If there’s one word to describe digital marketing in 2025, it’s “futuristic.” If you thought the industry changed drastically in 2024, just wait until you see what this year has in store. From AI agents designing websites and debugging code to AR building brand new construction right before our eyes, the digital landscape is looking pretty unreal.
Don’t worry, as always, Assemble is on top of it for you. But there’s a lot to touch on, so let’s just dive in!
1. AI Agents Expanding their Skill Sets — Big Time
At this point, we’re all using AI in some way or another. But that’s about to get a whole new meaning for web development with AI agents. Forget about chatbots that simply answer questions; we’re talking about following complex instructions and performing tasks like screening potential sales leads.
This past year, we got a taste with AI agents handling busy work like data entry. But now, they’re planning on tackling software engineering, customer service, and digital marketing.
Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, believes AI agents will become the next big thing for artificial intelligence.
The integration of AI into development workflows is making it easier for teams to focus on creativity and innovation while delegating repetitive tasks to intelligent agents. So much so that Salesforce is having a hiring freeze in software engineering this year because of the 30% increase in productivity they’ve seen with “Agentforce.”
Here are just a few examples of how AI is revolutionizing digital marketing and web dev:
- AI-Powered Coding Assistants: Replit’s Ghostwriter AI agent can build, debug, and deploy applications with minimal human input, streamlining the development process.
- QA and Automated Testing: AI agents are being developed to perform end-to-end testing, generate test cases, and analyze test results, reducing manual effort.
- DevOps: AI-driven tools are automating deployment pipelines, monitoring infrastructure, and even predicting issues before they occur.
And that’s just the start. Stay tuned for lots more to come.
2. SSG and SSR Taking the Lead (Sorry, SPA)
If you know anything about Single-Page Applications (SPAs), you know they revolutionized web development in the 2010s. They helped deliver seamless, interactive front-end experiences through client-side rendering when the world needed a better way to keep up with evolving websites. BUT their dominance has waned in favor of approaches like Static Site Generation (SSG) and Server-Side Rendering (SSR), which also addresses more modern concerns regarding scalability, performance, and SEO.
SSG has become a favorite for blogs, marketing sites, and content-driven platforms, using frameworks like Gatsby and Astro to simplify generating pre-rendered HTML, which ensure faster load times and better SEO.
Then there’s SSR, championed by frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt, gaining serious traction for dynamic, data-driven applications. The advent of Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) by Next.js combines the best of SSG and SSR, allowing for real-time content updates without sacrificing performance.
So while they all have their time and place, both SSGs and SSRs are truly the next generation of SPA. SPAs will likely continue to monopolize highly interactive applications like dashboards and PWAs, but they’ll be increasingly focused on specific niches rather than broad adoption. So expect to see a lot more of its predecessors taking over newer, content-heavy web projects this year.
3. Progressive Web Apps Facing Major Challenges
When it comes to frameworks, many developers thought Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were the future. That’s why it made our Digital Outlook shortlist for 2024. But now, PWAs have an uncertain future, thanks to limited support from Apple.
Despite attempting new caching capabilities, enhanced performance, and deeper integration with operating systems this year, there will be a lot more areas where PWAs fall short for users due to iOS limitations. That includes a lack of push notifications, manual installation, browser dependency, limited offline capabilities, and more.
Maybe it’s the fear of losing control over its app library, maybe it’s something else, but we all know the uphill battle ahead of anyone without Apple in their corner. So for now, we’ll be keeping an eye on things to see if PWA can overcome the challenge. 2025 is gonna be a key year to determine the fate of PWA, so stay tuned.
4. Programming Language Competition Heating Up
Developers know that the programming language they choose can be the difference between a successful project and a total failure. And that selection process has become harder than ever with emerging challengers in the space once dominated by JavaScript. While it remains the undisputed leader in web development for now, competition is intensifying. Here’s who’s stepping up:
Python: Thanks to its simplicity and versatility making it both friendly to beginners and robust for experts, Python is increasingly being used in web development, especially for back-end tasks and data-heavy applications. It also has a rich standard library with numerous framework support for web development, data analysis, and machine learning.
Rust: The rising star in terms of performance, security, and efficiency, Rust is making inroads in web development with frameworks like Actix and tools like WebAssembly. Its increasing popularity largely comes from system-level programming and performance-critical applications (e.g., banking).
TypeScript: As a close companion to and superset of JavaScript, TypeScript is the preferred choice for type-safe, large-scale applications, borrowing several of its modern features. It’s also popular for server-side development with Node.js and frontend frameworks like Angular. More and more companies looking for source code that’s easy to modify and update as they scale are relying on TypeScript to deliver.
