Google's June 2025 core update Impact - #SEOFOMO TL;DR July 21st, 2025

The latest news this week in SEO and AI search. There's so much to cover. The Google update, ChatGPT releases, and to go through it all, I have today with me the wonderful Tori Gray, who's the founder, director, CEO of The Gray Dot Company. Thank you very much, Tori, for coming over.

Thank you for having me, Aleyda. It's always wonderful to see you.

Likewise. And before starting to go through the latest in SEO, I want to thank SimilarWeb, who are today a sponsor. Let's start with the top news of the week that in this case has been the release of the latest Google Core Update. Of course, people wanted to know what happened. And on one hand, Marie Haynes did this wonderful, insightful, comprehensive analysis, analyzing pages that improved following the June Core Update, identifying patterns. She shared the shifts. That she saw across many different cases. And at the end, she shared a very actionable summary establishing the patterns that she had identified. And I have to say that it doesn't surprise me that these websites she saw an improvement demonstrating firsthand experience, prioritize structure and scannability, include truly helpful visuals, Offer actionable, practical advice, include troubleshooting and FAQs, aim to be complete one-stop resource, which it is meant to be the goal of these updates at the end of the day. I also had the chance to go a few verticals for which I have clients in e-commerce, SaaS. Also, I had the chance to take a look at a little bit of a few publications that used to rank for product-related queries, the best type of queries, and so some of the patterns aligned to what Mari mentioned, right? The major, more authoritative retailers or small but highly specialized gained in visibility for product terms, like for example, summer dresses instead of the brands, which I can understand Google really wants to provide diversity for those top of broader queries. It was interesting to see that in the case of e-commerce brand, it's not that they all decreased necessarily. A lot of them also saw an increase in traffic, at least the third-party traffic data that I was able to check, because there were a lot of product packs that stopped being showcased at the top. Many of them were shown even before the first organically ranked page, and now it's below or in third position, right? I can see many, especially product packs, not being right at the top. And then with SaaS, what I could also see is that big players decreasing again in rankings visibility for niche topics. So more specialized websites ranking in this case for software-related terms, which again makes sense because they should have much more crystallization, niche type of authority for them.

I work in similar industries. So I think this is very much what we're seeing. And I'd say like my overall thought here is I'm excited to see a lot more what feels like nuance. It felt like when we switched to like the brand first, I understood why it solved a lot of problems for Google. Users were seeking brands, and so Google was going to provide that. You know, there's some more trust just out of the gate, right? Because you already have trust in that brand, so you can feel safe purchasing from them. You, you know what you're getting into. But at the same time, I feel like it's been overbalanced on one side of the spectrum, for it's been all big brands sort of all the time. It felt like even when that brand doesn't necessarily have a specialization. So I'm excited to see that nuance in where brands have highly specialized knowledge. So whether it's a niche site, but where do you have true expertise and where can you show that and where can you start to have visibility for that? That balance I think has been sorely missing and I'm excited to see it, especially in a world of small publishers struggling a lot. So it's been a good month.

100%. I have heard also from people who specialize on affiliates and had been seeing so many decreases and negative trends, they actually saw a few increases in those affiliates that they had been doing an actual great job aligning with all of this EAT experience-first best practices. Then what also took my attention was to see the increase in discussions and forums across many of this. Unsurprisingly, Google also released a week and a half ago or so, their new filter to be able to see the impact and evolution of this in the Google Search Console. And all of this shows the importance of experience and user-generated content. This other topic is the great decoupling of clicks and impressions. Coincidentally, the type of websites that I have seen that haven't been affected by the great decoupling are especially those SaaS and also marketplaces that Worked a lot on one hand with their community, and then on the other hand, have gone very in depth with topical clusters, but to become an actual reliable resource for decision-making for their audiences, right? And this is what on one hand here, Tom Kapper covers in the Whiteboard Friday about the greater coupling of clicks and impressions, going through it, Mm-hmm. explaining what it is and then sharing advice of what can we do? How is this the consequence of a change of the paradigm? Not only because of the rise of AI search platforms and AI overviews. Actually, a lot of the complaint in e-commerce is happening not because of AI overviews, because the product packs. So all of these search features, but how on one hand we should focus much more on more meaningful metrics rather than just clicks on the other hand. Mm-hmm. And the type of additional activities that we should embrace. This ties very well also with Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson's piece regarding topic-first SEO, because of what I mentioned before, the players that I have seen that haven't been affected by the great decoupling are the ones that have nailed this in a way that is actually very meaningful for their business, focusing on those topics that actually align and have to do with your different product lines, with your different service areas, and where you should be able to provide actual value. And it's more important than ever because speaking of the Great Decompling, I believe that unfortunately this only is going to get even worse, let's say, because of the announcement of Google Discover adding AI summaries, threatening publishers with further traffic decline on one hand. And then of course, Google is starting to test also the search box with an AI mode button, which is reasonable. We knew that this was going to happen, but maybe not that fast, right? I was expecting Google to test a lot first, their monetization with AI mode and AI overviews even further.

