There were no official updates and little official news from Google in February, but still plenty of news about the search engine. In the Search Engine Land article How volatile have Google rankings really been? Mordy Oberstein tells us that “Some things in life are constant – Google rankings aren’t one of them”. SEO Joy Hawkins reported on what she thinks is an update to local search and Barry Schwartz reported volatility in Google search results on the 4th and 5th, 20th, 26th and 27th.
In other news, Seer Interactive released research that shows that the presence of AI Overviews in search results reduces clicks on organic and paid links. Later on in the month, the US company Chegg has sued Google for exactly that: claiming that the AI Overviews is negatively impacting their traffic, revenue, and workforce.
Reviews bug on Google Business Profiles
Many business owners across the world thought they saw their Google Business Profile reviews drop dramatically from February 7th and it kept them worried throughout the weekend. There were a lot of theories circulating as to why Google was removing reviews from businesses, but it turned out that it was just an error in the calculation in the total number of reviews – no reviews were actually removed.
A post by Victoria Kroll in the Google Business Profile Help forum on the 10th clarified the issue and she later announced that most affected profiles were back to normal on February 13th. She also pointed users towards Google Business Profile documentation “Understand missing & delayed reviews” for help for actual problems of missing reviews. This is also covered in this short 2021 video
Local Diversity Update
On February 18th, local SEO expert Joy Hawkins reported on what she considers a recent change to Google’s algorithm. She has baptized it the “Diversity Update”. Her theory is that starting August 2024, Google changed its algorithm to reduce the chance of a company featuring in both local-pack and organic search results. The impact of this algorithm has increased over time to become a big problem in 2025. For companies this may mean a drop in organic traffic from competitive keywords where they previously featured twice in search results. The loss of traffic can be spotted in Google Search Console for non-branded keywords.
The article is recounted – a tad over-excitingly – by Joy and Colan Nielsen in YouTube and they invite you to add questions and comments if you have experienced this same problem.
The solution that Joy suggests if you realize that you are ranking in local packs but not organic search results, is to change your link in Google Business Profile. If you want more tips on ranking for local search, see our guide 20 Tips for Ranking in Local Search with WordPress.
Revised Quality Raters Guidelines
Google published new Quality Rater Guidelines on January 23rd, but a lot of the reaction to this document happened in February so we feel justified about talking about it in this month’s news. The Quality Rater Guidelines is a document used by human quality raters who are given the job of rating Google search results manually. This document talks a lot about E-E-A-T as a framework for evaluating the quality of web pages and sites. We covered this subject in our article Optimizing WordPress sites for Google EAT.
Dr Marie Haynes – an SEO specialized in E-E-A-T – published her notes on the changes she saw between the January 2025 and March 2024 versions of the guidelines in the article New in the rater guidelines – filler content, scaled content abuse and guidance around AI use. She points out new additions that underline what Google considers as bad quality: filler content, paraphrased content, expired domains, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse.
There are warnings against the misuse of AI generated content in sections about Paraphrased content and Scaled content abuse. Google assimilates using AI with copying content with the recommendation to quality raters to give the lowest rating if “all or almost all of the main content on the page (including text, images, audio, videos, etc.) is copied, paraphrased, embedded, auto or AI generated”.
The section in the guidelines about “filler content” uses recipe websites to illustrate this bad practice. The example is a recipe page where the ingredients are shown at the top of the page, but a user has to scroll down through a lot of other content including ads before finding the actual recipe. Marie feels that this quality rating could easily be applied algorithmically and she recommends that recipe sites feature prominent “Jump to recipe” button at the top of recipe pages if they do have filler content.
Marie recorded herself going through the Quality Rater Guidelines in a 1 hour 45-minute episode of her podcast on YouTube. You can watch this back below.
Click-thru rate and AI Overviews
On February 4th, Tracy McDonald of Seer Interactive published the results of a study into click thru rates for paid and organic search results in Google depending on the appearance or not of AI Overviews (the generative responses featuring in Google search results outside of Europe).
The title of the article, “Google AIO Impact – SEO & PPC CTRs at all time low” gives you an idea of the main take-away: if AI Overviews feature in search results, there are less clicks on organic and paid links.
Looking into the details, Tracy points out that AI Overviews may be showing for searches where click-thru rates were already low. She also points out that that there is a general trend to lower click-thru rates for paid ads across the board – as if we were getting tired of seeing ads or find them less relevant.
In the description of AI Overviews provided by Google (updated on February 11th) it is worth noting that clicks on links provided in AI Overviews are included in the Performance report in Google Search Console and are indistinguishable from other organic search traffic.
Chegg suing Google over loss of traffic
As reported in Search Engine Land but also by mainstream news sources like Washington Post, New York Post and CNBC, the publicly listed US company Chegg has sued Google over the introduction of AI Overviews. The company says that this new search feature has blocked traffic from coming to their website and has had a profound impact on traffic (down 49%), revenues and workforce. The company is facing significant financial difficulties, and its stock has plummeted 99% in value since 2021.
In an official statement released on February 24th, Chegg said “Google AIO has transformed Google from a search engine into an answer engine, displaying AI-generated content sourced from third-party sites like Chegg”.
The action started by Chegg may see other companies challenge Google and lead to more lawsuits and calls for regulatory changes to generative AI. Although unconnected to the antitrust trial lost by Google in 2024, these new claims may have an impact on the sanctions that are decided against Google to break its monopoly.
