Google’s Latest Core Update: What It Means For SEO & AI, Plus Top Takeaways From Search Central Live

What does Google’s March core update mean for SEO professionals, and how are top global brands successfully adjusting to the first major algorithm update of 2025?

As has been the case throughout the years and decades since Google first began pushing out major search updates, the impact of the search giant’s March 2025 core update has continued to unfold and reveal itself well into the second quarter of the year.

We covered the initial rollout in our weekly Friday SEO and AI industry update the day it launched, and again as the core update officially finished its release, and now that the dust has settled a bit we wanted to take a look at some of the SEO strategies that are seeing particularly successful results, and highlight others that may no longer be as effective as they were before the March 2025 core update.

We’ll also explore how the SEO sea change that AI has brought to search has evolved, how Google has incorporated AI in its latest core update, and what successful brands and SEO professionals are doing to achieve success in the aftermath of the March update.

Let’s jump right in.

The Latest Google Core Rollout & Its SEO Impact

Google utilized its tried and true Google Search Central blog to announce the March 2025 core update, while driving discussion to a public post on Google’s namesake showcase page on LinkedIn, which as of this writing has received over 1,000 re-posts and some 225 comments.

Google search algorithm updates will almost without fail find inevitable winners and losers when it comes to how the key changes put into effect impact businesses and the optimization efforts of SEO professionals.

The changes that Google has recently made involving greater prominence for its AI overviews — search query results provided by Google’s own Gemini AI technology — have caused particular consternation among a wide swatch of businesses, each worried that as Google and its AI get better at answering user questions posed in search, fewer people have clicked on the links to visit their websites — a shift to the type of answers that have been called zero-click results.

Recent research data from Ahrefs determined that for a top-ranking page, having a Google AI overview correlated with click-through-rates (CTRs) some 34.5 percent lower than pages without AI overviews.

“The customer journey is changing,” Chris Andrew, CEO and co-founder at Scrunch AI recently told our own CEO and co-founder Jordan Koene in a Voices of Search podcast episode entitled, “How to Win Customers in an AI Search-Driven World.”

“I’m less likely to visit a website. I’m more likely to get an answer from my search experience. I’m more likely to refine that answer in a chat-based experience with my model of choice and maybe move along from there. That’s a really big change in the customer journey that we’re tracking with our clients,” Andrew added.

AI Overviews Change Reach & Exposure Numbers

Initial reports from the SEO community after the Google March 2025 core update featured vocal accounts from both businesses that have seen sometimes significant decreases in reach and exposure within Google search, and to a lesser degree those reporting certain favorable changes to their search rankings.

Some have used the frustrations they have experienced with Google’s latest core update to question the very role that Google and other commercial search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing are playing in search in 2025.

“Why are they unilaterally deciding what is a high-quality click and how we should engage our readers when we’re the ones creating the content?”, Danielle Coffey of publisher News Media Alliance recently asked of Google in Bloomberg’s “Google AI Search Shift Leaves Website Makers Feeling ‘Betrayed’.”

The combination of Google rolling out its AI overviews in 2024 and the rise in the number of people using AI tools in place of traditional search engines have combined to create an SEO landscape unlike any I’ve seen in my 41 years on online communication, and publishers, brands, the makers of AI tools, and search engine firms are paying special attention to the repercussions of Google’s March 2025 core update.

Shakeups — Ongoing Search Ranking Volatility

Since the early days of Google’s existence and its predecessors such as Altavista, Dogpile, and others, publishers and SEO professionals have been largely at the mercy of search engine firms when algorithms inevitably roll out, as by nature the precise intricacies of how Google or other search providers decide which results to show searchers are typically veiled in mystery, with only very basic generalisms about each update made available to the public.

“Google has provided little information about the improvements to its search algorithm in this core update,” Matt G. Southern of Search Engine Journal observed.

One early analysis that tracked the initial impact of the Google March 2025 core update on some 150,000 websites found that the number Google’s featured snippets — information shown within Google search engine result pages (SERPs) quoted directly from websites — had fallen by almost 40 percent, with a similar rise in the number of Google AI overviews.

