AI in digital marketing and SEO: Key trends

The future is faster than most of us thought. AI is already everywhere these days: in smartphones and PCs, in self-driving cars, in healthcare diagnostics, in virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, and even in digital marketing campaigns and SEO.

In marketing and SEO, it helps drive productivity, improve decision-making, increase efficiency, and save time by automating hundreds of processes. Is AI a part of your marketing strategy?

This article uncovers the pivotal trends you need to know to harness AI’s full potential in your campaigns. Read on to discover how AI powered digital marketing can revolutionize your business processes.

Content generation with AI

We begin with content generation, as it’s a go-to AI application for the time being. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and lately DeepSeek, these are the first crests of an effective AI-human collaboration wave.

At the start of 2025, the LLMs (large language models) such as the ones mentioned above are capable of what would seem like magic 20 years ago. They can create a copy of any complexity and style, be it an email text, cover letter, landing page, product description, blog post, or ad copy.

What previously took marketers and SEO specialists hours and days can now be done in seconds by combining artificial intelligence and online marketing.

Let’s take guest posts. You can now write a compelling guest post perfectly relevant to your industry and niche using an LLM of your choice.

The only grain of salt is that LLMs are of little use so far in acquiring quality backlinks from authoritative resources. No cause for concern, as innovations are already here to back you up. You can focus on acquiring quality backlinks and drive traffic like never before with the help of specialized backlink services, which, to be fair, also leverage AI tools for automation and efficiency.

Did you know?

Julia E. McCoy, a renowned content marketing strategist, the “mother” of the “content hacker” term, and the CEO of First Movers, has made a name in utilizing AI to create content. She began her copywriting-entrepreneur career back in 2009, but just a few months before ChatGPT came out, she sold it.

The sad part is that she had to lay off the team of nine full-time copywriters to leave only one, who works just two hours a week!

Process automation

We’ve just seen how AI can automate content creation, but that’s barely scratching the surface of what this technology can do for marketing. Other processes it can automate include:

• Marketing Research: Analyzing the target audience, competitors, and own business processes with AI is so much easier, faster, and cheaper.
• Lead Generation: Creating lead magnets (discounts with automated pricing adjustments, free guides, etc.), automating landing page creation with compelling CTAs, and capturing and nurturing leads.
• AI driven SEO: Keyword Research Process, on-page optimization, technical SEO with improving website mobile-friendliness and speed, link-building, and others. Companies use SEO tools to automate marketing processes for sustainable growth and to boost revenues. Understanding how to use AI for SEO is becoming an essential skill for marketers who want to stay competitive.
• Social Media and Email Marketing: Choosing the right platforms, capturing and managing contact databases, generating user-optimized content, running paid ads, analyzing engagement via surveys, etc.

A surprise automation process here is the one about marketing/SEO strategy. Who would have thought that AI could strategize better than most humans?

Just a year ago, experts in the field of marketing and AI claimed a machine could never surpass humans in strategizing and dreaming about the future. Yet, here we are at the start of 2025, when frontline AI models like ChatGPT 4o Turbo can replace a whole team of marketing strategists.

Did you know?

Pinterest has integrated AI into its advertising platform to improve ad process targeting and efficiency. The introduction of the Performance+ suite, an AI-driven tool, has automated and enhanced advertising processes, making it easier for marketers to launch ad campaigns and run them at reduced costs.

This implementation led to a 20% surge in Pinterest’s shares, with first-quarter revenue forecasts surpassing expectations at $837 million to $852 million.

Personalization at scale

Picture a world where customer service intuitively adapts to your preferences, worries, and moods. You get exactly what your body and mood need every time you go shopping.

That’s not some kind of distant future; that’s a reality within a year’s reach.

AI algorithms already track and analyze everything users do online. The data collected gets processed by Google Analytics and other tools, fed into Google Ads, and users receive hyper-personalized offers.

Here are some common AI-enabled personalization scenarios:

• Personalized Search Results: Google tailors SERPs based on search history, location, and browsing patterns.
• Geo-Targeted Ads & Offers: Artificial intelligence and online marketing synergy enable promotions relevant to a user’s physical location.
• Chatbots & Virtual Assistants: AI-powered chat responses tailored to individual user preferences and inquiry history.
• Customized Website UX/UI Elements: Adjusting navigation menus, font sizes, or dark/light modes based on user preferences.

