Google I/O 2025
This year’s Google I/O 2025 conference (coupled with key announcements from Google Marketing Live) delivered a clear message: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the foundation of the future internet experience. With serious updates across search and paid media, this year’s announcements have exciting implications for how we approach digital marketing.
What Is Google I/O?
Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference where the tech giant unveils upcoming products, platform changes, and advancements in AI, search, and the broader Google ecosystem. While it traditionally skews toward a technical audience, the announcements invariably have a ripple effect, particularly on digital marketing.
Our Takeaways from Google I/O 2025
AI Mode and AI Overviews
One of the most immediate changes is the continued rollout of AI Overviews and the new AI Mode. AI Overviews are Google’s AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of a search results page (SERP), providing quick answers by aggregating information from multiple sources, without requiring users to click through to a site.
AI Mode takes this a step further. It’s a new search experience that’s more conversational in nature. Users can ask complex questions, and Google’s AI will provide detailed, multi-source responses with follow-up capabilities directly within the SERP.
This reinforces the need for extremely valuable, authoritative content that can serve as a definitive source for AI models, improving the likelihood of your content being featured or inspiring users to dig deeper on your site. And in practice, it means doubling down on in-depth, topical content that answers long-tail queries.
Deep Search and Query Fan-Out
These are perhaps the most technically interesting updates from Google I/O 2025. Deep Search and Query Fan-Out are enhancements to how Google’s AI models interpret the user’s underlying intent. Deep Search breaks complex queries down into multiple subtopics and retrieves and synthesises information from a broader range of sources. This works hand-in-hand with Query Fan-Out, which extends the single user query beyond direct keyword matches to uncover related concepts and information.
Where a traditional query might be interpreted in one or two ways, Query Fan-Out allows Google to explore multiple nuanced angles. The result is a more detailed response, raising the bar for content depth, specificity, and semantic clarity. What that means in real terms: Google is looking deeper, wider, and with more context.
This approach aligns with how we already structure content at Herdl, but the emphasis on content layering and intent-driven hierarchy is only going to intensify. This means going beyond standard keyword optimisation and truly embracing semantic SEO, crafting content that comprehensively addresses every facet of a user’s potential query and linking it back to relevant landing pages.
Multimodal and Real-Time Search
Multimodal search refers to Google’s ability to process and combine different types of input, like text, images, and voice/audio, within a single query to get more precise results. In tandem with this, real-time search provides the most up-to-the-minute information available, ensuring that answers reflect current events and rapidly changing data as it becomes available.
This means search is becoming more intuitive and immediate. It also means that your content strategy must extend beyond text. High-quality images, videos, and even audio could become increasingly vital for discoverability and engagement, not just for users but for AI models interpreting content. Generative media tools like Veo 3 and Imagen 4 might make it easier to create branded visuals and video content.
Project Mariner and Agentic AI
Project Mariner and Agentic AI introduce Google’s move towards a more autonomous search assistant, capable of stringing together actions based on user intent. Basically, AI doesn’t just return results; it performs multi-step actions on your behalf. Whether that’s to plan a trip, find a product, compare reviews, or make a purchase, all of this could happen without ever visiting a site directly. That’s the challenge. But also the opportunity.
Our team is quite excited about the agentic search capabilities announced at Google I/O. We’ll need to make sure that our websites are integrated well into Google’s ecosystem: Merchant Centre optimisations, great schema markup, and a strong technical structure to tick all the boxes. In other words, your structured data, product feeds, and eCommerce SEO hygiene have never mattered more.
Personalised Search Across Google Services
Google is doubling down on personalisation, with AI now pulling in context (and personal data) from its various services, including Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, and more. Search results are increasingly shaped by location, previous behaviour, and inferred preferences. This makes the concept of a single “ranking” less relevant and emphasises the need for a holistic digital presence and consistency across platforms.
The Last Word
At Herdl, the through-line from our team and the Google I/O 2025 conference is that success in this marketing landscape requires aligning activities with what works now while keeping an eye on the horizon. Embrace AI marketing opportunities and double down on future-proofing strategies.
As Google continues to reshape its digital ecosystem, our focus is shifting to a macro strategy that prioritises content that caters to deep search capabilities, structured data, optimising for agentic AI, and supporting discoverability within AI-powered, zero-click environments.
If you’re looking to understand how these Google I/O updates affect your business, speak to our team about what a future-facing SEO strategy could look like for your site.