This year’s first official update to Google’s algorithm was released on March 13th. Ranking volatility was more notable before this Core Update than during it, suggesting Google has made other changes already this year (Danny Sullivan from Google confirmed this during a Google Search Central event in New York). AI Overviews were released to 9 new European countries and 4 new languages and Google has released AI Mode in the US. This new feature, released as an experiment, may be the future of search.
March 13th – March 2025 Core Update
Google announced the release of the March 2025 Core Update via the Google Search Central accounts on X and LinkedIn. This is the first official update to Google’s ranking algorithms in 2025. It is interesting to note that the LinkedIn post is longer and got more engagement (likes, comments and shares). LinkedIn may now be the better place to follow Google Search news.
The full LinkedIn post from Google read “Today we released the March 2025 core update to Google Search. This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites. We also continue our work to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year. Some have already happened; additional ones will come later. We’ll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://status.search.google.com/”.
The update finished rolling out on March 27th. Looking at tools that track changes to Google’s search results like Similarweb’s SERP Seisometer (screenshot above) or SemRush’s Sensor, it is difficult to distinguish volatility caused by the update from March 13th from ongoing volatility in early March. As reported by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, Google confirmed that volatility prior to March 13th was not linked to the Core Update.
It is interesting to note that the Linkedin post from Google indicates that it has already released updates to the algorithm this year (without making any official announcement) as part of an effort to “help surface content from creators”. This certainly refers back to the Creator Summit event in October last year during which Google apologized to site owners who were negatively hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update. These updates may explain volatility experienced in February and early March.
Although the impact from the March 2025 Core Update does not appear to be widespread, if you noticed a drop in traffic and ranking (using a tool like SEOPress Insights) from March 13th, you may want to check our article Recovering from a Google Update to help understand what you can do to recover.
Search Central Live New York
A more recent event organized by Google happened on March 20th (during the roll out of the Core Update) at its new New York offices. As related by Barry Schwartz in his article My Takeaways From Google Search Central Live NYC 2025 the majority of the content presented was not new and is already available on the Google Search Central website.
His article shares photos of slides from the presentations by Danny Sullivan, John Mueller, Eric Barbeta and Danny Waisberg. Among comments that caught his attention were:
- 50 % of the content on the web is spam
- There is no list of freelancers that can cause a site to get a Google site reputation abuse penalty
- The use of AI alone is not a scaled content violation, but any means of mass generating content should be carefully considered
- Over 1 billion users are using AI Overviews
- Users clicking from AI Overviews are visiting a larger diversity of sites and are spending more time on sites
- Seeing links in AI Overviews is possible because of “grounding”
- AI Overviews specific data is not coming to Google Search Console
- Google Search Console reports are based on the Californian time zone
During a question and answer session, Danny Sullivan took the opportunity to talk more about the efforts Google is making to ensure that good, small, independent websites can rank as well as big brands. This was developed by Roger Montti in the Search Engine Journal article Google’s SEO Tips For Better Rankings – Search Central Live NYC.
The next Google Search Central Live events will be in in Johannesburg on April 2nd and then in Madrid on April 9th.
AI Overviews launched in Europe (but not in France) and more changes
After reports of some European users seeing AI Overviews appearing for searches in February and early March, Google announced the European launch of AI Overviews in a blog post published on The Keyword on March 25th
The AI-generated responses are rolling out to 9 new countries and 4 new languages: Austria (German & English), Belgium (English), Germany (German & English), Ireland (English), Italy (Italian & English), Poland (Polish & English), Portugal (Portuguese & English), Spain (Spanish & English), Switzerland (French, German & Italian, plus English).
The notable exceptions here are France and French (which is also an official language in Belgium and Switzerland). The Google Search Console documentation for AI Overviews is translated into French however.
In other news released by Google on The Keyword on March 5th we learnt that AI Overviews are now available even when you are not connected to your Google account, it uses Gemini 2.0 in the US and that results have been improved to reduce spam but also to limit satirical content.
AI Mode available in Labs
The March 5th article published on The Keyword also shared the news that “AI Mode” was coming to Google. Once you have this set-up you can go into AI mode after an initial search by clicking on the AI Mode link in the menu. This takes you out of the SERP and into a chat with Google where the query is answered again with long form answer, links to relevant websites and an invitation to ask follow-up questions. AI Mode uses a custom version of Gemini 2.0 that performs multiple searches in Google search to source answers. It can also access Knowledge Graph and product data.
The article linked to a PDF document AI Overviews and the AI Mode experiment in Search which gives more information about AI Mode (and AI Overviews), including quality and safety protections.
This feature is only currently available as an experiment in the US, but it is suspected that AI Mode is the future of Google Search so SEOs should get familiar with it now. You can request access via Google Search Labs. In an interesting post published on LinkedIn, “Does Google AI Mode represent the Future of Search and another shift in Discoverability?” James Gray from Remarkable discusses the disruption that AI Mode will cause to SEO if it becomes the default mode of search. This includes a large potential drop in traffic to websites from Google.
Robots Exclusion Protocol refresher
Over the month of March, the Search Relations team published a series of articles on the Google Search Central site about the Robots Exclusion Protocol which can be implemented via a Robots.txt file, a robots tag or http headers.
The article Robots.txt — a flexible way to control how machines explore your website, by Martin Splitt and John Mueller, presents the robots.txt file that can used to give instructions to crawlers (like Google) about which content can be accessed on a website. The article says, “If you’re using a CMS, it usually has something already built in to help you change your robots.txt file.” Although WordPress creates a default robots.txt file, you can’t edit it without a plugin like SEOPress PRO.
Page-level granularity talks about using tags and HTTP response headers on pages to handle robot directives like noindex, nofollow and nosnippet. With WordPress and SEOPress, you can handle meta robot tags globally using SEO > Metas and titles and for individual pages, articles and other post types in the Advanced tab of the SEO metabox.
In the last article of the series, Future-proof Robots Exclusion Protocol, Gary Illyes calls for help in adding new features to the Robots.txt standard.
