2025 Year in Review with Similarweb

2025 brought no shortage of change. Markets shifted quickly, competition intensified, and uncertainty became the backdrop. The challenge in moments like these is knowing what matters, where to focus, and how quickly to act.

That’s why in 2025, we focused on removing friction from the most important jobs you need to accomplish.

From controlling brand visibility in AI-driven discovery to analyzing markets at scale, benchmarking more intelligently, spotting trends earlier, and turning insights into always-on intelligence, every update we shipped last year was designed to help teams move faster, from question to answer and from insight to action.

In this post, we’ll look at those updates through the lens of the real work your teams do and how Similarweb helps to make that work simpler, smarter, and more scalable.

1. Control your visibility in AI discovery

2025 was a defining year for Gen AI. Multiple steps in user journeys collapsed into a single conversation, and brands realized that showing up in AI-driven discovery is no longer optional. Missing this moment means handing an entire channel to competitors.

In response, we launched Gen-AI Intelligence and improved our Gen AI Brand Visibility Tracker to give teams more control, including topic-level tracking and sentiment, plus broader LLM coverage and localized AI responses. You now have a clear view of how your brand appears across AI-driven discovery and where to focus next.

• Measure your brand’s visibility in AI answers: AI Brand Visibility Score shows how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers for the topics that matter to you, globally or by topic, so teams can see where they’re winning visibility and where to focus next.
• Understand where AI gets its answers: Our AI Citation analysis tool shows which domains and pages AI platforms rely on when generating answers for your topics, enabling you to identify where they need to be cited, whether through partnerships, content, or coverage.
• Understand what users are asking AI and how you show up: Our AI Prompt analysis tool reveals the exact questions users ask AI platforms for each topic, how visible your brand is for those prompts, and where opportunities exist to align content with user intent.
• Understand how AI talks about your brand: Our AI Sentiment analysis tool breaks down AI mentions by positive, neutral, or negative tone, helping to ensure your brand appears the way you intend in AI-generated answers.
• Understand where your brand is visible across AI platforms: Track how your brand shows up beyond ChatGPT, across the fastest-growing AI platforms. Broader LLM coverage gives a clearer, more accurate view of AI visibility so they know where their brand leads and where to focus next.
• Understand how your brand appears in local AI discovery: See prompts and AI responses in different languages, exactly as users ask and experience them by region and language, so teams get a realistic view of how their brand shows up in local AI-driven discovery.

2. Turning competitive insights into a system 

Staying on top of competitors and markets has traditionally required constant effort. In response, we focused on eliminating the manual work that slows teams down. What once meant repeated searches, tool-hopping, and drained resources is now a more seamless experience.

By removing friction at key points in the workflow, we made it easier to stay informed without constant effort. Insights surface faster, important updates arrive automatically, and less time is spent navigating the platform, so teams can focus on acting, not searching.

• Never miss a competitor move: Stay ahead with Competitor News & Updates, a daily digest of the most important competitive developments. Get real-time alerts delivered to your inbox, ranked by impact, so teams across your organization can act on what matters most.
• Find the insights you need with less effort: A simplified Web Intelligence navigation, slimmer sidebar, and redesigned Search, Referrals, and Website Content pages reduce friction so you can get to insights faster and spend less time navigating.

3. Bring market intelligence into your AI workflows with MCP

As AI becomes part of everyday work, the limiting factor isn’t access to tools. It’s trust in the answers they produce. Too often, teams are forced to choose between speed and reliability, relying on AI that moves fast but isn’t grounded in real market data.

In 2025, we took a major step toward closing that gap with the launch of our MCP server. MCP makes it possible to connect Similarweb data directly to AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and custom AI agents, allowing you to ask competitive and market questions in natural language and get answers powered by live, trusted intelligence.

Instead of exporting data, stitching together analyses, or second-guessing AI outputs, you can now access Similarweb insights where they already work. What once took hours of manual effort can now happen in minutes, inside an AI conversation, turning AI from a speculative assistant into a reliable partner for analysis, reporting, and data-driven decision-making.

Connecting trusted market data to AI tools is a critical step. But even with better answers, many teams still spend time repeating the same analyses, preparing the same briefs, and manually translating insights into next steps.

That’s where automation needs to move beyond answering questions and start doing the work.

4. AI agents that turn analysis into a continuous system

In 2025, we introduced Similarweb AI Agents to help teams move from insight to execution more quickly and consistently. These agents aren’t general-purpose assistants. They’re specialized AI teammates, each designed to handle a specific, high-impact job that teams perform every day.

Built on Similarweb’s proprietary digital data and embedded directly into existing workflows, AI Agents turn analysis into an ongoing system rather than a one-off task. They monitor signals, interpret change, and deliver clear, actionable outputs without requiring manual setup, prompting, or repeated effort.

The first generation of Similarweb AI Agents focuses on some of the most critical jobs across marketing, strategy, and sales:

• AI Trend Analyzer helps teams understand not just what’s trending, but why, connecting demand shifts to real-world events, seasonality, and emerging signals so teams know how to respond.
• AI SEO Strategy Agent translates competitive search data into clear, topic-level SEO strategies and execution-ready content plans, eliminating hours of manual analysis.

