Five predictions for SaaS and the startup market in 2025

Executive overview

AI is reshaping search, advertising, and product language in ways that create both threats and opportunities for founders. Google's dominance faces its first real structural challenge. New ad ecosystems and shifting user behaviour will reward founders who move early.

The biggest near-term opportunity: building better ad tools for AI chat interfaces before the incumbents do.

Organic search traffic will fall

• AI answers at the top of search results mean fewer clicks on blue links.
• Prediction: Google organic traffic drops at least 15% in 2025.
• SEO is not dead, but its yield per article is shrinking.
• Zero-click results and ad placement have already been eroding organic traffic for years; AI accelerates this.

Google's ad revenue faces structural disruption

• Over 90% of Google's revenue comes from AdWords tied to search results.
• AI chat interfaces (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) have no meaningful ad infrastructure yet.
• These platforms are still in land-grab mode; monetisation lags behind usage.
• Google has not yet solved how to monetise its own AI answers, creating a transition gap.

The term "AI" will peak and fade

• Overuse and abuse will trigger a backlash similar to "crypto," "blockchain," and "Web3."
• Marketers and product teams will shift to outcome language: "smart," "auto-generated," one-click.
• The mechanism (artificial intelligence) matters less to users than the result.

Platform risk intensifies for bootstrapped founders

• Dependence on a single platform — app stores, search, social — becomes more dangerous as platforms change rules or decline.
• Bootstrapped founders have less buffer to absorb sudden traffic or distribution losses.

Ads in AI chat interfaces create a tooling opportunity

• AI chat platforms will begin monetising through ads in 2025.
• When new ad ecosystems emerge, the native ad tools built by big platforms are poor.
• Examples: Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads interfaces — both weak, both spawned better third-party tools.
• Early opportunity: build an API-connected interface offering scheduling, targeting controls, and reporting that the platforms themselves won't prioritise.
• Analogous bet: Linkllow (linkllow.io) did this for LinkedIn Ads.