The Year That Defined AI Search: A 2025 Botify Recap

2025 was a landmark year for brands. Search expanded beyond Google into a fragmented, fast-moving ecosystem of AI answer engines and agents that browse, summarize, recommend — and increasingly act — on behalf of customers. We evolved right alongside it with a simple focus: to help brands be found everywhere consumers, bots, and AI agents search.

Achieving that visibility for our customers meant helping them take action fast enough to win in this new world. We leaned into education and practical frameworks, while product work prioritized AI bot activity, crawlability, and trustworthy data (because if bots can’t access it, agents won’t recommend it). 

In celebration of a new year that will undoubtedly see even more innovation and volatility, let’s take a look back at the biggest shifts of 2025, and the work we did at Botify to help brands keep ahead of change. 

The new “user” is a bot (and soon, an agent)

One reality became increasingly clear this year: AI bots and AI agents are now a distinct audience for your site, finding, summarizing, and engaging with your content on behalf of humans. In practice, that means the customer journey now starts with a machine deciding what a potential consumer sees and trusts. 

That’s why so much of our work in 2025 centered on the technical fundamentals that suddenly mattered even more for content discovery and results. Technical accessibility and content clarity are now the pre-requisites for AI discovery:

• Search is now fragmented: People find answers to queries across multiple platforms, and AI platforms need accessible, crawlable, indexable sources to reference (or to build their own indexes).
• AI Overviews became the new SERP feature: Whether you love them or hate them, they changed search expectations by creating shorter pathways to answers and requiring fewer clicks. To show up, you need structured, trustworthy information. 
• Agentic commerce gained traction: As AI shopping assistance accelerated, the key question for brands became whether or not the models customers use can actually see them (and if they can, how to get chosen). 

How is generative AI finding your content, and do you want it to?

As bot traffic surged, the conversation moved to access. Not all AI traffic is useful to brands, and a strong AI bot governance plan became critical for any future-forward marketing strategy. We helped teams understand that a strong plan will include:

• Which bots to allow and block, and how to control them;
• What content should be available for training vs. live retrieval;
• How to align bot access with business priorities. 

To build successful AI search strategies you also need to know how AI platforms source content to begin with, including the role traditional indexes still play while proprietary AI indexes are being built in parallel. 

This theme showed up in a big way this year when Google’s removal of the &num=100 parameter revealed that synthetic activity and AI scraping is inflating impressions data, demonstrating to the marketing industry just how much awareness (and control) of artificial activity matters when you’re trying to make the right, data-driven decisions for your brand.

Botify’s 2025 product updates: Doing more with less by pairing teams with automation and agents

With all these shifts in 2025, we heard the same challenges from all of our customers: they had more platforms to manage and new metrics to track, but with shrinking budgets and teams. In February, we shared our evolved mission: to empower businesses to drive sustained growth with the leading agentic AI solution for online visibility. We wanted to make automation and agentic workflows feel less like a threat and more like a trusted co-worker to help fill the gaps, and our product updates this year reflected that. The point of these offerings wasn’t adopting AI for AI’s sake, but rather to help you streamline months of work into scalable workflows so that your teams could move faster and ship impact with less manual effort. 

Measuring what matters in AI search with AI Visibility

In October, we announced our AI search measurement solution: AI Visibility, built to help brands understand and track their presence across platforms (including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity), and focus measurement on what actually correlates with business impact using insights grounded in first-party data. 

Released in beta, we’re delighted that 86% of our clients have projects live with AI Visibility. We’re excited for everyone to gain access in early 2026! 

Making automation conversational with Botify Assist

This year’s launch of Botify Assist improved usability and collaboration for teams through agentic integrations. Instead of digging through spreadsheets and stitching together analyses manually, you can interact with your data through natural language: ask questions and receive answers tied to your project data, export tables straight from a conversation, or jump directly to other parts of the Botify platform to keep workflows moving seamlessly.

