What Happened & What It Means for Your Site
Rollout highlights:
- Launched: June 30, 2025, around 7:34 AM PDT
- Completed: July 17, 2025, approximately 1:00–4:18 AM PDT
- Duration: ~16 days and 18 hours
Google describes this as a “regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”
What This Core Update Did
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This was Google’s second broad core update of 2025 (after March’s). It’s global, language-agnostic, and affects all verticals—for example, web search, Discover, AI Overview, and featured snippets.
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The update sparked strong ranking volatility some sites saw major gains, others sharp declines, and many remained stable.
Who Won & Who Lost
Winners:
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YouTube and Wikipedia saw big jumps in visibility, hitting multi‑year peaks.
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Independent & long‑standing sites, especially those with clear author credentials, in-depth visuals, and well-organised layouts, also surged.
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Some sites initially affected by 2023’s Helpful Content Update (HCU(X)) began partial or full recovery, which is a real relief for struggling publishers.
Losers:
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Major retail and e‑commerce: Amazon, eBay, Nordstrom, and Target all bailed with visibility drops.
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LinkedIn saw widespread visibility loss, including in core site sections like company and jobs pages.
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YMYL domains in health, finance, and legal all faced pronounced volatility. Some sites that had earlier recovered fell again.
Subtle Signals & Emerging Trends
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Pre-rollout volatility in early to mid-June suggested Google may have pushed behind-the-scenes review updates, particularly impacting sites affected by earlier review systems.
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The update influenced AI Overview and AI Mode results, losing visibility in regular search, and also dropped in AI surfaces.
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Technical SEO standards tightened: issues like JavaScript rendering, crawl errors, redirect chains, and messy URL setups led to deindexing in some cases.
What to Do Now
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Audit your performance
Use Search Console and SEO tools to compare rankings and traffic before and after July 17. Spot durable shifts vs. temporary dips.
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Supercharge your quality
Follow Google’s core update guidance: enhance authenticity, structure, usefulness, and improve readability with visuals and E‑E‑A‑T signals.
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Fix technical issues ASAP
Check for JavaScript errors, redirects, and crawl problems. Google is getting stricter. Prioritise pages deindexed or losing visibility due to tech glitches.
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Track niche and competitor response
If others in your space surged or dropped, reverse engineer what changed, especially in YMYL or specialised verticals.
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Stay proactive for fall
With another core update likely this autumn, use this time to recover and reinforce quality across your site.
This June 2025 core update was big but nuanced. It offered hopeful recoveries for sites penalised in 2023, while challenging large e‑commerce, YMYL sites, and technically weak domains. The key to staying resilient: focus on true user value, polish technical foundations, and watch your data.
