2025 was a year of cumulative validation and accelerated growth. It included speaking at Polish and international conferences, taking part in closed masterminds, co-authoring books, and appearing in podcasts and vlogs.
What mattered most, though, was gaining access to several closed SEO communities and meeting in person people who I already followed and learned from. Those conversations, often informal and unrecorded, significantly accelerated my development. I don’t treat that exposure as promotion. For me, it was confirmation, and pressure, that the way I think about SEO is trusted, useful, and worth structuring, re-thinking, and validating against reality.
Being a speaker at international conferences like SEO Estonia and especially Chiang Mai SEO Conference, also taking part in Holistic SEO Mastermind in Kusadasi, was a clear moment of professional validation for me. These aren’t communities where you can hide behind buzzwords. You’re presenting to people who actively test, break, and rebuild SEO theories, so clarity and depth are non-negotiable.
What made it truly valuable wasn’t just the talks themselves, but what happened around them. Long conversations with highly skilled SEOs, often late and informal, quickly revealed how many of us, regardless of experience, struggle with imposter syndrome. That shared openness led to an intense exchange of ideas and perspectives, and accelerated my growth more than any single project or success metric could.
My biggest struggles weren’t SEO-related. They were about management, delegation, spendings, people decisions, and assertiveness. I was sometimes too patient, too cautious, or too slow to make decisions I already knew were necessary. It reinforced that building a mature business requires a different skill set than solving complex SEO problems, and that decisiveness is something you have to practice deliberately.
I’m mostly inspired by people with a strong technical and analytical foundation. Understanding how the engine actually works is essential if you want to build anything durable on top of it.
I learn a lot from people like Olaf Kopp, Max Geraci, Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, Shaun Anderson, Michael King, Dan Petrovic, Mark Williams-Cook, and Marie Haynes. I’m also inspired by people who consistently execute and build real businesses in a competitive environment, like James Dooley or Alex Drew from Odys, and several colleagues from Poland who continue to grow and create despite market pressure like Mateusz Calik from Delante, Damian Kozłowski and Michał Chlewiński from Linkhouse, Michał Suski and his crew from Surfer and Damian Sałkowski and Robert Niechciał – especially regarding their focus on SensAI and influence they have on professionals in Poland.
Every time SEO was officially declared dead again, usually followed shortly by someone asking how to recover traffic after the latest update.
The biggest change isn’t a specific update, but a shift in mental models. We’re moving away from a near-deterministic, ranking-centric way of thinking toward a more probabilistic, information-retrieval-based approach.
Less focus on traffic volume, more on targeting, funnel, brand voice, category definition, and semantic precision. SEO is becoming less about covering everything and more about being clearly understood and preferred within a meaningful niche. Introduction of AI Overviews and AI mode were clearly catalysts of that change, but it’s not only about Google’s UI, obviously.
E-commerce performance will be driven less by scaling tactics and more by reducing uncertainty, for both humans and machines. Clear positioning, stronger product narratives, better semantics, and content that actually helps people decide will matter more than volume.
At the same time, success will depend on technical readiness for agentic commerce. Feeds, APIs, structured data, and deep technical alignment will be essential as new shopping experiences emerge in Google and ChatGPT. Brands that aren’t prepared to be consumed and acted upon by agents will simply be invisible.
From an SEO perspective, this means moving beyond pure link scaling toward brand advocacy and trust signals. I also expect paid placements to appear inside LLM-driven shopping layers. PPC in AI results will be… interesting 🙂
Systems thinking and synthesis. Tools and data are widely available, but the ability to connect technology, semantics, and business goals into coherent strategies will remain rare.
SEO is becoming a craft for strategist-artist-engineers, not checklist operators.
Build frameworks and agents with deeply thought-through foundations, then evolve them layer by layer. Listen to smart people, test relentlessly, implement, and connect the dots to find less obvious ways of understanding and delivering results. Use Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, custom GPTs, Gems, N8N workflows, whatever, but create MVPs, prototype and validate ideas.
The ROI of this kind of work is hard to calculate upfront, which is exactly why many avoid it. The safe path in SEO is increasingly a dead end.
Take care of your mental health. Burnout, anxiety, and depression quietly affect a lot of people in this industry. Talk to others about it, don’t normalize constant overload, and don’t treat exhaustion as a badge of honor. Good decisions and long-term clarity depend on mental stability as much as technical skill.
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