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Another Google core update was completed last Friday, the first one this year — but what it will mean for publishers won’t be clear for a while, if at all.
Google’s core updates, which happen multiple times a year, change its search algorithms and systems and have the potential to make or break publishers’ traffic. Last year’s core updates threw publishers for a loop. A core update in March 2024 aimed at cleaning up spam and low-quality content in Google search results hit news publishers hard, with many seeing their sites’ search visibility fall. Another change to Google’s algorithm at the end of the year decimated publishers’ product review sites.
Publishing execs were keen to discuss the latest core update in a closed-door town hall session during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, last week. The consensus was clear: there is a sense of Groundhog Day when it comes to Google’s updates, and they’re yet again in the dark and at the mercy of those changes. (It’s been almost a year since Google rolled out its AI-generated search feature AI Overviews, and publishers still know very little about how it’s really impacting their referral traffic, for example.)
“There is a new Google core update going again. [Our team has started] reworking text [on our sites], and we do not see much uplift there,” said one exec.
“Nobody ever knows anything about core updates,” said another publishing exec.
What makes matters more challenging for publishers? Google will conduct core updates more often, according to an announcement by the tech giant at the end of last year. Google conducted four core updates last year, four in 2023, two in 2022 and three in 2021.
The March 2025 core update, which ran from March 13 to March 27, was a “regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites,” Google explained in a LinkedIn post.
A third exec said Google core updates affect traffic to certain verticals of content or certain URLs.
“I work mostly in sports, [and I see changes] on some verticals … and some not. And so it’s really hard to understand. I’m turning the dial [and] trying to figure out, what do I need to do to either get back to where I was or, hey, I got lots more traffic from the same thing I was doing before — so this is pretty nice. You have no idea,” they said.
Jason Hennessey, an SEO consultant and founder of digital marketing agency Hennessy Digital, is seeing a few forum websites get hit by the latest update. A site called DIY Chatroom lost about 150,000 monthly visitors, and is now getting less than 200,000 site visitors after the update, he said.
There’s not much a publisher can do to prepare for upcoming core updates from Google, other than to follow SEO best practices, said Hennessey.
A publishing exec — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — told Digiday that it’s too early to tell how their sites have been impacted by this March 2025 core update.
“We never rush into algorithms recovery since the kind of action big sites like ours can take always takes months anyway,” they said. During core updates, it’s best not to make any changes — even if traffic drops, or increases in the beginning, the exec said.
“On the last day of the roll out, traffic may bounce back after a dip or drop after a spike. And any action you take during an update won’t have an impact before the rollout ends, which could muddy the waters for investigating recovery steps once it’s over,” they said.
The best course of action, in their opinion, is to wait until the update is finished. And even when a Google core update has completed, a publisher won’t be able to really know the impact the changes to the algorithm has had on their sites until days — or even a few weeks — later.
“You can’t just quickly fix and recover,” Hennessey said. “People go into panic mode and think there’s a quick fix but there’s not. Google will sometimes roll out an update, see how it settles, and then adjust it. … Don’t quickly make rash decisions.”
Despite the potential crackdown, both creators and marketers broadly view YouTube’s updated policies as a positive move. They believe it indicates that the platform is paying attention to the ways creators are using AI — and that it’s open to AI tools that don’t result in the propagation of so-called “AI slop” videos.
Here’s a breakdown of the emerging vocabulary of AI-media economics, what these terms mean, and why they matter now.
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