The flip side of the personalization coin is the privacy loss concern. Privacy in digital marketing becomes harder to maintain and requires a radical mindset shift and new approaches from businesses and individuals alike.

Did you know?

Coca-Cola utilized AI in its “Share a Coke” campaign, manufacturing bottles with unique names to create a hyper-personalized customer experience. AI was employed to analyze large datasets from social media, sales, and customer feedback. This enabled a deep understanding of consumer preferences.

Coca-Cola’s data-driven approach led to a significant sales increase and an 870% boost in social media engagement, with millions sharing their personalized Coke bottles online (by the way, user-generated content is another popular trend in digital marketing).

Predictive analytics in marketing

Let’s confess: prediction in marketing is something we all love doing and feel passionate about, but honestly speaking, we are horrible at it.

Partially because only a few of us are good at math and statistics (which are absolutely required in forecasting), and partially because our biological minds have evolved to think linearly while the tech of the 21st century develops exponentially.

Conversely, AI in digital marketing can take millions and billions of details into account when making predictions about the future. It is uniquely positioned to make informed decisions based on pure data, unbiased by prejudice and superstition. The future of AI in marketing will likely push this predictive power even further, transforming how brands anticipate customer behavior and market trends.

Key applications of predictive analytics in marketing and SEO:

• Sentiment Analysis & Brand Reputation Management: Monitoring online mentions to predict and prevent PR crises.
• Customer Churn Prediction: Identifying users likely to leave and triggering retention campaigns before they do.
• SERP Feature Optimization: Predicting which SERP features (featured snippets, People Also Ask, videos) will dominate for specific queries.
• Content Performance Prediction: AI SEO marketing tandem evaluates which content topics will gain traction and suggests updates before rankings drop.

Did you know?

Starbucks leverages machine learning to predict what customers will likely purchase based on their past behaviors. This AI functionality is embedded into the brand’s app in the App Store and Google Play.

Ever since this feature was implemented, the company has experienced increased levels of customer engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction. Subsequently, Starbucks’s sales and ROMI have gone up.

Chatbots and conversational AI

Chatbots have long become common in customer care and support. However, it wasn’t until recently that companies started to actively integrate AI into these processes.

The innovation has led to enhanced productivity, significant cost cuts, and better user experiences (although the latter aspect took some time to perfect).

Some common applications for chatbot platforms and conversational AI include:

• 24/7 Customer Support: Restless bots that never get tired, hungry, or sick outperform human personnel 10x times. A few highly skilled human agents with the highest emotional intelligence (e.g., empathy & persuasion) still handle a portion of calls.
• Automated Appointment Scheduling: Allowing customers to book, reschedule, or cancel appointments through chat.
• Multilingual Support: Automatically detecting and responding in the user’s preferred language.
• Interactive SEO & Content Navigation: AI for SEO helps users find relevant content, blog posts, or product pages based on conversational queries.

Did you know?

Sephora, a leading cosmetics retailer, launched the ‘Virtual Artist’ chatbot, utilizing artificial intelligence and augmented reality to allow customers to virtually try on its makeup offerings. The bot relies on the latest natural language processing models to understand conversational customer queries.

The AI-powered process innovation enabled Sephora to handle over 70 million conversations with users (unthinkable productivity for human consultants) and increase CTR by 300% compared to conventional email campaigns.

What’s coming next

Virtually all the AI trends mentioned in this post converge towards the so-called agentic AI and, ultimately, AGI. The latter is the advanced AI with greater autonomy and initiative, comparable to that of humans.

Companies of all sizes and industries should start preparing for this fundamental shift toward autonomous AI agents now to avoid being left behind in the competition tomorrow. Agentic AI is expected to gain strength and come into being by the end of 2025. Not much time left to contemplate and prepare, right?

The AGI, on the other hand, is the abbreviation of Artificial General Intelligence, an anticipated power gain in AI to equal and surpass the computational capacity of the human brain. That’s when machines start to think better than humans.

If you don’t start planning, investing, and integrating AI in digital marketing and SEO processes today or tomorrow, the next month might be too late. Early AI adopters, on the other hand, will gain a competitive advantage and a significant boost to productivity.