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.)
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