Another examination of search performance data in the wake of the Google March 2025 core update featured insight from Semrush, SimilarWeb, and seoClarity, as Barry Schwartz explored for Search Engine Land in “Data providers: Google March 2025 core update had similar volatility to the previous update.”

“You can see the volatility the March 2025 core update caused across the health, finance, retail, travel and finance industries,” Schwartz noted. “You can see the finance industry showed the highest levels of fluctuation, particularly in the top five results. In contrast, the travel industry experienced notably low volatility in the top three positions,” he added.

Additional research pointed to Google’s March 2025 core update as having the most volatile shifting of SERP results in more than a year.

“We are less than a week after the Google March 2025 core update finished rolling out and we are seeing some heated volatility again, maybe more heated than what we saw during the last core update,” Schwartz suggested in Search Engine Roundtable’s “Google April Post Core Update Ranking Volatility Heats Up.”

Yet more research showed that despite a greater number of AI overviews, Google saw the combined volume of searches conducted using its primary web, image, news, shopping, maps, and video services increase by more than 21 percent between 2023 and 2024.

What a similar comparison will show for Google search volume between 2024 and 2025 data remains to be seen, however with its longstanding 90-plus percent share of the search market — along with purported search volume that was some 373 times greater than that of searches carried out via OpenAI’s ChatGPT — it’s clear that Google has a vast and long-established lead.

“While Google has lost some market share, this metric is less significant than it seems,” Sebastien Edgar, global SEO consultant and Previsible expert-in-resident, recently noted.

“It’s normal for market share to decline when new players (e.g., ChatGPT) enter. Search diversity is increasing. What matters most is the total number of searches, and Google has grown by 22 percent year-over-year,” Edgar added.

Some, however, are increasingly feeling that the swift rise in the number of searches being conducted using AI tools may make headway even with Google’s mile-long search dominance, and we’ll examine some of the advances in AI technology that are driving such predictions.

Notable Google Algorithm Shifts To Forum & Other Content

Recent years have seen Google make various attempts to surface more user-generated content (UGC) within search results, including information from message forums such as Reddit and smaller niche online communities, as was the focus of the search giant’s “hidden gems” update in 2023.

Now however, some early reports surrounding the Google March 2025 core update have pointed to a drop in such UGC content aside from Reddit.

“Could [it] be that the SEO glory days of ‘Just be a forum and you’ll rank’ might be coming to an end?”, Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy and research at Amsive recently asked.

Despite new AI competition, Google has remained among the top developers of LLMs.

For some, Google’s latest core update has stood out from those of the past.

“It’s brought major changes to Google’s helpful content, core, and spam algorithms, and it has already massively reshaped the SERPs,” Rachel Hernandez, senior director of content at The Hoth recently observed.

AI’s Growing Role In Redefining Google’s Search Dominance

There’s no denying that Google’s latest core update has and will continue to have significant impact on brands large and small the world over, however when it comes to the role that AI will take as we head towards 2026, few would deny that AI and its role in search will change the very nature of how humans interact with computers.

Multiple breakthroughs have brought about an AI convergence, and Stanford University’s Institute for Human Centered AI has compiled a 450-plus page report (PDF) measuring the impact of AI on business and society on a global scale.

The newest eighth edition of the Stanford report offers a wealth of insight into the state of large language models (LLMs), and a look ahead to where AI efforts are intensifying — all offering SEO professionals a helpful rundown on a search industry in flux.

“AI’s influence across society, the economy, and global governance continues to intensify,” the report noted.

“AI adoption has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, as millions of people are now using AI on a regular basis both for their professional work and leisure activities,” Yolanda Gil, a member of the National Science Board (NSB), and Raymond Perrault of SRI International, co-directors of the AI Index Report, observed.

Conditions have aligned to make for relatively easy access to AI tools — and with the technology being baked into more of the tools and services people use everyday, AI adoption rates are poised to climb for the foreseeable future.

“As high-performing, low-cost, and openly available models proliferate, AI’s accessibility and impact are set to expand even further,” Gil and Perrault added.

