In digital marketing for franchising, expect 2025's SEO trends to focus on AI-powered snapshots and the resurgence of the long tail.
Google Search Generative Experience (SGE), also known as AI Overviews, represents a fundamental change in how search works. AI Overviews is an experimental Google Search feature from Google Labs that uses generative AI to answer a user’s search. These answers appear at the top of the search results and are trained on a variety of content from across the internet.
As an example, if a user types in a question like “What’s a better vacation destination for a family with kids under 3 and a dog: Bryce Canyon or Arches?” With generative AI, Google will provide an AI-powered snapshot of key information to consider, with links to dig deeper.
This often referred to as a “zero-click” search because users can view the information they want directly on the search results page without clicking through to a website. This approach clearly has a major impact on traffic to company websites, in particular sites that focus on top-of-funnel, question-based content such as “what is” and “how to” searches.
This article is part of a series that examines major digital marketing trends that franchise systems should be aware of in 2025. Check out our other articles in the series:
- How Generative AI is Changing Digital Advertising for Franchises in 2025
- What Franchise Companies Need to Know About Voice Search in 2025
- Video is a Must-Have Marketing Tool for Franchise Companies in 2025
- Influencer Marketing for Franchise Companies is Going “Nano”
- Franchise Marketing Data Privacy Update for 2025
- How Franchise Companies Can Capitalize on Social Search in 2025
- Social Shopping Trends for Franchise Companies in 2025
Google officially launched AI Overviews in the US on May 14, 2024. Within three months they rolled the functionality out to six more countries: the UK, Japan, India, Mexico, Indonesia, and Brazil. On October 28, 2024 Google announced that the company was starting its rollout of AI Overviews for Canada.
To adapt to this, brands must shift their focus from simply driving clicks to ensuring that their brand and message are visible in these zero-click environments. Creating concise, value-rich content that can be featured in snippets or rich results will be essential. Additionally, brands will need to explore new metrics for measuring success, focusing on brand visibility and engagement rather than traditional traffic-based metrics.
Some specific areas for franchise companies to focus on in 2025:
Continue to follow SEO best practices: Google has stated that SGE is “rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems,” and all indications are that sites with strong SEO fundamentals continue to perform well. Quality original content and good website structure are still important factors in showing up for searches.
Provide Google with key business information: AI Overviews include citations, and Google Knowledge Graph is an important citation source. The Knowledge Graph is a Google-owned database that provides SGE with billions of data points to use for AI-generated results. To help Google learn about your business, we recommend franchise companies implement the following for your corporate site and location pages/sites:
- Include a homepage or “about us” page on your site that clearly outlines information about your business
- Implement organization schema markup on your website
- Create social media profiles on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
- Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) for every location
- Link to your homepage or “about us” page from your social profiles and GBP
Grow brand mentions and backlinks: It is very valuable to increase the amount of positive content about your brand online. This can be in the form of user reviews, quality backlinks to your site, or even articles about your company. The interesting part about generative AI is that you don’t necessarily require a backlink to your site – just being mentioned is a positive signal.
Implement structured data: Structured data (also called “Schema markup”) is important to enable search engines to not only crawl your site, but to truly understand it. Structured data is implemented at the template level of your website to describe your content to search engines in a specific way. Forward-looking franchise organizations should be actively exploring opportunities to add structured data to their site to ensure the search engine understands who your company is, what you do, and who you do it for. Structured data is particularly important for franchise systems who have ecommerce on their websites.
Improve content readability and target the long tail: Optimize your content for humans first and search engines second by using natural language to address user needs, questions, and search intent. Also, structure your content to answer “long tail” questions. The in-depth nature of long tail queries allows AI to generate personalized, detailed answers from various sources. When the AI links to you as a source, that can boost your visibility and engagement on search engine result pages. This is why informational queries, particularly long-tail ones, are anticipated to gain prominence in SGE. To tap into this potential, it’s important to comprehensively answer questions users have. That means you should try to create and optimize content specifically for question-based queries. As an added benefit, long-tail queries typically have higher conversion rates than their short-tail counterparts.
Focus on E-E-A-T signals: Related to several of the above activities, we recommend continuing to pay close attention to E-E-A-T signals – experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. To improve your E-E-A-T, you should actively demonstrate your company’s expertise and experience through strategies such as:
- Including subject matter experts in your content creation
- Incorporating trust signals into your website such as certifications, awards, or years of experience
- Supporting information on your website with studies, statistics, or quotes from trusted sources
- Using an “active” tone in your content. As an example, “we sell office supplies,” as opposed to “office supplies are sold at our stores.”
Interested in learning more about the topics presented in this article and other franchise digital marketing trends for 2025? Be sure to download our guidebook here.
Check out the other articles in our series below:
- How Generative AI is Changing Digital Advertising for Franchises in 2025
- What Franchise Companies Need to Know About Voice Search in 2025
- Video is a Must-Have Marketing Tool for Franchise Companies in 2025
- Influencer Marketing for Franchise Companies is Going “Nano”
- Franchise Marketing Data Privacy Update for 2025
- How Franchise Companies Can Capitalize on Social Search in 2025
- Social Shopping Trends for Franchise Companies in 2025
