digital marketing

Google March 2025 Core Update Done Rolling Out

28 March 2025
Bourahima


Google Core Explosion

Google’s March 2025 core update is now done rolling out, it took 14 days, starting on March 13, 2025 at around 12:23 pm ET and ending on March 27, 2025 at around 8:34 am ET. Google posted saying, “The rollout was complete as of March 27, 2025.”

This was the first core update of the year, but we are expecting more core updates, more often, this year – so we will see.

Google March 2025 Core Update Quick Facts:

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

  • Name: Google March 2025 Broad Core Update

  • Launched: March 13, 2025 at around 12:30 pm ET

  • Completed: March 27, 2025 at around 8:34 am ET

  • Targets: It looks at all types of content

  • Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages

  • Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.

  • Impact: The normal core update – updating some of the “core systems”. Google said this March update is a “regular update.” Maybe content creators will see better results but not sure on that.

  • Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.

  • Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.

  • Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Google March 2025 Core Update Volatility

Some sites got absolutely hammered, while some others saw huge lifts in Google Search ranking visibility. But this core update, at least based on what I am tracking, did not seem as widespread as some previous core updates. I can be wrong and those who saw huge movement, I know – you were really impacted by this update. But I did not see the same level of complaints about this core update that I saw with some of the more recent ones.

What did we see? Well, we saw that the update started to kick in a couple of days after it was announced, around March 16th or so and then it calmed down a bit. Then we saw some confusion from some of the Google tracking tools a few days after that. Finally, we saw some more volatility around March 26th.

Just a reminder, Google said any volatility prior to the announcement of the core update was unrelated to the March core update.

Google March 2025 Core Update Details

There were three pieces of unique details Google posted about this core update.

(1) Google wrote the rollout “may take up to 2 weeks to complete.”

(2) Google wrote this is a “regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”

(3) Google wrote they will continue “to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year.” Adding they did some efforts around this earlier and will do more later, “Some have already happened; additional ones will come later,” Google said. Google added later that some sites may never recover fully but they will continue to work throughout 2025 on this topic.

Below you will find the third-party tracking tools and chatter within the SEO community. The story that tells is that some feel Google was testing this core update in the wild for days or weeks prior to the rollout of this update. But as of the past day or so, volatility was pretty calm relative for a core update. That being said, as of this morning, the tools are also pretty calm, again, relative for a core update.

Google Tracking Tools On March 2025 Core Update

Here are screenshots from the third party tools, so you can see what volatility they reported over this rollout period. Just a reminder, don’t forget the confusion we reported on during this update:

Semrush:

Semrush

SimilarWeb:

Similarweb

Mozcast:

Mozcast

Algoroo:

Algoroo

Advanced Web Rankings:

Advancedwebranking

Accuranker:

Accuranker

Cognitive SEO:

Cognitiveseo

Wincher:

Wincher

Mangools (looks broken?):

Mangools

Sistrix:

Sistrix

Data For SEO:

Dataforseo

SERPstat:

Serpstat

Google March 2025 Core Update Chatter

Here is some select chatter from this core update from within the SEO community on this site and WebmasterWorld:

I lost 30% of my Google traffic in March 2024, I now have lost 40% more, so I’m at 70% loss of google traffic, it’s almost nothing. Being outranked by sites like Cookpad is super discouraging when we right everything the way Google wants it. I feel like after 15 years in this business I’m shifting my entire mindset to focus on email and digital products. I am mostly annoyed with myself being complacent and not expecting Google to wipe the rest of my traffic with one update.

Same happened to me but much earlier. May 2022. I wasted 2/3 years hoping to get my traffic back. Mostly 2 years. In the past year, I kind of accepted this was done.

Traffic dropped 50 percents. Whats going on…

Seeing a drop too.

Don’t know why its doing it. In any event most of the traffic died years back. Youtube is showing me an advert every 5 minutes the last few days so there must be something going on.

All indications are that it has already started

50% down on very low traffic.

After what looked to be some success in the past couple of weeks, Google has now undone all of it. Thanks a lot.

My number of indexed posts is being reduced in this update. That’s very strange considering my impressions and traffic have risen slightly. Before the update, I only had 50% of my posts indexed. I can only assume most bloggers are losing webpages in the index.

I lost around 5% of my previously indexed posts.

Biggest drop since Panda algo was released years ago. Drop is about -70%.

And this updated aimed our main traffic pages. They are ALL gone by now.

ebay is down as well. Amazon sales are up again and gained +50% since this updated started.

Shop, the number of visitors is increasing, but sales have dropped to a minimum. Only bots are coming from Google. Result: -75% drop in profits compared to last year, minus 45% compared to last month
News page: Here, the number of visitors is also increasing, but not because of the news, but because of the rest. Google has practically sorted out the news. And as Martin has already written, the nonsense in the top positions on Google is increasing, and there is also more and more nonsense in Google News that does not comply with the guidelines.

This time, the update seems to be targeting small websites and especially shops. I wonder why there is no outcry outside the SEO community…

Previous Broad Core Updates

Here is a list of the most recent core updates we’ve seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.

Previous Helpful Content Update Impact

Here is the list of the previous Google helpful content updates:

Video On Completion Of March 2025 Core Update

Here is a quick video I made to sum it up:

So, how did you all do with this update?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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