2025: The Great Brand + Marketing Collab

Over the past few weeks, we've been reading about the many "2025 trends" in eCommerce and marketing. One consistent theme across these posts is the growing importance of brand and marketing collaboration.

Marketing can provide the most value to brand teams through tracking capabilities, comprehensive reporting, and data-driven insights.

This month, we’ve got something special for you.

We’re launching our relevancy metric to the industry. You can use this relevancy metric as a further data source to collaborate closely with your brand team around organic metrics. This metric enables a more data-driven approach to analysing your brand's PR coverage (or occasional lack thereof) each month.

The relevancy metric quantifies the coverage your brand generates each month.

Use this metric to help your brand team enhance their reporting and establish benchmarks, shifting focus from broad reach and impressions toward relevant, marketing-driven coverage.

From what we can tell, chat engines like GPT and Gemini highly rate relevant industry coverage when recommending brands, so you will also be taking the first steps to future-proof your brand across these chat engines.

Want to help make your brand’s activity more data-led? Join us on 23rd January at 2 pm (GMT) for a short webinar where our PR team will be showcasing how they’ve been using this metric for the past 12 months and how it will benefit you this year: https://thisisnovos.com/services/navigating-link-relevancy-webinar/

Perplexity Announces CPM Ads

Perplexity has announced it's launching a CPM model for marketers to bid on its AI-generated instant answer results.

Why do we care?

It's an interesting move—while we initially expected Chat Engines to adopt a search engine-style commercial model, these LLMs haven't delivered strong enough commercial results.

Even money-machine Google has never attempted to monetise these top-of-funnel results, but a CPM model could be promising. It's the lowest-friction way to start monetising, so we'll keep an eye on its adoption and see how many marketers find value in this bidding approach.

We believe these top-of-funnel information searches should remain with unbiased, organic results rather than paid-for slots, but we’ll see what the future holds.

Below is an interview with Perplexity’s head of business development, who outlines this CPM model.

Google Takes on Reddit

Google gave Reddit a big hit in December. Reddit has been on a roll in recent years, but Google has had enough of its domination within SERPs. Google made a similar approach to Pinterest around 5-6 years ago when it started dominating SERPs; Google wanted traffic to go to Google Images over Pinterest pages.

LLMs Are So Basic…

Vercel conducted a really interesting analysis showing the difference between Googlebot crawlers and the recent LLM crawlers.

Why do we care?

This has reminded SEOs (hopefully others) that these LLMs are just bots, like Google. The big difference is their crawl capabilities.

We’re essentially dealing with Googlebot from over six years ago. LLMs or Chat Engines struggle with Javascript. If your website isn’t Server-Side Rendered, these Chat Engines aren’t reading it. SEOs worldwide rejoiced, as it’s a further reminder that SEOs will be needed by these Chat Engines.

Full analysis is available here.

The Cost of AI vs Search

Here's another recent watch that outlines the incredible cost of AI vs. Search and what big tech is doing about it.

TLDR: Big tech companies are investing in nuclear energy to power their AI operations. For context, a single ChatGPT query consumes 10 times more energy than a Google search. Only nuclear power can meet these massive energy demands, and only the tech giants have the cash needed to revive nuclear investments.

Why should this matter to us?

So many reasons outside of Marketing but for Marketing in particular: We've noted how these astronomical investments in AI and the Metaverse—particularly by Meta and Google—will need to be recovered. This suggests we'll likely see rising CPCs (cost-per-clicks) in the coming years. Read more here.

More Reading From the Team

• 5 metrics to prove the Value of SEO

• 6 digital pr trends to watch in 2025

• 10 SEO ecom predictions for 2025

• Core web vitals report automation in Python

• The impact of digital pr on seo

• How to improve your site navigation during busy periods