2025 Reflection

My thoughts on the industry | where Growth Memo is at and where it's going | Personal reflection

This Memo was sent to 23,215 subscribers. Welcome to +80 new readers!

You’re reading the free version of Growth Memo. This week, Premium subscribers get the strategic layer behind the predictions - the “What this means for you” operating guidance and “watch-outs” to take with you into 2026.

The platform for winning search, everywhere

Search is expanding. With Semrush Enterprise, brands are set up for success across Google and AI search.

Get performance tracking, live content scoring, and real-time optimization guidance for both SEO and AI search visibility in one place.

Plus, swap tiresome manual tasks for strategy that moves the needle, through advanced automations that are powered by the industry’s leading search database.

Start dominating every search

At the close of each calendar year, I take a 2-week pause from the Growth Memo to rest and enjoy the holidays with family.

So before we close up shop for 2025, I’m sending an annual review that wasn’t just a highlight reel. (Although it is also full of highlights, and for that I’m beyond thankful!)

Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s memo:

1. Growth Memo growth (with details) 🚀

2. A low-lift ask - I want to hear from you. 👈

3. 5 reflections on the SEO / organic search marketing industry as a whole 📈

4. Personal + professional reflections from a year of significant learning 💪

2025 was hard and successful… and I’m grateful I get to do this interesting work alongside you, the Growth Memo community.

Growth Memo’s inflection point

First, I’m celebrating with this community that Growth Memo subscribers grew at over 40% YoY over the last 5 years, aside from its first year.

Keeping in mind that 2025 numbers don’t include December, this year will end strong with over 23,000 subscribers.

The year started a bit soft because I ventured off of SEO topics, but then picked up real steam when I published the first user behavior study of AI Overviews in May.

That study set the Growth Memo on a whole new trajectory with international press clips and a new positioning around original research. (👏A big shout-out to Eric Van Buskirk and his research team.) I had published unique insights before, but this study lifted Growth Memo to a whole new level.

The top growth channels for the newsletter:

• Substack: 41.1%

• Direct: 19.6%

• Google: 14%

• Linkedin: 9.7%

• Search Engine Journal: 2.2%

The top 10 most read articles:

Growth Memo Premium almost hit the goal of 500 paying subscribers (489 at the time of writing). The step change in May is the result of expanding premium content and gating the end of the weekly Memo - along with some classic CRO.

Another big change was bringing on Amanda Johnson as a (part-time) co-strategist and editorial support. Amanda helped me not just bring a more consistent style and feel to the Growth Memo, but also upleveled “infrastructure content” and processes around the main content: drip campaigns, landing pages, boilerplate copy, etc.

In turn, revenue doubled this year. The Growth Memo makes an average US salary, which humbles me every day.

Revenue growth is trending in a strong direction:

• 2023: Low growth starting with advertising

• 2024: Building out advertising infrastructure, raising prices, and starting the premium membership

• 2025: Raising ad prices, step change for premium subscribers

Growth Memo hit #38 of Substack’s Business Bestsellers.

I also started a free Whatsapp group in 2025 where I share new insights and research as I come across it myself.

The group quickly grew to 800 people until I migrated it over to Slack to have a 2-way conversation instead of a broadcast.

We’re now at 825 members. Join here if you haven’t already. (It’s free.)

In 2026, Growth Memo is projected to cross the 30,000 subscriber mark, and I’d like to get closer to 1,000 premium subscribers. I have a few ideas for 2026 that should accelerate paid subscriber growth.

The feedback I hear the most is “I don’t subscribe to the premium version because I get so much for free.” (And I don’t know if that’s a wake up call to shorten the sends or the biggest compliment of a lifetime. 😆)The easiest move would be to just gate everything, but I don’t think that’s the right thing long-term.

In 2026, Growth Memo is best positioned to produce truly differentiated research - and share it with all of you.

I’m very excited about this… especially now, as we all collectively work together to figure out this AI thing. Stay tuned!

And here’s the ask:

Fill out this quick 10-question reader survey.

It should take less than 5 minutes (and that’s significantly less time than it takes to explain SEO/AEO/GEO to your stakeholders).

Your responses will influence the 2026 content calendar, along with the supportive resources.

And…. if you’ve thought about switching over to premium, now’s the time. There will be changes and expansions to premium content in 2026, and you don’t want to miss it.

Industry reflections: Organic search is evolving faster than our language for it

The rise of ChatGPT has given the SEO industry a massive spotlight. But we’re facing more challenges than opportunities that affect crucial areas:

• Industry identity

• Success metrics

• Complexity of the work

• AEO/GEO “gold rush”

• Increased influence

1/ Industry identity: We’re not in agreement - yet.

In 2025, we still don’t know what to call the thing we do. AEO? GEO? None of these are good, in my opinion, because LLMs are evolving. Are we going to call SEO agentic visibility optimization (AVO) when agents become a thing? Probably! But humans need a term to make sense of something. So, AEO it is for me. For now.

The bigger question - and one that’s more polarizing: Is good AEO / GEO just good SEO? The answer: No, but it’s about 90% the same. What both camps on either side of the question miss is that this will change over time. Right now, the overlap is strong. But don’t expect that to stay. LLMs are not search engines.

2/ Success metrics: Everything’s changed, and so should your reporting.

The question of how to measure success in LLMs is less about available metrics and more about the approach. The relationship between mentions / citations and revenue is unclear. It’s really hard to know what a 10% increase in citations or a 2% increase in Share of Voice will mean for the business because we don’t have attribution or enough leading indicators, like SEO clicks.

