Staying Ahead of SEO: AI, ChatGPT & eCommerce Updates 2025

News and Updates

As we know, the world of SEO is constantly changing. But, in the past few months, it has felt like change was happening faster than ever. We’ve seen some pretty drastic industry updates from content to Shopify, integrating with OpenAI.

The Core SEO Updates in 2025 Everyone is Talking About

1. How to Rank on ChatGPT in 2026

In August 2025, a webinar held by Rocket Agency covered how we can create content to rank in ChatGPT. Key topics covered included: identifying key content pillars, publishing content that is unique and different, and leveraging Wikipedia/Reddit to rank. A few months ago, Wikipedia and Reddit were being favoured as authoritative sites that ChatGPT would regularly cite. However, recent developments suggest that this is soon to shift. Notably, currently, Wikipedia is attributed to roughly 8% of citations, meaning that 8% of the time you ask a query, it will find its info from Wikipedia.

2. Google Disabling the ‘&num=100’ Parameter

On September 12th, it was discovered by the SEO community that Google has disabled the ability to use the parameter &num=100, which enabled the 100 results as the default display rather than 10. Brodie Clark’s analysis of the impact of &num=100 sheds light on how this disrupts various rank tracking platforms. So what does this mean to you? Well, instead of seeing the top 100 results, as a default, we’ll see the top 20 instead. In the coming weeks, we can monitor GSC to see how this update has altered reporting data.

3. OpenAI Partners with Etsy and Shopify on ChatGPT Checkout

Skip forward a month later, to the end of September, Reuters released an article on how OpenAI is partnering with Etsy, Shopify on ChatGPT payment checkout. Shopify merchants and Etsy sellers will be able to sell directly through ChatGPT. Now this means less user website traffic but a more seamless commerce flow for customers doing research prior to ChatGPT. Opening up a new source of revenue for OpenAI and using heavy traffic to their advantage. This was massive news for eCommerce businesses. Although in its early days, it’s another step closer to conversational commerce.

4. LLM Tracking Tools Report ChatGPT Stops Citing Reddit and Wikipedia

OtterlyAI has reported that Reddit and Wikipedia are declining in ChatGPT searches. These sites in particular saw declines in their citation share, and the long tail of website citations increased instead. With this update being newer, there are more speculations and theories currently.

What Does This Mean for SEO Content Writing?

Well, this means that content has never been more important Ensuring website pages are easily crawlable by search engines, internal linking is implemented, and authority for your site is enhanced. Content creation is the hardest to scale and the most time-consuming task, yet it drives the best results. In the past 12 months, it was found that original content creation has the largest positive impact on SEO, sitting at 66.3%. Content updates and refreshes had a 42.6%, technical enhancements 42.3%, keywords optimisations 24.6% and internal linking strategies 22.9%.

Key Content Takeaways to Factor in Your 2026 SEO Strategy:

Resource allocation – strategic planning around producing valuable content, planning, writing and optimisations.
Technical audits – from site speed to schema markups.
Content cycles – refreshing content and keywords.

How Our SEO Agency Can Help Your Business Stay Up To Date

Staying on top of industry changes is one thing to wrap your head around. Staying ahead of the game is another. The team of SEO experts at Alpha Digital are always staying on top of these lightning-speed changes in the industry. By partnering with Alpha Digital, you can expect us to make reassessments and slight pivots in strategies to help our clients become more discoverable, scale in rankings and be more competitive in this new AI-driven shopping pond. Covering many aspects of SEO, such as authentic copywriting, technical audits and revised content optimisation plans. Staying ahead means staying informed with the latest insights, tools and platforms.

What’s next for SEO?

If one of these recent updates has made you reflect on your SEO strategies, contact us to find out more about how these changes might affect you.