According to Ed Hyatt, director of newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal, the fundamentals of SEO remain the same: being intentional with content and audiences, focusing on building authority in key topics, and maintaining brand focus. Emphasis is on creating content resilient to AI that fosters meaningful, long-term audience connections. Key SEO lessons for publishers in 2025 include: 1. **Shifting KPIs**: Traffic alone is no longer sufficient to gauge SEO success. Hyatt stresses the need for holistic metrics beyond clicks. Faith Durand, SVP of content at Apartment Therapy, notes her team splits efforts between traditional search optimization and redefining KPIs aligned with business goals, moving away from vanity metrics. Many publishers now prioritize subscriber growth and free registrations. For instance, Forbes introduced an AI-powered dynamic paywall to diversify revenue beyond search-driven income, and The Economist tests strategies to convert social followers into registered users. Michael King, CEO of iPullRank, describes the current state as “a flux where the new model needs to be figured out. ” 2. **Focus on Conversion Metrics**: Apartment Therapy highlights a shift towards membership conversions, exemplified by its food brand The Kitchn launching a paid membership in 2026. Durand contrasts broad, low-yield traffic with deeper engagement of smaller, monetizable audiences. Hyatt affirms clicks and subscription conversions remain key but acknowledges additional KPIs reflecting goals like connected readers, subscriptions, registrations, and ultimately revenue. 3. **More Data, Value Undetermined**: 2025 brought a surge in tracking tools and dashboards to analyze AI-driven traffic and visibility.

New predictive AI visibility solutions from firms like Profound, Semrush, and Similarweb enable tracking of prompts and citations, enhancing understanding of AI discovery. Hyatt notes the abundance of data is valuable but publishers are still learning to interpret it effectively for their businesses. 4. **Changing Distribution**: As user searches grow on AI and social platforms, SEO teams must coordinate more with social and audience teams. King highlights the importance of presence on platforms like Reddit and YouTube. Hyatt explains that large language models (LLMs) analyze content creators and journalists to assess brands, making a distributed content model increasingly critical. 5. **Decline of Evergreen Content**: AI-driven search favors fresh, recently updated content over evergreen material. Google AI Overviews often answer queries directly via summaries instead of linking out, reducing referral traffic for long-standing content. King remarks that the evergreen strategy is now largely obsolete due to diminishing returns and high competition for basic informational searches. 6. **Emergence of Agentic Search**: Agentic search—AI-powered agents that autonomously complete complex tasks like booking flights or hotels without providing direct links—is on the horizon. This shift poses questions for SEO, as Ray notes the urgency for websites and content to become fully discoverable and retrievable by intelligent agents. It represents a key topic as SEO teams adapt to this new paradigm. In sum, SEO in 2025 demands intentional, brand-focused content creation; a broader set of success metrics emphasizing engagement and conversion rather than just traffic; strategic data utilization; integration across social and SEO functions; a move away from evergreen content reliance; and preparation for disruptive innovations like agentic search. Publishers must evolve to remain resilient and connected in an increasingly AI-driven landscape.