While Google continues to be the World’s leading search engine, tools using Artificial Intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity are also being used to search the web. They can be interesting new sources of visibility and traffic for your website. Even Google is in competition with its own search engine after launching AI Mode in the US and India this month.
Our approach to SEO news has to change too
To be more useful to SEOPress users, we have made a small but significant change to our monthly news roundup. Instead of focusing on Google Search only, we have decided to include news from other search tools. Including IA.
SEO is still relevant for modern search
Some people say that efforts to rank in AI is not SEO, but GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization). We disagree. The effort required to rank in these new search tools is still SEO. SEO recommendations that we have given over the years will still stand you in good stead for ranking in Google and other search engines today and tomorrow.
Keep applying SEO best practices to stay visible and generate traffic in an evolving environment!
June 30th – Google Core Update
Early on Monday, June 30th, Google released an important update to ranking algorithms, the June 2025 Core Update. The update was announced with taciturn posts on X and on LinkedIn by Google Search Central. Both posts link to the Search Status Dashboard which indicates that the update is expected to take 3 weeks to complete. The LinkedIn post gave the extra information, “This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites”.
What should you do about the Core Update? During the next few weeks, you should monitor your ranking in Google carefully. SEOPress Insights users can track keywords from within WordPress. Keep updating your site as you would normally do, but don’t plan major changes until the Core Update is finished.
If you do spot ranking changes, we recommend waiting until the update has finished rolling out before analyzing results. The Search Status Dashboard will indicate when the update has finished and some sites experience volatility during updates only to find themselves back in the same position as before when the update has finished rolling out. Hopefully your ranking will even improve during this update. If ranking drops, see our guide Recovering from a Google Update to help solve your problems using SEOPress.
Google AI Mode released in US and India
Announced in May during Google I/O, AI Mode was made available to all US users on June 12th and was launched as an experiment in Search Labs for India on June 24th. This new chat-based AI search tool is only currently available in English, but we are expecting it to roll out to other countries and languages over the next 12 months.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that AI Mode is the “future of search”. Commenting on his remarks, SEO expert Marie Haynes believes that AI Mode will eventually replace traditional Google search results as the main search experience on Google. Currently searches on Google go to traditional search results first (but increasingly with AI Overviews included), you need to click on the AI Mode button or tab to have AI Mode answer your query.
What should you do? According to Google, AI Mode is a popular feature. If you have clients in the US or India, you should be checking out AI Mode and monitoring traffic from those countries. Test AI Mode with your targeted keywords. Typically, if you are ranking well for keywords in traditional search results, you should be featured in AI Mode responses. That’s the good news. The bad news is that click-thru rates are probably much lower from AI Mode than from traditional search results so you may be losing traffic.
Google Search Console Performance reports include impressions and clicks from AI Mode and AI Overviews, but there is currently no way of filtering this data from impressions and clicks generated by traditional search results.
Some website owners have been noticing a new trend in Google Search Console Performance reports that has been coined The Great Decoupling. This is when impressions are going up and clicks are going down. Attending a Google Search Live event in Poland, SEO Robert Nowaczyk shared a picture of Google’s Martin Splitt showing this phenomenon in his slides. You should check your Google Search Console reports to see if this is happening to your site too (it has also been called the Crododile Effect).
Getting more impressions (the purple line going up) may be caused by AI Overviews and AI Mode. When a site features in AI Overviews and in traditional search results on the same page, it receives 2 impressions. As a user interacts with AI Overviews, new pages from the same website may also get impressions. If a user goes from AI Overviews to AI Mode, featured links will once again trigger impressions. So, whereas before one search gave one impression, it may now generate several.
Clicks going down, however, means that your site is losing traffic. Many conclude that this is because users are getting the answers to their questions from AI Mode or AI Overviews and don’t need to click thru to sites anymore. This is a worrying issue if you rely on traffic for revenue.
ChatGPT improves search and gets more users
Writing for Search Engine Journal, Roger Montti wrote on June 16th that ChatGPT had quietly improved search results. He spotted these changes in the OpenAI changelogs.
- Improved quality
- Smarter responses that are more intelligent, are better at understanding what you’re asking, and provide more comprehensive answers.
- Handles longer conversational contexts, allowing better intelligence in longer conversations.
- Improved search capability and instruction following
- More robust ability to follow instructions, especially in longer conversations, significantly reducing repetitive responses.
- Capability to run multiple searches automatically for complex or difficult questions.
- Search the web using an image you’ve uploaded.
According to data shared by Neil Patel at the WebSummit Vancouver 2025 at the end of May, ChatGPT currently processes 1 billion daily searches compared to Google’s 13.7 billion. Visual Capitalist published an infographic based on this data entitled ChatGPT Lags Far Behind Google in Daily Search Volume. Although this statement is true, it is still surprising to see that ChatGPT has gained so much ground on Google in such a short time.
This comparison may be contestable. A study of ChatGPT stats by SparkToro concluded that the “1 billion messages a day” reported by OpenAI in December 2024 did not equate to 1 million searches. They calculated that one prompt equaled 8 messages and 70 % of prompts were not web search but requests related to creating images, summarizing text and “doing math homework that Timmy really should have done himself”.
What should you do? Whether the statement from Neil Patel is completely reliable or not, you must be aware that a lot of people are now using ChatGPT and that they are using it for searches they would have previously performed on Google. If you haven’t already done so, it is time for you to check your website statistics to see if new AI tools are already interesting sources of traffic.
If you use Google Analytics, go to your account and in Reports navigate to Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. This report shows data by “Session primary channel group” by default. Change this view to “Session source / medium”.
In this example we can see that “google / organic” (this means any traffic from Google other than ads) provides 60 % of this website’s traffic (9,743 sessions). Sources labelled “chatgpt.com” total 520 sessions. This is still some way behind Google, but it roughly fits with the idea that for 13.7 Google searches there is one ChatGPT search. Further down in the list of sources, we can also see Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity.
While you are looking at this Google Analytics report, it will also be interesting to compare traffic sources by quality metrics such as Engaged sessions, Average engagement time per session, Key events, Session key event rate and Total revenue. Is traffic from AI search performing better or worse than traffic from Google? Did You Know? You can use SEOPress to Install Google Analytics on WordPress (no need for another plugin). PRO features let you set up Ecommerce tracking and import data to the WordPress Dashboard.
And what is your SEO news from June 2025?
Well that is enough news from the search engines, what was your SEO news of June 2025? Did your ranking and traffic improve? Did you publish any new articles, optimize any TITLE tags, add ALT text to images? As we stress in our 2-hour-a-week SEO plan with SEOPress, just installing the best SEO plugin for WordPress is not enough to improve ranking. You need to check progress, create SEO optimized content, do on-page optimization and search backlinks. The same applies whether you want to improve visibility in Google, Bing or AI search tools.
For July, here are some of the actions we have suggested in this article
- Check if June 2025 Core Update has finished rolling out
- Monitor keyword ranking using SEOPress Insights
- Test AI Mode with your targeted keywords
- Visit Google Search Console and see if your Performance report shows “The Great Decoupling”
- Use SEOPress OpenAI integration to complete Title tags, Meta Description tags and image ALT text
- Check Google Analytics to see if AI tools like ChatGPT are driving traffic to your site, in addition to traditional sources like Google
