into a single step, greatly improving UX.

Just be careful not to bulk “no index” your entire site, warns Jan, who admittedly may have been speaking from experience.

JavaScript SEO and AI

Two intriguing presentations on JavaScript SEO and rendering offered some valuable insights for SEOs.

Will Kennard emphasised the importance of understanding JavaScript, rendering, and how it matters to SEO. Whilst useful, render-blocking JS files are a pain point in a pagespeed waterfall graph, and server-side rendering is a great way to improve this. He also noted that none of the AI crawlers currently seem to render pages. Thus, content rendered with client-side JS may not be seen by most AI crawlers.

Google’s Martin Splitt gave a talk on where rendering fits in the indexation pipeline. GoogleBot takes two passes in a crawl, first on the HTML, and later by rendering any JavaScript on that page into a Document Object Model (DOM) tree. He made it clear that if a page gets indexed, it gets rendered, but that whether a page needs to be rendered or not has no impact on how quickly a page will be indexed.

Content, Strategy and Industry Trends

Key themes: Competitor Research | Query Counting | Sustainability | A/B Testing

BrightonSEO didn’t only focus on AI and Tech; strategy and content SEO found its place, too.

Doing SEO Right

Emily Barrington overviewed how to successfully approach competitor research by reverse engineering top-ranking competitors, identifying their strengths, and isolating easy wins. Prioritise high-impact, low-effort, then high-impact, high-effort opportunities.

A case study on content scaling by David Kaufmann covered the internationalisation of their client site, and how it led to the globalisation of chess.com that we see today. Critically, he weighed in on the benefits of working with the findings cross-departmentally, collaborating with rather than working against PPC.

Daniel Foley Carter spoke about query counting for SEO, a simple yet powerful method of page weighting that focuses on the number of queries pages rank for, rather than conventional clicks or impressions. He argues that query counting gives a longer-term view of how a page is performing, with a decline/growth in queries being a “far more accurate” measurement of page performance.

There was even an indication that a sudden shift in query count can forecast an imminent core update.

Sustainability in SEO

Sustainability may not be the first thing you associate with SEO, but it’s rapidly becoming a part of the conversation. Oluwatobi Folasade Balogun’s presentation on sustainability in SEO covered some eye-opening realities about the environmental impact of slow sites and mass-producing content - over 90% of published content gets 0 organic traffic from Google, and websites loading in 5 seconds vs 1 second emit three times the CO2 per visit. 

Aware that environmentalism may not be at the top of the agenda for stakeholders, she highlights that companies embracing sustainable digital practices do gain a competitive advantage, as well as increased customer loyalty.

Page speed and sustainability is an area we are equally passionate about here at Hookflash, towards the end of 2024 we explored the Impact of Page Speed on Carbon Expulsion which is only increasing as we move through 2025.

Don't Silo Your Strategy

Perhaps underpinning BrightonSEO this year was the emphasis on collaborative practices, expanding the benefits of SEO company-wide. Ellie Connor discussed “breaking down silos” and collaborating between SEO and PPC as a key to holistic search success. By siloing datasets and working against each other, the two streams create inefficiencies, but by working together with an SEM (search engine management) approach, both parties win.

Collaborative search strategies require teams to work together, sharing data and ideas, but what's the tangible benefit? For one of our clients we helped to generate £840k of incremental revenue by identifying PPC inefficiencies resulting from an accidental brand switch off. This single day of initial data was shared by the client PPC team, prompting a test which led to the above case study, incredible.

Well, that's a wrap

So… did we hold a funeral for SEO at BrightonSEO this year? Not a chance.

It’s clear that AI is changing Search, and by extension SEO, but we should not blindly chase the hype. Understand what is changing and continuing to focus efforts on what works is vital, be it tech, content, or AI strategy.

Despite such a wide range of topics, there were still a few gaps this year. Beyond a couple of anecdotes on internationalisation, the topic was not widely explored, and local SEO took a bit of a backseat, too.

As SEO continues to evolve alongside Search, it’s refreshing to remind ourselves that SEO changing is nothing new - the industry has always been shifting.