Can we truly get an accurate picture of the current SEO landscape? Many have tried to agree on what tactics are effective, forecast what’s ahead, and pinpoint the elements that contribute to “good” (or “bad”) SEO. While much of this work is helpful, none of it provides the same solid, data-driven foundation as the Web Almanac, a project I was fortunate to contribute to. With the release of the 2025 SEO chapter, we’re now able to examine the numbers, identify the key trends emerging in 2025, and consider what they might signal for SEO in 2026.
SEO standards keep climbing
The year 2025 has continued the pattern of rising SEO standards — a clear win for the web overall:
- HTTPS is now almost universal, with adoption surpassing 91%.
- Title tags are used on nearly 99% of pages, and viewport meta tags have reached more than 93% adoption.
- Canonical tag usage increased from 65% in 2024 to over 67% in 2025.
- HTML validity is gradually getting better. For instance, invalid <head> elements dropped to 10.1% on desktop and 10.3% on mobile, down from 10.6% and 10.9% the year before.
- Robots.txt error rates have declined.
- 404 responses fell to 13%, down from 14% the previous year, and 5xx errors dropped to around 0.1%.
- Meta robots usage edged up to 46.2% in 2025 from 45.5% in 2024.
Individually, some of these shifts may seem modest, but together they reflect a clear, ongoing trend of steady improvement. The 2025 Web…