Along with more people using it, the sophistication and capabilities of AI have also continued to expand at a rapid pace.

“The once-formidable Turing Test is no longer considered an ambitious goal, having been surpassed by today’s sophisticated systems,” the Stanford report pointed out, leading to changes affecting the international community.

“AI is driving significant shifts in energy sources, attracting interest in nuclear energy. Microsoft announced a $1.6 billion deal to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to power AI, while Google and Amazon have also secured nuclear energy agreements to support AI operations,” the report noted.

Several new initiatives have launched that are dedicated to keeping AI output in check.

“This year, several new benchmarks were introduced for evaluating the factuality and truthfulness of LLMs, including Google’s FACTS Grounding. This benchmark assesses how well LLMs generate responses that are both factually accurate and detailed enough to provide satisfactory answers,” the report added.

Each of these AI advances and plenty of others have manifested in Google’s March 2025 core update, which brings up the question of what can savvy SEO professionals do to make the most of optimization efforts?

Top Tactics For SEO Success With Google’s March 2025 Core Update

While Google hasn’t provided detailed official guidance specific to its latest core update, the Alphabet-owned firm has held a number of events during which company representatives shared their takes on how businesses can best work with the latest search algorithm incarnation.

We’ve had the good fortune to attend some of these events, including our own senior SEO strategy lead Ayala Steinhart, who gathered some of the key insights and take-aways from Google’s Search Central Live event in New York, which we present here to help with your own optimization efforts.

• Fun Fact: In 2023 alone Google conducted 719K quality tests and 4.7K update launches (non-core updates)
  
• Some e-commerce sites may have merchant centers that are auto-tagging the search result source listing ID (SRSLTID) parameter, however this doesn’t affect crawling or indexing
  
• Don’t over-focus on core web vitals (CWV) – if big issues and performance drops are taking place, use core web vitals as a guideline, however they shouldn’t drive all decisions, because they represent only a small part of search ranking
  
• There is a new 24-hour view on Google Search Console (GSC), and Google is also working on an 8-day view. We detailed this change in our weekly AI and search news update, “OpenAI’s New o3 & o4-Mini AI Models & Social Plans, & Google Analytics Gets Hourly Data While Losing Country-Code Domains.”
  
• Google generally knows to ignore toxic backlinks, so the health of a backlink profile may not be as critical as once thought
  
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and GSC can show different numbers, because they collect data differently, e.g.:
  
  • GA4 has cookies or tracking tags blocked, whereas GSC doesn’t need such consent as it only counts clicks
  • Each also have time zone differences, with GA4 being customizable and GSC always using U.S. Pacific Time, while each also utilize different attribution models
  • GA4 is aggregated by query and topic, while GSC is aggregated by URL and site
  • Google’s Looker Studio — formerly known as Google Data Studio — allows users to monitor both GA4 and GSC data together

“It’s always been near impossible to get a perfect score on the CWV tests, but many SEO professionals tend to be hyper-focused on them. According to Google senior search analyst John Mueller, that’s probably because it’s such a tangible report with numbers, so it can seem especially important, or maybe because they named it core web vitals, such as a core update,” Steinhart observed during the event.

Despite the core moniker, CWV ratings shouldn’t necessarily be the only area SEO professionals focus on.

“Now Google is saying basically, ‘It’s okay if the score isn’t perfect, just don’t let there be huge issues such as really slow-loading pages, or pages that aren’t mobile-friendly.’ In other words, best practices and fixing major issues are still important, but getting that number up shouldn’t be a main priority,” Steinhart added.

Other tactics shared during Google Search Central Live in New York offer insight into both optimization tactics in the wake of the latest core update, and more general best-practices.