5. The Who’s Who of Web Dev Tech Has New Players
To say there has been significant innovation in tech for web dev this past year is pretty much an understatement. It’s all set the tone for a transformative 2025, so there’s a lot to look forward to. Here’s a sneak peek:
Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) redefines how content-heavy sites manage updates. This new development platform by Next.js allows you to create and refresh sections of a site on demand without redeploying. The result is better performance, reduced backend load, and faster builds.
Server Islands in Astro offers a groundbreaking technique of rendering content into web experiences. With Server Islands, the rendering strategy becomes more granular down to a per-component basis. So you’re able to render only the necessary parts of a page dynamically, drastically improving performance.
Render's blueprints acts as a single source of truth for managing complex infrastructure. It allows developers to recycle previous architectures, while saving the way that services, databases, and server instances are defined and configured to work together, so they are easily accessible for future use.
But these platforms are far from their peak. They’ll continue to evolve with enhanced serverless functions, edge computing, and integrations that simplify the development workflow. Exciting news for developers!
6. Website Frameworks Getting a Major Boost from AI
With AI now powering just about every aspect of the digital world, more and more marketers are realizing the emerging tech as a partner, not a competitor. As a result, website productivity and experiences are improving in all super exciting ways.
From collaborating on layouts to generating the perfect image and adapting existing ones, AI will continue to highly streamlined web development tasks and create unthinkably personalized user experiences. Tools like GitHub Copilot and AI-driven frameworks are leading the way. Their technology is helping websites dynamically adapt to user behavior, improving engagement and retention automatically. We love to see it!
7. Web3 Fueling the Rise of Cryptocurrency & Blockchain
While Web3 has been making an appearance in our digital outlooks since 2022, it’s come a long way since. As it continues to create decentralized and secure web experiences through blockchain, more websites are discovering the benefits of greater control over their own data and how it’s used.
In 2025, websites will adopt blockchain-based features like crypto payments, token-gated memberships, and decentralized applications (dApps). This will help them expand reach and accessibility overseas, lower transaction fees, increase value for members through exclusive content, and much more. As it continues to evolve, monitorization will be super important to remain compliant with current laws while being as competitive as possible.
8. Serverless Architecture Becoming Mainstream
Expect to hear a lot more about serverless architecture in your marketing circles this year. This approach is helping teams build cost-effective and scalable applications by revolutionizing backend management. Serverless solutions like AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions will reduce hosting costs, improve scalability, and enhance performance by eliminating the need for traditional server management.
This year, it will continue to become increasingly capable of AI workloads to handle super complex algorithms, merging with edge computing for seemingly impossibly fast processing speeds, and evolving event-driven architectures to handle complex workflows and real-time responsiveness.
And with the market expected to reach about $44.7 billion by 2029 (+22 billion), it’s really just getting started.
9. Immersive Technologies will Become More Practical
From sci-fi like concepts to practical, everyday tools, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual (Reality) have blended the digital and physical worlds to change the way we interact with websites, buy products, train workforces, and travel to far off destinations.
AR, VR, and 3D design will no longer be tools of the select few — they’ll become integral parts of evolution for industries like eCommerce, real estate, and education. Businesses will start using immersive media to create virtual try-ons, architectural realization, simulation-based training, and more to create interactive, engaging experiences across all industries. When it comes to AR/VR, the future is here.
10. AI & Machine Learning Making its Way in Search
AI is best known for its ability to analyze tons of data at lightning speeds, so it was only a matter of time before it put those skills to work for search.
This year, AI-powered tools will evaluate user intent, preferences, and behavior patterns to help marketers better optimize content, keywords, and overall SEO strategies to match these findings. Thanks to tools like SEMrush and Jasper, hours of data analysis and strategy building will be reduced to minutes, ensuring total optimization for today’s advanced algorithms
11. SEO Becomes Key in Video Visibility
Kicking into high gear this year is SEO in multimedia content. Behind its parent company, Google, YouTube is the 2nd most-used search engine. With over 500 hours of video uploaded to the site every single minute and 2 billion active users monthly, standing out is just as hard as any written content online — and just as important.
Video content will dominate search rankings with strategies like adding transcripts, using keyword-rich descriptions, titles, and tags, and leveraging video schema markup as the driving force behind the videos that will be most successful in getting the most eyeballs. Other factors will not surprisingly include video comments and shares, average view duration, audience retention, and likes-to-dislikes ratio.
Bring on 2025: How to Stay Ahead of the Game
While that’s a wrap for our 2025 Digital Outlook, it’s only the beginning of the only imaginable possibilities of what a couple of months down the road may actually look like. But all along the way, Assemble will be staying on top of it for you! Stay tuned for deep dives into each of these top trends as they evolve and more this year in our blog! Are you ready?