One of the biggest frustrations and delights for anyone performing ongoing SEO on a website is Google’s core updates. Every 3 or so months, Google will publish an update to its ranking algorithm, which can shake up where your website is ranking. This algorithm determines where each website ranks for a given keyword, whether a website ranks in position 1 on the first page or at the end of page 99. Google is continually updating this algorithm, with the intention of providing its customers with the most helpful website, related to their search terms. In this article, we will discuss and unpack what Google Core Updates are, the history of core updates and what to do if your site has been affected by a core update.

History of Google Search updates

In the early days of Google Search, Google would only make changes very slowly to their algorithms. In the last few years, Google have been publishing major updates to their search algorithm every quarter. Recently, in December of 2025 Google confirmed that smaller updates are happening continuously. These are part of Google’s continuing evolution rather than single standout events, but they still often cause noticeable ranking shifts across the web

Here is a list of most of the known, updates that have been published by Google since 2011;

🐼 Panda – February 2011

Targeted low-quality, thin, or duplicate content across sites.

🐧 Penguin – April 2012

Focused on spammy link practices, demoting sites using manipulative link schemes.

🐦 Hummingbird – September 2013

Major overhaul introducing better semantic search and natural language understanding.

📱 Mobile-Friendly Update (“Mobilegeddon”) – 2015

Prioritised mobile-friendly websites in mobile search results due to rising smartphone use.

🤖 RankBrain – 2015

Google introduced machine learning into ranking.

❤️‍🔥 Medic Update – August 2018

A broad core algorithm shift that heavily impacted health/medical sites (and other YMYL content).

🧠 BERT – October 2019

Used neural language processing to understand context and nuance in search queries.

🧑‍💻 Core Web Vitals / Page Experience – 2021

Introduced real page performance metrics (speed, stability, responsiveness) as ranking factors.

📍 Helpful Content Updates (2022–present)

Designed to reward genuinely helpful “people-first” content and penalise content made primarily for ranking.

🧠 Broad Core Updates (2018–present)

Google now regularly releases broad core updates that don’t always have custom names (above the calendar date), but they represent significant system-wide adjustments to how Google evaluates content quality and relevance. Examples include:

2023

• November 2, 2023 — November 2023 Core Update 
• October 5, 2023 — October 2023 Core Update 
• August 22, 2023 — August 2023 Core Update 
• March 15, 2023 — March 2023 Core Update

2024

• December 12, 2024 — December 2024 Core Update 
• November 11, 2024 — November 2024 Core Update 
• August 15, 2024 — August 2024 Core Update

2025

• December 11, 2025 — December 2025 Core Update
• June 30, 2025 — June 2025 Core Update
  
• March 13, 2025 — March 2025 Core Update
  

What is the difference between spam updates and core updates?

Google Spam articles are very focused updates, targeting websites that make use of black hat or spammy SEO practices and violate Google’s policies.

Some of these practices that might be targeted in a spam update include;

• Low-quality, AI-generated content
• Keyword stuffing
• Black hat backlinking

Google core updates are much broader updates to the Google search algorithm, and whilst they still may target specific industries. Core updates are aimed at improving the algorithm’s ability to show customers the most relevant content to their search term. 

How do I know if my site has been affected by an update?

The best way to see if your site has been specifically affected by a Google Core update is to check your data in Google Search Console. You will likely be able to see a specific drop or increase in traffic around the time of a core update. We have listed historical Core Updates and dates above in this article for you to compare. 

If you don’t see a specific change in traffic or a gradual decrease in traffic over time, it probably means that your website and content has been aging and have not been updated in some time. This is a great time to publish some new blog content and expand in detail on your services pages.

Action plan for sites affected by a core update 

If you think your website has been negatively affected by a core update, it is important not to rush into making changes; before anything else, check whether a core update is currently being rolled out. If you are in the middle of a core update and have been negatively impacted, we would recommend waiting until the end of the update before making major changes to your website. We have found that sites that take a big hit early in a core update may see an increase towards the end of the rollout.

Step 1 – Content Audit 

Let’s start off by auditing all the pages on your website to first determine any trends between pages that saw an increase in traffic, versus any that saw a decrease in traffic. If every page across the board saw a drop in rankings, then significant changes to your website overall will need to be made. We then want to evaluate every single page to ensure that we are explaining the topic in as much detail as possible and answering any potential questions that your customers may have. Ultimately, we want to make your website the most authoritative place in your given industry. 

Step 2 – Technical Audit

Now we want to examine your website from a technical SEO perspective. We have a range of tools that we use to conduct a comprehensive audit of your website.

Some of the things we look at include;

• Speed
• Internal Linking
• Page Metadata
• User Experience
• Crawl Errors

Step 3 – User Experience 

We like to do an unbiased test by asking non-tech-savvy people to use the website in question. So that we can evaluate how easy it is for the consumer to use and find the information they are looking for, and ideally place an enquiry. This will highlight any issues in the user experience that may be prevalent, such as too many images or ads in the way or an unintuitive way to access information.

Step 4 – Ongoing Monitoring and changes

You won’t be able to instantly recover from a core update, but by continuing to monitor and make changes to make your website easier for your customers and provide the most helpful information. You will end up winning more core updates than you lose.

Why sites using AI are often affected worse than other sites

When generative artificial intelligence first became popular around 2021-2022, you could easily generate hundreds of blog articles in a very short period of time, obviously much faster than a copywriter could write, so business owners and SEO’s would generate hundreds of articles for their websites at a low cost and see a great improvement in organic ranking results on Google. Since then, with each Google Core Update, websites using AI-generated content have continued to be negatively affected and hit hard.

But why has this happened? When first reading a piece of AI-generated content, it reads really well, and it does read like a professionally written article, but it lacks depth. When you read a few, you can see that each piece of content has a very similar flow, using dot points, em dashes, and usually American English spelling; in Australia, we use British English. But the biggest issue I find with AI content, besides very surface-level coverage, is that it doesn’t have the personality that human writing has, to explain the concept using that person’s expert knowledge in their field.

How do I make my website ‘core update-proof’?

This is a great question, and I wish there were a way that we could make websites core update-proof. Whilst we can’t make a website update proof, we can stick to Googles principles of creating content within the EEAT framework and staying away from spammy practices.

Let’s talk about EEAT, this is the most important principle to stick by, to ensure that your website is more likely to see a boost in traffic, every time a core update comes around. EEAT stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness. If you can provide and demonstrate all of these factors, naturally on your website and throughout your content, you will continue to see growth in your Google Search Rankings.

 

If you would like to learn more about Google Core Updates or need some support with SEO on your website, please feel free to reach out and one of our team members will get back to you as spoon as possible.