SEO in 2025: Adapting to Google’s New Reality

By Molly Owens

In the latter half of 2023 and throughout 2024, the SEO landscape has been thrown into upheaval. Monumental updates and changes have left many small- and mid-size websites reeling, especially in niches where they once outperformed larger competitors.

The reality is, SEO results almost never happen in a vacuum. Every action you take on your site is influenced by a web of concurrent developments — algorithm updates, SERP feature shifts, and more. This makes it difficult to isolate variables and pinpoint what’s really driving disruptions in your performance.

Understanding what’s currently happening in the world of SEO is more vital than ever for informing your strategy as you plan for what’s ahead in 2025.

A timeline of SEO turbulence: Late 2023 into 2024

The last six months of 2023 saw relentless volatility in the SERPs, with one major algorithm update after another.

August 2023 Core Update: This marked the beginning of a turbulent period, shaking up rankings across the board.
September Helpful Content Update (HCU): Previously separate from core updates, this iteration has left many sites struggling to recover.
October and November Core Updates: These continued the trend of volatility, with significant impacts on rankings and traffic.
Google’s Deal with Reddit: In February of 2024, Google licensed Reddit’s content to train its AI models. At the same time, Reddit’s presence in the SERPs exploded, sparking debate about its usefulness and safety for users. While Reddit’s AI overview appearances are dwindling, its influence on search visibility remains significant.
March 2024 Core Update: This 45-day-long update aimed to reduce unhelpful content by 40%, with harsh penalties for offenders. Sites were deindexed within days, making this one of the most impactful updates in recent memory.
August 2024 Core Update: With this update, Google acknowledged that many smaller sites saw major losses during the HCU, aiming to connect people with “a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches.” Early results show some signs of recovery for those sites.

Adding to the complexity, Google replaced the First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vitals (CWV) metric. While not a primary ranking factor, INP and CWV could act as tie-breakers among top-ranking pages — a crucial detail given the fierce competition on the SERP today.