2025 Google Algorithm Updates: A comprehensive review

The March Core Update saw a range of sites across the board experiencing volatility. High-authority and established health, finance and government sites performed well while sites with many low-content pages and programmatic SEO suffered notable declines. One affected niche included forum-based sites that rely on user-generated content which saw some declines in performance after this update. Reddit stood out as an exception, pulling strong performance through scale and translated content.

The June Core Update was noted as a relatively large update, which saw many sites previously negatively affected by Google’s 2023 helpful content update surge and recover in traffic. YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) niches, like financial, legal and healthcare websites saw a larger-than-expected increase in volatility during this time, which suggests stricter scrutiny around EEAT signals. 

Speculation suggests that at least some part of this core update included integrating a new multi-vector information retrieval process. This allows queries to be semantically defined by multiple vectors and provides users with more relevant sources, highlighting a shift to accommodating specifically for conversational queries. This addition also enhances Google’s ability to understand nuanced queries and serve more relevant results.

The August Spam update aimed to further improve Google’s ability to automate spam detection. This update specifically targeted programmatic SEO and mass-generated content that are created mainly for the purpose of ranking. This update also tackled sites with unnatural backlink patterns, which signals spammy link building techniques, like link exchanges or paid links. Legitimate sites with helpful content and a healthy backlink profile experienced some gains after this update as sites with manipulative tactics were filtered out.

Observations across the SEO community saw 2 major changes after the December Core Update. Firstly, pages ranked up and down as a unit, not just individually, which suggests that Google is increasingly evaluating content clusters instead of individual pages. This highlights the importance of optimising whole clusters, coupled with natural internal linking to signal the semantic relevance of your content clusters. Secondly, generalist pages that tried to satisfy multiple types of queries saw noticeable declines. This emphasises Google’s move to prioritise specialist pages that offer novel information instead of aggregate content.

Adapting to these updates is a vital part of a resilient search marketing strategy. There are clear macro-level trends around Google’s 2025 algorithm updates, which can help us understand where search is going and what we should be prioritising. 

• Google is increasingly using UX and engagement metrics as proxy trust signals. This means optimising page load speed, and minimising bounce rates will become an important foundation for ranking performance. 
• Google’s algorithm is improving at interpreting highly complex queries with nuanced intent and matching them with relevant content. Paired with its de-prioritisation of generalist content, this highlights the importance of differentiated and intent-focused pages and underscores an opportunity to target low-volume, specified, but high-intent keywords. 
• AI Overviews saw its peak mid-year with around 25% of queries triggering AIO during that time. These figures dipped towards the end of the year (to 16.5% in November), presumably as Google tweaked the criterion that triggers AIO. (Source: Semrush)
• Intent patterns for AI Overviews have also shifted in 2025. While around 91% of queries that triggered AIO in January was of an informational nature, this figure dropped to 57% in October. (Source: Semrush)
• Click-through rates have risen for AIOs since January, which is an encouraging sign. According to a Semrush study of keywords before and after AI Overviews were triggered, zero-click rates fell from 33.75% to 31.53%. This shift may have something to do with query intent changing. Since AIO is now triggered for more commercial and transactional intent, users may find more need to click through to the source website. We may well see this figure drop further in 2026, as more AIOs are being served for a wider range of queries. Find out more about zero-click search.

The fundamental SEO principles have not changed. Content that is relevant, authentic, and helpful will always be prioritised. However, the updates in 2025 have given us a peek into the ideal search experience Google wants to deliver, which allows us to extrapolate some focus points for optimisation in the future. 

• Optimise for AI search beyond informational intent. With the rise of AI agents and increase in AIO answers for transactional and commercial queries, it is clear that AI optimisation needs to go beyond informational pages. Product and service pages need structured and machine-readable content so AI can holistically understand your site and your offerings. 
• Define a clear target intent for each page. As Google introduces more advanced semantic-based retrieval processes, it is increasingly more important to be purposeful about the pages on your site. Ensure that all pages are differentiated in terms of the queries it aims to rank for. 
• UX is more important than ever, with user engagement metrics being used as proxy trust signals. Identify friction points in the user journey and optimise your website to guide users to conversion. 
• Optimise content clusters. Google has started evaluating sites based on clusters of content, gaining a more holistic understanding of the relationships between pages on your site. To facilitate this understanding, optimisations need to happen across pages in a cluster, tying them together semantically and through internal linking.  

With the search landscape evolving rapidly, it can be difficult to keep up. As AI and zero-click search become more widespread, it is important for businesses to innovate with novel content strategies, technical optimisations and reliable data. At Varn, we pride ourselves in our expertise, transparency and trustworthiness in guiding our clients through their digital activities. 

If you’d like to know more about Varn and what we could do to help, feel free to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.