One of our customers, the Singaporean telecom company Singtel, used Botify Assist as part of their solution to generate content more aligned to their customers’ needs. “Botify Assist has helped us stay closely attuned to what our customers are searching for, so we can create content that’s both relevant and impactful,” says John Hon, Singtel Senior E-commerce Manager. That content helped them achieve a 227% increase in impressions and 175% increase in clicks year-over-year. 

And they’re not alone: in 2025, 82% of Botify customers have used Botify Assist as part of their optimization workflows.

Helping bots and agents see your site with SpeedWorkers

Bots don’t experience your site the way humans do, and many AI bots can’t render JavaScript reliably (or at all). SpeedWorkers solves that by delivering fully rendered versions of your webpages directly to the platforms responsible for discovery, both traditional and AI. This way, AI bots and agents can more quickly and reliably gain access to and interpret your content for potential customers. It also helps teams handle the reality of increasing bot traffic by reducing infrastructure impact, so increased crawling doesn’t overload your servers.

Bot access is just one of the issues teams will need to grapple with in order to be visible in 2026. For more details and tips on strategizing for GEO, be sure to check out our recent webinar. 

Getting content found faster with SmartIndex

Even if your content is accessible to AI bots and agents, waiting passively for them to find that content is a risky bet, especially for recent launches, seasonal updates, or PDPs that change frequently. To improve your path to indexation, we released SmartIndex.  

SmartIndex supports a more proactive approach to indexation by generating updated sitemaps, alerting search engines to updated content, and pushing priority content and updates straight into Bing’s index, all so that search engines and the AI platforms that rely on them can reflect the freshest, most accurate information about your brand. 

Scaling the signals that shape discovery with SmartContent and SmartLink

We wanted to address two key themes that appeared in 2025 search: 

1. The need to optimize content for AI search efficiently and at scale, and
2. The need to make site structure more legible for AI bots and agents. 

To do so, we launched two additional solutions to improve discovery paths for bots, agents, and humans alike: 

1. SmartContent, to help teams automate the creation, testing, and deployment of on-page elements like titles and meta descriptions at scale, and
2. SmartLink, to automate smart internal linking using first-party data, so your linking strategy can evolve as your site does.  

Leveling up PageWorkers

This year, we improved PageWorkers by making large-scale automation more precise and measurable, which included new features like: 

• Scheduling deployments and pauses (especially useful for seasonal updates);
• Required variables, so optimizations only trigger when the right conditions are present; 
• Cloning optimizations across projects to replicate what’s working;
• And impact measurement that links deployed changes to business metrics. 

These new updates were a hit: in 2025, we saw a 155% increase in PageWorkers optimizations across our customer base. 

Making it easier to prove impact

AI-era visibility and success is hard to explain with traditional SEO metrics alone. Teams needed ways to prove impact through better storytelling, which we’ve aimed to do with recent updates to RealKeywords Explorer and CustomReports. With clearer before-and-after views and new, executive-ready templates, it’s easier than ever to connect your optimizations with outcomes, and communicate that progress across the organization. 

Strategy support for the AI search era

Finally, it’s not feasible for most teams to navigate GEO vs. SEO strategy shifts alone. This year, Botify expanded our service offerings to help teams build practical plans for the generative AI search landscape, including readiness audits and consulting support to develop and operationalize strategies. 

What we’re taking into 2026

If 2025 taught the industry anything, it’s that search is now a multi-platform, agent-driven discovery layer. The brands that win will be the ones that:

• Build strong technical and content foundations for bots and humans.
• Measure AI visibility in ways that correlate to business impact.
• Lean into automation and agentic solutions to execute fast. 

Where we’ve landed is GEO-first (but SEO-strong) thinking. By using AI-era visibility to get clearer about the foundations that make content retrievable, trustworthy, and reusable across systems, we’ll prioritize the work that actually changes outcomes, not just dashboards.

Ready to turn 2026 visibility into measurable results? Reach out to see how Botify helps you be found in AI search, or get help crafting your 2026 GEO strategy with Botify’s expert consulting services.