I think this is a great piece. And one thing I'd emphasize specific to this one is it's not embrace it or fight it. It's, and, you know, you're doing both. You're doing what you can to retain traffic because I think that that frankly is underrated. You know, I hear a lot of conversations about how people are, hey, it's okay that we lost all this traffic because we've retained our conversions. And I think we're, we're being maybe a little short-sighted about the long wind downwind effect of what happens to our funnel when we're not growing top of funnel through the visibility, through the traffic that we've been able to drive and perhaps the email marketing, the remarketing, the other forms of marketing we can do with users because we got them in the first place. I think there's going to be frankly a growth in how do we maintain our moat? How do we keep as much traffic as possible? I think that that's gonna be a growing need. So in a world, how do we improve our click-through rate? How do we improve our conversion rate on our site so that when people do come, we can maximize that return in as much as possible in addition to the work of finding new sources of traffic, of taking all these tactics. But you actually, Aleyda, had a great post kind of summarizing like, how do we create content? That really stands out, that does something that AI can't do, right? Some of the baseline, you know, we've talked about templates. What are the assets that are sharing? What are the data points? How can you provide news? What can AI not do? If AI is rewriting what you are writing, how do you create something that requires a click, that requires interaction and requires a higher bar of interaction than an AI can potentially easily replace today? So I've seen an example, say, of people drafting a cover letter where you can, you know, replace names. Right? So some of those very sort of easier entry-level templates that are more text-based, those are going to be easier to replicate by an AI than more advanced functionality. So I think going back to Kevin's post, starting with your user, starting with what, what are you great at and why? Start there. If you're still starting your SEO work with a list of keywords that drive volume, I'm sorry, but you're doing it wrong and you have been for a while. And it's not like you should ignore that data. You can use that to guide, to make sure you're mirroring language. So you're speaking to your user on the same terms, but if that's guiding what content you're creating and why, I think you're missing the forest for the trees, right? You're not speaking to your customer. You're not speaking to their needs at every stage of the funnel. And so starting with that topic, starting with how do I solve their problem? How do I do it in a meaningful way with the brand that connects with them, with product features and tooling that really helps them meet those needs in a way that's harder for AI to replicate? Like, that's how we stand out.

I love this criteria that you mentioned, something that AI cannot replicate. That is the key, right? And has to do with experience first at the end of the day. And this is a content that You really need people who has know-how to write, not generic writers that don't know your business, don't know your audience, and don't have the know-how. And I can understand how difficult that is having that type of specialization and expertise. And that is why it is so critical to work along with experts in case you don't have that expertise or experience, right? It becomes fundamental now.

You have to go deeper. You have to go deeper. You have to go deeper in those user needs and get smarter and and dig deeper into our classic marketing knowledge or psychology. How do we meet those needs? So it's expertise. And I'd also argue, you made a great point about UGC. This post, this is the one I was talking about.

Yes.

Like how, how can users help you do that at scale? They may be experts, they may not be experts, but they may bring a new use case, a new opinion. They bring social proof. You know, you brought up UGC before. If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with UGC and I think this has been a tremendously underleveraged tactic. For community building, for our users, for brands for a very long time in the SEO world and just ignore it at your peril.

I want to also highlight something that is connected with this because a lot of this latest releases, trends, et cetera, and because of the great decoupling, oh, less traffic, less reliant on traditional SEO, more on AI search, et cetera. A lot of people think that Oh, SEO is dying. SEO is not as important. And AI search is booming, even if still realistically right now it's just 2 or 3% of the traffic of any major website out there. But in this piece here, Lily makes an amazing point or many different points about why SEO best practices still apply in any case, are even more important than ever for whatever you want to call AI search optimization, GEO, AO, whatever acronym. The lack of JavaScript. Clients are rendering support by AI bots on one hand, then you structure the content, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. And I love how she went through so many of the different areas that we should be caring about digital PR as well. Oh, now it seems that all of a sudden we are talking about citations are important. Like if you were doing good SEO and if you care about enhancing and improving your brand popularity and authority, you should have cared about citations even before. Perfect. The importance of structured data too. If you have one of those situations and scenarios in which your boss, your client ends up arguing about the importance of SEO principles, best practices for AI search optimization, here you have.