Funny enough, with clicks dying as a metric, I find myself looking at the number of top ranks more often again to gauge whether Google likes a site or not.

3/ Complexity of the work: It’s more challenging to earn organic search visibility.

The complexity of optimizing for AI Visibility is high:

1. LLM answers are probabilistic. Run the same prompt 5x in a row and you only see ~10% of the same brands.

2. A lot of success depends on the prompts you track, and no one knows which prompts people use.

3. LLM answers are increasingly personalized, which makes unified tracking very hard.

4. The position of a brand in the answer text matters less than how the brand is portrayed.

5. Prompts are much richer than search keywords (5x longer on average), so we cannot reason from search volume.

6. The number of LLM mentions and citations fluctuate constantly, making it hard to know what “good visibility” looks like.

7. Results vary by LLM. The only ones that really matter right now are ChatGPT and Gemini (in the form of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini itself).

4/ Gold rush: The pressure of “owning” the LLM channel first.

The AEO/GEO gold rush is driven by pressure and FOMO:

• Boards put a lot of pressure on the C-suite to have an AI strategy. Being able to report on AI visibility feels like control.

• No one wants to miss an opportunity to be a first-mover and establish a competitive advantage on ChatGPT. It happened on Google ~20 years ago. CMOs have not forgotten.

• Over 800 million people use ChatGPT every day.

• All (acquisition) channels suck right now.

It’s difficult to answer the question “How much can we influence purchase decisions on or within LLMs?” The answer could vary from “very much” to “not at all.” The latter is scary because it would mean the end of SEO. But the reality is, no one knows yet.

Lots of agencies, pressured by budget cuts, sell common SEO tactics as cutting-edge AEO tactics, diluting the nuance between LLMs and search engines. It was that way when SEO started, and it has been a common response when any other digital platform has evolved. I’m not surprised, but also not delighted.

5/ Increased influence: Stakeholders are listening - and your expertise matters more than ever.

For the first time in history, SEOs can contribute directly to output beyond recommendations. AI enables us to create and update content (at scale). A technical SEO can spin up an AirOps workflow that creates quality content refresh pipelines and net-new content. That’s new! This ability raises the value of SEOs but doesn’t replace the need for strong editors and strategists who vet and course-correct AI automation pipelines.

Final thoughts: Growth is won by teams built around outcomes, not channels

What it will take to be successful in organic growth going forward - from my perspective - is a more radical approach to Marketing / Growth teams. We know brand, PR, technical SEO, content automation, advertising, etc. are all important. And yet, all these teams are separated.

The bet I want to see more companies take is to mix all these roles into unified teams (not dotted lines). I want to see the resurgence of Growth teams, just across all types of companies. Not just the Big Four.

We’re still stuck in channels, while we should be thinking in outcomes.

2025 tested my capacity - and rewrote my priorities

I had a couple of lofty goals for this year:

1. ✅Make a certain amount of money

2. ✅Cross the 20K subscriber mark for Growth Memo (more on that in the next section)

3. ❌Publish on Harvard Business Review/HBR

4. ❌Show up for my family

5. ❌Commit to a number of date nights with my wife and a couple’s retreat

6. ✅Work out 4-6x per week

7. ❌Protect my morning routine

I hit goals 1, 2, and 6, but missed 3, 4, 5 and 7. Oof!

The highlight (and lowlight) reel is as follows…

2025 was an easy year for me and my family - until about May. We moved from Michigan to Germany to be closer to my parents and brother. Although we had planned this for a while, and any big move is a challenge, it got really rough when we had to move a second time in Germany because of issues with the first house we had picked.

Then came conference season - and it created the perfect storm. The plan was to have been settled in Germany by then. But that didn’t happen, and it made the time away from family and responsibilities much worse. My workouts dropped, my morning routine vanished, and my wife and I didn’t do as many dates as we wanted to. The only silver lining is the lesson learned in that.

A huge win for me, despite the stress of an international move, was reaching my (high) income goal. Had you told me 3 years ago that I would ever get to that level, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are, and I feel proud. For next year, however, I’m setting my income goal a bit lower to lower the pressure on my schedule.

My motto for 2026: Create space.

Conferences

I spoke at 8 in-person conferences this year:

• Similarweb Summit (London)

• Digital Olympus (Amsterdam)

• G2 AI in Action (London)

• Semrush Spotlight (Amsterdam)

• Ahrefs Evolve (San Diego)

• Seoktoberfest (Austria)

• SEO IRL (Toronto)

• Seokomm (Austria)

I had the best time. I even came in #4 at this year’s G50. But as I mentioned before, it was also very draining. Next year, that number will be dramatically less. Probably closer to 3.

I also did a few online events and an in-person mastermind in San Diego, which was incredible. I’m not yet sure if I’ll repeat, but if I do, you’ll hear about it here first.

Advising

This year, I tried out lots of smaller advising engagements instead of a few larger ones.

My initial thought was that office-hour-like engagements would allow me to work with more companies to get a broader overview, while reducing the price point for clients. While that worked well, it also created more overhead than I thought. As a result, I’m going back to fewer and closer engagements in 2026.

Besides strategic consulting on SEO / AEO, I’m also trying out a new offering where I help clients analyze internal data and turn it into sales narratives, content, and copy. It’s a research function that embeds within clients’ teams to transform internal data into original, citable stories that are designed to establish category authority, crush sales objections with evidence, and drive higher win rates and shorter sales cycles. Should be fun.

All in all, that’s it for this year… take that Growth Memo survey when you get a moment, and see you all in 2026! 👋

Wishing you happy holidays,

—Kevin