Online presence and promotion have always been about standing out to users with differentiated messaging or clever peacocking. There’s a reason they call it the attention economy. But before being seen by a human, all those zeroes and ones are passed through the machine and weighed by algorithms.
This has always been the case, and is a principle at the heart of SEO given the need to reverse engineer and appease the mightly algorithm. But that principle will both amplify and take on new forms in 2025 says Christian Ward, Yext’s Chief Data Officer and our go-to source on all things AI & search.
You may remember we recently discussed adjacent digital marketing topics with Ward including the difference between personal & personalization, and the impact that the new ChatGPT search will have on traditional local search. Now we switch gears to the above topic: convincing the machine in 2025.
Expanding Mosaic
For Ward, one of the things that makes this principle different than the past is the expanding mosaic of technologies and media that comprise the commercial web. That includes search of course, but also social media, chatbots, and review platforms. And overhanging all of the above is the rise of AI.
“As consumer behavior diversifies across platforms—encompassing social media, chatbots, and reviews—traditional notions of search engines are no longer sufficient,” Ward told Localogy Insider. “This shift demands a different approach to how brands appear and are evaluated across the digital landscape.”
That brings us back to the concept of “convincing the machine,” as Ward puts it. This needs to be a key consideration for any brand, SMB, agency, or any other entity that wants to amplify its visibility in 2025. And those who can adapt fastest to the evolving set of ranking factors will be rewarded.
“Brands are at the mercy of the algorithms on these platforms to choose what is trustworthy long before it is ever shown to a human,” said Ward. “Focus on factors that help machines calibrate levels of trust with your brand data should be your absolute focus for 2025.”
Human-Savvy
All the above reminds us of a resonant Wardism from one of his recent Localogy event keynotes. Paraphrasing, he says that a competitive edge has always been granted in our society to computer-savvy humans. But the same will apply increasingly to human-savvy computers (read: AI).
One takeaway is that AI’s effectiveness – and therefore a success factor in anyone building AI models – is to best understand human behavior. AI that can anticipate human intent and predictively determine the best results/answers/recommendations will define and lead the next era of the commercial web.
That ties back to convincing the machine in that computer-savvy humans and human-savvy computers will have to interface and find the most cohesive connections. Replace “computer-savvy humans” in that sentence with computer-savvy companies and the message sustains: It’s time to convince the machine.
Header image credit: Isis França on Unsplash
