“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Vladimir Lenin supposedly said this about the Russian Revolution … but when I look back at 2025 for marketers, I can’t help but think the same thing.
2025 has been one of the most pivotal years in the history of digital marketing, if not all of marketing in general. We’ve seen seismic shifts in the way we find and consume information as an audience — as well as seeing many of the tools we used as marketers disappear, change and evolve.
Let’s take a look back at the three trends that shaped 2025.
AI Took Over
I was talking to a buddy of mine who works at a household name content marketing company recently. They’ve always relied heavily on Google and blog traffic. He told me ninety percent of their search engine referral traffic disappeared this year.
And they’re not alone.
Google’s aggressive expansion of AI Overviews in May put the nail in the coffin of SEO as a reliable referrer. The trend had already been occurring; this was part of the impetus behind the Google Web Creator Summit in 2024, where the Internet giant basically shrugged its shoulders at a number of small businesses dependent on search traffic and said “you’ll have to figure it out, I guess.” Both large and small businesses have seen massive losses in traffic since then, though small businesses have been disproportionately impacted.
Though strict AI search like Google’s AI Mode, SearchGPT and Perplexity are still small percentages of the overall pie, there’s been a huge drop in click-through driven by people not exploring past the overview. Adoption has been swift, and marketers are still working to figure out what the next big driver of organic referral traffic is … or if one will even exist.
Traffic and Conversions Decoupled
There is some good news — despite click-through and referrals falling off a cliff, conversions generally haven’t. People are still clicking, buying, downloading and signing up. It’s just less clear where that traffic is coming from. We’re also seeing a trend of “zero-click” content on social media outperforming content with links (even Seth Godin isn’t immune), which is shifting the focus to content that isn’t tied to referrals.
There are companies struggling, but most of them are the ones that over-indexed into SEO tricks instead of building a strong base of content across multiple channels.
The industry is still trying to figure out what’s driving this, but the undisputed truth is that brand is now front and center again. Instead of a clear, defined user journey, we’re seeing a messier and harder-to-track process where users dip in and out of the “funnel” before finally taking action. This makes brand visibility and TOMA (top of mind awareness) critical. Conversions might happen in areas you don’t expect, areas that don’t have easy attribution.
The Attention Economy Turned K-Shaped
You might have heard the term “K-shaped economy,” used to refer to an economy with increasing wealth inequality — the middle disappears as rich and poor diverge.
We’re seeing a K-shaped economy emerge for attention spans.
The growth of short-form video has been impossible to miss the last few years, with TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts exploding on the scene to take over our down time. But at the same time, video lengths on YouTube have started to creep back up. Smart TVs saturating the market means that there’s a larger percentage of the population that may passively watch something like they used to with TV, which is driving a trend towards longer videos (think hour-plus).
The old saw about attention spans getting shorter isn’t necessarily true either. People will still watch a deep dive on a subject, and there’s still an appetite for longer content. They just make decisions quicker on whether a piece of content is worth their time. Short content drives attention and gets people interested; long content keeps them invested.
2026: No End in Sight
Marketing changed a ton in 2025, and 2026 looks to be no different. These three trends look like they’ll continue to make major impacts next year. It’s a challenging time to be building your business online … but we’re here to help. Stay tuned to the Rainmaker Dispatch and we’ll keep you informed.
Thanks for reading the Dispatch this past year, and we’ll see you in 2026.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services