I have been thinking non-stop about the sessions and insights from the HiveMCR 2025 and honestly it was such an eventful day! HiveMCR brings together all the greatest minds from the search industry and beyond. This was my second time attending HiveMCR, where I spent the whole day evolving in this search and AI world. WOW!
The event was full of back to back SEO wisdom talks and a stellar line up of sessions. If I had to pick my three top talks, they would be Alyeda Solis, Mike King and Steve Paine. Let’s unfold!I
Aleyda Solis
Personally I was very excited about the session and I had a fangirl moment with her for obvious reasons! Who doesn’t like her?
She spoke about AI Search: Where Are We & What Can We Do About It?
One of the strongest statements she delivered was that Google is not anywhere even though LLMs are dominating the search world. Traffic drops are visible due to AIO search pages. Apple claims Google search has fallen due to heavy shift on generative AI tools. However, the actual number is only 1-2% of referral traffic.
So, SEO is constantly changing and it’s not only about ranking on Google rather it’s expanding on search engines and AI platforms.
The future speculation would be traditional search platforms along with AI agent first experience and focus on brand mentions, citations, and content visibility.
Michael King
Mike’s session was definitely a thought provoking one. His stage presence was incredibly charismatic and I think he gave just the right amount of search game mastery.
The end of SEO As We Know It – sounds quite daunting, isn’t it?
Well, not exactly. But it’s not exactly what it used to be! The change and overpowering AI is evident which causes less website traffic even when the site is ranking. Zero click search is on rise and young users are relying on AI-generated summaries.
Mike says it’s not just about the rankings anymore, it’s more about brand visibility, making it easy to find your brand on Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
What do we do? Adapt on a new approach- Relevance Engineering! There he said it!
Work on your brand presence on AI summaries and clear topic based content to make it easy for AI to feature.
Steve Paine
As a Sistrix user, I was really looking forward to Steve Paine’s session.
He presented AI-Chatbot Analysis – a new study on three AI platforms: ChatGPT,Google Gemini, and DeepSeek to identify how often AI chatbots mention websites and brands.
Each of the platforms asked millions of questions in different languages and 150 million responses were received and 11 insights.
- Chatbots hardly shows links
- When there are links its usually 10 links
- Each of the Chatbot has different preferences of sources
- Gemini is diverse with multiple variety of sources
- Chatbots don’t overlap their sources
- Google AIO’s and Gemini share sources
- Despite Google and Reddit collaboration, Gemini hardly mentions Reddit
- Chatbots don’t usually link to the brands when they mention it
- Most of the answers don’t mention any brands
- If there is a brand mention, it’s likely with other brands
- Some Chatbots mention multiple brands
You can also check your AI Chatbot visibility in Sistrix new tool!
There were a range of sessions and panel discussions which focused on real world topics to shape the digital landscape! After the event when I look back and try to summarise the day, HiveMCR highlighted that- it is crucial to balance in this evolving AI dynamic. SEO is not dead or going anywhere but it’s important to accept the change and think beyond traditional SEO.
Throughout the day the atmosphere was spectacular, lots of foods, drinks, networking, and good vibes only. If you are someone like me, inquisitive about how SEO really works, I highly encourage you to attend the next HiveMCR, because it will be bigger and better.
That’s all from the girl at the entrance handing out the totes and Ids. Until next time!