• Don’t underestimate the power of the Google Search Status Dashboard, which offers the latest on Google’s recent updates
  
• Google confirmed the removal of breadcrumbs for mobile search results, cached page retrieval from all search results, along with sunsetting the sitelinks search box
  
• Labeling all AI-generated images on sites was recommended
  
• Mueller and Zoe Darme, director of knowledge, information, and trust at Google, both mentioned that GSC performance reports provide data on certain Google AI overviews and other AI features
  
• There isn’t yet a search console for Google’s Gemini AI model, however some related information can be pulled from HTTP referral data
  
• In a “Myth-Busting” session, Mueller mentioned that schema markup doesn’t necessarily help rankings
  
• Mueller noted that content marketing was not necessarily critical for all small businesses, including specific e-commerce firms
  
• Rose Lichtenfels, strategic product partnerships manager of search at Google, spoke about the importance of relevance, relatability, and having an authentic voice when it comes to user-generated content (UGC)
  
• The Google representatives noted that AI overviews (AIO) can lead to users performing a greater number of  searches, that they have seen the overviews helping with certain new types of questions, and that users were now visiting a greater diversity of sites
  
• Daniel Waisberg, search advocate at Google, discussed use cases for GSC, GA, and Google Trends:
  
  • Google Trends — Terms, Topics, Geographic Data, and Interests
  • GSC — Queries, Pages, Geographic Data, Clicks, Impressions, and Positions
  • GA — Users, Pages, Geographic Data, Events, Sessions, and Views
    
• Within GA, long-tail search keywords may not be fully represented, while in GSC long-tail keywords could be over-represented

Many thanks to Steinhart for taking the time to share these helpful insights from Google Search Central Live in New York.

A Range of Voices React To Google’s March Core Update

Others at the Google Search Central Live event observed that while Google was generally listening to the concerns of the SEO professional community, it wasn’t yet offering up all the answers.

“We’re in a transitional moment for search – one where experimentation is happening in real time, and where many of the most impactful changes (like AIO) are still a bit confusing and vague,” Amsive’s Ray observed.

During a separate Search Central Live event held in Madrid, Mueller pointed out that Google’s AI features were still new, with implementation changes, user-behavior and expectations each remaining in a state of flux, and noted that specific optimization for Google AI’s elements weren’t needed — as Aleyda Solís, founder and international SEO consultant at Orainti, shared.

“AI Overview inclusion has a negative impact on sites already ranking in top organic search results, whether they’re also shown in the AIO snapshot or not,” Solis also noted recently.

When looking at Google’s latest core update and how AI search is shaking things up, the sizable search traffic lead Google has shouldn’t be overlooked.

“Amazon February organic search traffic was 417.38 million, while the total AI chatbot traffic — with ChatGPT being the biggest channel — was 1.2 million, just one percent of referral traffic,” Solis recently observed.

While we currently live in a decidedly Google-centric world, search diversification has increasingly been on the mind of many in the industry.

“SEO is undergoing a profound evolution. The rise of AI overviews is fundamentally changing search results, forcing a move beyond keywords to genuine user understanding,” Marcus Tandler, founder and host of the SEOktoberfest G50 Summit event recently told me.

“Prioritizing helpful content and a seamless user experience is becoming non-negotiable, and building a strong brand across multiple channels is now a core SEO strategy. However, recognizing the risk of Google dependency, diversifying traffic sources, especially through social platforms and multimodal optimization — especially video — is crucial for future success,” Tandler added in our recent collection of “12+ Top 2025 SEO Trends & Predictions From Industry Experts.”

Google Core Update — Staying Ahead Of The SEO & AI Curve

Both Google and savvy SEO professionals are jointly and indelibly involved as key figures in the great AI and search experiment playing out in real time daily around the world, and while finding common ground in the name of providing the best search experience is possible, how non-Google AI firms will reshape search when 2026 comes around remains to be seen.

We hope that you’ve found this look at the Google March 2025 core update, the role of AI, and top take-aways from Google’s Search Central Live events helpful, and that the insights we’ve shared will help with your own SEO efforts.

Crafting a successful SEO and AI strategy today requires ongoing dedication, significant time investment, and sound strategy, which is why more brands than ever are turning to dedicated SEO agencies with a deep understanding of AI such as Previsible. If you’re looking for proven SEO and AI search help from some of the industry’s top experts, please drop us a line today and let’s talk.