Together, these agents represent a shift in how digital intelligence is applied. Instead of pulling data, interpreting it, and deciding what to do next, teams can delegate recurring analysis and preparation, freeing time and attention for judgment, strategy, and action.

Paired with MCP, AI Agents complete the loop, giving you trusted data flows into AI, and AI turns that data into work that actually gets done. It’s a more scalable, reliable way to operate in fast-moving markets and a foundation for how digital intelligence will evolve next.

5. Make benchmarking more precise, with Business Lines and Folders

Benchmarking only works when comparisons are relevant. In 2025, we focused on increasing precision without adding complexity.

By enabling benchmarking at the business-line level and improving the clarity and accuracy of channel data, we made it easier to compare performance against the right competitors and the right metrics. The result is simpler benchmarking, clearer context, and faster, more confident decisions.

• Analyze site performance at the right level of detail: Business Lines and Folders are now part of the Website Content report, making it easier to analyze and benchmark performance by category and content structure, all in one place.
• Understand channel performance with greater clarity: Upgraded Marketing Channels data, including a new Gen AI channel and improved accuracy, provides a clearer, more reliable view of performance across channels, helping you get to insights faster. Now available in benchmarking reports as well.

6. From isolated industry views to a market-wide perspective

Our Market analysis tool now spans multiple industry views, making it possible to compare industries and understand how markets relate to each other. At the same time, our predefined industries now reflect how markets evolve, including the emergence of entirely new categories like AI.

• Market analysis comparison mode: Compare two industries side by side to uncover differences in market share, growth, and leading players.
• A new AI Chatbot industry: Analyze leading players like ChatGPT, Gemini, OpenAI, and more to see who’s shaping the market.
• Business Lines in market research: Break industries into meaningful categories to benchmark performance more precisely and compare competitors on what truly drives growth.

7. Spot demand shifts before they show up in your KPIs

We made our demand analysis tool more forward-looking by adding AI-driven context to demand changes, expanding discovery beyond predefined keywords, and introducing more current, continuously updating views. 

This makes it easier to understand what’s driving demand as it unfolds, giving teams earlier visibility, clearer explanations, and more time to act before shifts appear in downstream KPIs.

• Understand what’s driving demand: Our AI agent finds and summarizes the news and signals across the web that explain sudden changes in demand, giving you clarity without manual research.
• Discover hidden and emerging demand: Use AI-generated topics to uncover demand you wouldn’t find through predefined keywords. By grouping related queries by meaning, not exact phrasing, you can spot new areas of interest earlier and understand demand more holistically.
• Track trends as they unfold: Daily 28 day data and month-to-date reporting make it easier to see how trends are developing in real time. You can monitor momentum, spot changes early, and understand how the current month is progressing without waiting for it to close.

8. Protect and grow your paid media performance

In paid media, the challenge is knowing where value is being created and where it’s leaking away. You need clarity on who’s advertising where, how competitors are bidding, and when brand spend is being wasted without manually monitoring campaigns around the clock.

We expanded our Ad Intelligence capabilities to help teams protect performance and uncover opportunity, turning competitive ad activity into actionable insight.

• Identify new advertiser opportunities: See all advertisers running campaigns on a given publisher site to understand who your competitors are monetizing. This makes it easier for publishers to spot gaps, identify missed opportunities, and proactively approach advertisers who are already active in their category.
• Protect brand spend and prevent wasted clicks: Monitor competitor bidding on branded keywords to understand lost clicks, bidding share, and changes in activity. Automated alerts help teams respond quickly, protecting brand traffic and significantly reducing unnecessary spend.

9. Turn search data into a clear content strategy

Understanding competitor SEO strategies shouldn’t require manually sorting thousands of keywords or guessing which content themes actually drive visibility. As keyword lists grow, it becomes harder to see the bigger picture and even harder to turn that data into a clear content plan.

With Keyword Clusters in our Keyword Research suite, your SEO team can instantly see the content themes driving traffic for any site. Related queries are automatically grouped into meaningful topics, making it easy to understand what competitors are ranking for, which themes they’re investing in, and where gaps exist.

Just as importantly, these topic groupings provide a ready-made foundation for your own strategy. Instead of starting from a blank slate, SEOs can use competitor topics to define their own content themes, prioritize opportunities, and build content plans faster without the manual work of keyword categorization.

Building for how teams actually work

Whether it’s AI visibility, smarter benchmarking, market analysis at scale, or early trend detection, the common thread in 2025 was the same. Helping you move from analysis to action faster and with less friction.

Across every update, the goal was to reduce manual work, surface what matters sooner, and make digital intelligence something teams can rely on continuously, not something they have to chase. By focusing on the real jobs teams are trying to get done, we built tools that fit naturally into how decisions are made today and how they’ll be made tomorrow.

As markets evolve and discovery continues to change, that focus remains the same. Helping teams see clearly, move confidently, and stay ahead.