During Google’s Q1 2025 earnings report on April 24th, CEO Sundar Pinchai looked back at the double-digit growth in Search revenue this year and pointed towards the increasing use of AI in Google Search. He said that AI Overviews now has 1.5 billion users and that AI Mode – a new, experimental search result we introduced in last month’s news – has been received positively. Much of the other news about Google in April 2025 is also centered on the impact AI has on search results and traffic to websites. Whereas Google remains very upbeat about this new technology, more and more sources are calling out the problems it is creating for website owners and SEO professionals across the World.
Search results volatility
There was no official update from Google in April 2025, but search results continued to be relatively volatile. Barry Schwartz (a regular source of information on Google updates) reported on Post Core Update volatility on April 3rd following last month’s Core Update and then other peaks of activity around April 9th and 10th, April 16th, April 22nd and 23rd, and April 25th.
SEO Glenn Gabe reacted to Barry’s news on X to share that one of his client’s saw good progress in ranking on April 22nd but that he as been contacted by sites who lost Discover traffic on this date.
Search Central Live Madrid
Held on April 9th, Google followed up last month’s New York event with a new Search Central Live in Madrid, Spain. Featuring Camilla Samilian, Lino Cattaruzzi, Daniel Waisberg, Nikola Todorovic, John Mueller, Moshe Samet and Eric Barbera from Google, the event followed a similar pattern to New York with a series of short talks in the morning from 9 am to 1.30 pm, followed by lunch and networking.
SEO Aleyda Solis was at the event, and it is interesting to read her insider account. She notes that Google is putting a lot of effort into these events and that they focus on AI a lot. Her conclusion is that Google recognizes that there is concern in the SEO community about the future of search. Google wants to reassure professionals that current SEO skills will still be relevant in the future.
The 5 points that Aleda noted from the day were:
- Google’s goal, mission and focus have not changed. Google will still provide traffic and tools to websites.
- Google is dealing with AI generated content. Google asks quality raters to rate AI-generated text as low-quality.
- Google showed how AI Search and AI Overviews work and how to optimize for them. John Mueller said that there is no specific optimization websites can do in order to feature in AI-generated search results (partially because technology is evolving quickly).
- Monitoring and Tracking AI Overviews and Gemini searches. Google does not and does not plan to add features to Google Search Console to help track traffic from AI-generated search results. A big regret for Aleyda.
- The future of SEO with LLMs (Large Language Models). John Mueller insists that SEO skills remain relevant to new AI technologies.
Another interesting account was published by Clara Soteras (who was not a fan of John Mueller’s paella metaphors for Core Updates). During Eric Barbera’s presentation on Google News, she noticed that he was sharing a big announcement: Google Discover is coming to desktop. Her post from the event was picked up by Lily Ray and John Shehata and the news spread quickly around the World. To underline the importance of this news, she shared her experience that news sites get 50% to 60% of their Google traffic from Discover (which is currently only on mobile).
Google drops top level domains like Google.fr
In the article Here’s an update on our use of country code top-level domains published April 15th, Google announced that over the coming months, everyone using Google Search will be directed to the Google.com domain.
Currently each country has its own version of Google at a local Top-Level Domain (TLD). So for example, French users have Google.fr, Nigerian users have Google.ng and British users have Google.co.uk. Historically the Google domain used to search from had an important impact on search results – adding country specific signals such as recognizing official sites. In the article, Google says that the domain name you search from has not had an impact since 2017. Search results are now optimized to users’ locations based on signals other than the domain name.
The announcement led some specialists to wonder if this changes how Google now considers Top-Level Domains as a ranking factor. John Mueller from Google felt compelled to react to posts on social media to stress that there is no change to ranking factors. He replied to a question from Kurt Peterson on LinkedIn saying “Nothing has changed with regards to international SEO” and “I wouldn’t recommend using Google’s domains as a model that everyone / anyone else should copy for SEO purposes”.
For more advice on how to do international SEO see our free eBook https://www.seopress.org/support/ebooks/international-seo-with-wordpress/
More studies show AI Overviews reduce traffic
Reporting in Search Engine Land on April 21st, Danny Goodwin presents new studies from Ahrefs and Amsive that to him show that “the introduction of AI Overviews correlates with a measurable decline in organic visibility and clicks” for websites.
- The study from Ahrefs shows a 34.5 % drop in Click-thru for sites ranking number one in search results
- The study from Amsive shows an overall 15.49% drop in Click-thru when AI Overviews are present
These two studies confirm SEER results published in February. The main take-away from that study was: “If AI Overviews feature in search results, there are less clicks on organic and paid links”.
Google also confirmed to Barry Schwartz this month that AI Overviews can link to its own search results, keeping users on Google “when our systems determine it might be useful”. Barry comments, “Publishers have been begging Google to send them more traffic through Google Search. Now, with this new feature officially launching, you have to assume Google will send less traffic to publishers and more traffic to its own search results.”
Aleyda Solis has done some research on the impact of AI overviews on search traffic too and she has also concluded that this feature has a negative impact on traffic for a site even if it does feature in the AI-generated snippet. However, she insists that site owners should try and do their own analysis as results may change dramatically from site to site. In the video “How to Measure The Impact of AI Overviews on Organic Search Traffic” she goes through a method to do the analysis yourself.
