What a Google core update can actually mean for your business
Every few months, a headline does the rounds: Google has rolled out another “core update.” Marketing forums light up, agencies send out panicked emails, and business owners who have no idea what any of it means start wondering if they’re about to lose all their customers.
I’ve watched a lot of these updates roll through real client sites over the years. Here’s what actually happens, and what doesn’t.
Core updates aren't rare, and they're rarely about you specifically
Google runs broad updates to its search algorithm several times a year, sometimes with a name attached that gets media coverage, sometimes without. Google’s own official documentation on core updates describes them as broad changes “designed to ensure that overall, we’re delivering on our mission to present helpful and reliable results for searchers,” and explicitly states they don’t target specific sites or individual pages. Announcements and technical detail on each one show up on the Search Central Blog as they roll out.
That distinction matters. If your rankings move after an update, it’s rarely because Google “targeted” you. It’s because Google’s assessment of relative quality across your whole competitive category shifted, and your site’s position moved relative to everyone else’s, not because of some switch flipped specifically on your business.
This isn’t happening in isolation either. It’s landing at the same time as the shift I’ve written about separately, how AI search is changing how customers find your business in the first place. A core update changes where you rank. AI Overviews change whether ranking well even results in a click. Both matter, and they compound.
What actually predicts whether you're affected
Google has published its own guidance on this for years, and it comes back to the same handful of questions in different words each time: is this content genuinely useful, does it come from someone who clearly knows the topic, and does the site behave like something built to serve a real reader rather than to game a ranking.
In a competitive local category, plumbing is a good example, the majority of business websites say almost exactly the same thing: what they do, where they service, a phone number. When a core update rolls through, it’s disproportionately the sites saying only that, with nothing beyond it, that move down, and the ones with genuine depth, real examples of jobs done, real explanations of how something works, a real person’s name attached to the advice, that hold their position or move up. It’s less “Google changed the rules” and more “Google got better at telling the difference between a real answer and a placeholder.”
It happens to household names too
HubSpot is a useful, well-documented example, not because it’s a small business, but because the mechanism is identical regardless of size. Following the March 2024 core and spam updates, and further hit by the November and December 2024 updates, HubSpot’s blog lost roughly 81% of its organic search traffic year on year, with total domain traffic down somewhere around 50 to 60%, as covered by Search Engine Land.
The cause wasn’t a technical mistake.
HubSpot’s blog had spent years publishing content only loosely connected to its actual product, cover letter examples, sales quotes, general career advice, alongside genuine CRM and marketing content. That breadth diluted the topical authority Google could see in their core subject matter, and when the update reassessed relative quality across the category, the unrelated content dragged the rest down with it.
Worth noting: HubSpot’s revenue still grew 22% year on year through this, because their business depends heavily on direct and enterprise traffic, not blog visitors, a reminder that the impact of a core update depends entirely on how exposed your actual business is to organic search traffic in the first place.
What I actually tell clients when an update hits
- Don’t touch anything in the first week or two. Updates take time to fully roll out, and reacting to day-two movement with a panicked content overhaul usually means fixing the wrong thing, or breaking something that was fine.
- Check whether it’s actually the update, or something else. A rankings drop that lines up with an update announcement isn’t automatically caused by it. I’ve seen clients blame a core update for a drop that turned out to be a broken redirect, a missing tracking tag, or a seasonal dip that happens every year regardless of Google. The first job is ruling out the boring, fixable explanations before assuming it’s algorithmic.
- Look at the pattern across the whole site, not one page. One page moving is normal, minor fluctuation. Several pages in the same category moving the same direction is a real signal worth investigating.
- Then, and only then, revisit the fundamentals. If it genuinely was the update, the fix is almost never a quick technical tweak. It’s the slower work, content that demonstrates real experience and expertise, a site that’s clearly run by identifiable, credible people, and pages that give a visitor more than the bare minimum.
Why this should matter to you even if nothing's dropped yet
Here’s the part most business owners never think to check: is whoever’s currently managing your SEO, content, or website actually accounting for any of this, or are they still running the same playbook they were three years ago?
It’s a fair, specific question to put to your own agency or contractor, and it’s worth asking directly:
- When was the last core update, and did they check whether it affected your site specifically, or did you have to ask first?
- Can they show you, in your own Google Search Console data, what actually changed after the last update, not a generic explanation of what core updates are?
- Has your content strategy changed at all in response to AI Overviews and AI search, or is it the same content plan from before any of this existed?
- If your traffic has dropped, can they tell you specifically whether it’s a core update, a technical issue, or AI search reducing clicks, three completely different problems with three different fixes, rather than one vague answer that covers all of them?
If the honest answer is that nobody’s actually looked, that’s not necessarily a sign you’re being ripped off, plenty of competent people are still catching up to how fast this has moved. But it is a sign that whatever work has been done wasn’t built with the current landscape in mind, and it’s worth having someone independently check whether it still holds up, the same way I’ve written about elsewhere regarding auditing other people’s marketing work.
The businesses that don't panic about updates
Adrenalin Offroad Centre, a client I worked with in 2022, is a useful example of why this matters. More than three years after that original engagement ended, organic search still delivers 57.8% of all traffic to their site, ahead of every other channel combined, without any ongoing SEO retainer.
That’s not because they got lucky with one update. It’s because the work was built on genuine content and real expertise from the start, which is far less exposed to whatever Google changes next than a site relying on thin pages and keyword tricks ever was.
That’s really the whole point of a core update, for a business owner. It’s not a threat to react to every time it makes headlines. It’s a periodic check on whether your site is actually good, and the businesses with nothing to fix don’t lose much sleep over it.
If you’ve seen a ranking or traffic change and aren’t sure whether it’s a core update, something technical, or something else entirely, get in touch and I’ll help you work out which one it actually is before you change anything.
I’ve watched enough of these updates hit real client sites to know panic is rarely the right first response. If your traffic has shifted and you want a straight answer on what actually happened, see how I could help.