One thing I just want to underscore and laugh at is there's a part where she says, I don't think I'm the only SEO professional that read this documentation. She's pointing to Google's documentation about how to show up in AI search that thought like, this is just respun everything we've heard before. But I just want to underline that like 5 times and encourage people to go read that piece from Google. Because if you look at the how do you show up in AI, it's essentially technical SEO. Make sure your site is literally accessible to bots. Like, yes. And then the second section is SEO best practices. It's literally How do you show up in AIOs? You do SEO and then you do SEO again, right? And it's amusing, especially when you think of the broader conversation. Exactly what Lily is pointing out here is people are talking about AI search as if it's this brand new thing and not an evolution of what we were doing. So if you pull up, think about what is SEO. SEO is talking to users and being influential to users via the medium of bots. And that's what AIO is. That's what AEO, whatever geo, whatever term you want to call it. We are still talking to users and trying to influence them. We are doing it through the medium. So I think that there's a big future. I think it will evolve. I think what tools we do, you know, how do we show up? How do we get our Shopify listings, for example, to make sure that they're showing up in ChatGPT, in AI overviews? There's going to be new merchant centers. There's going to be new feeds. There's going to be new schema, there's going to be new mechanisms that we're going to need to learn. Certainly it is an evolution, but it is at its core what we do and what we have been doing.

100%. I love how you worded it. Last but not least this week, yet another launch by OpenAI, something that we knew was coming as well, just didn't know when. The introduction of the ChatGPT agent bridging research and action. able to perform different set of tasks concatenated. The aim is that they can complete full workflows for you. Funnily enough, and I don't know if it is because they saw it coming, and we can see now on screen a few of the examples that they gave. Yes, agents can run code, agents can connect your apps, agents can book a flight for you. It was a week or a couple of weeks ago. That Shopify updated a disclosure across all of their e-commerce that use their platform in their robots.txt saying that they don't allow, or they don't want to allow full tasks without a human until the very end of the process, completely automated, that you need to have a manual Mm-hmm. slash human intervention at the end. The ChatGPT agent, on one hand, I'm excited because as an SEO myself, I can see how it can help me to accelerate and automate many of this legwork that we tend to do on one hand, but yes, with the constraints of privacy matters, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, quality on the other hand, and then at the same time, the thought that Unfortunately, I can also see it and I am expecting in the next few days how there are some LinkedIn posts start popping up. You don't need a marketing team anymore of, of, of 20.

Like, we'll do it for you. Yeah.

ChatGPT with 30 configurations of this will end up doing all of your marketers' work, right?

I mean, listen, everyone is apparently trying to replace humans left and right. They're trying to say you don't need a marketing team, ChatGPT ChatGPT can do it for you. You don't need an engineering team anymore. We can build your entire app. But listen, companies have put forth entire apps. There was a story I was reading about Reddit about an agency who was a development agency using AI to build more quickly. And, you know, Reddit did what Reddit does. They quickly got ahold of it and very quickly pointed out that every single one of those apps was incredibly hackable. If we wanna think about the security and privacy implications of all of this, especially when your, your money and your time, potentially your life is on the line with some of these things that we're asking these tools to do. We can and should be experimenting. I think there's a lot of exciting things happening here, but at the same time, there's a first mover advantage and there's a first mover disadvantage of dealing with the repercussions of what is inevitably going to come. It's not even ChatGPT specific, right? Because there's plenty of LLMs and plenty of agents that are coming to do this functionality. These things are. Important and they open you up to a lot of business risk, legal risk, financial risk, all of these pieces. So be thoughtful about when and how you apply these.

As with everything with AI, right? We want to leverage it in a smart way, in a meaningful way as well, while preserving quality, while minimizing risk, while preserving also all of these requirements that we have business-wise. So we need to do it in a thoughtful, Way, 100%. And to wrap up with today's edition, I want to thank again Similarweb for their sponsorship. If you haven't checked yet their AI traffic report, go and take a look. They are sharing insights that I haven't seen in other platforms that can help you to make informed decisions in your optimization action towards AI rather than just following generic advice out there that might not necessarily be as meaningful for you. So definitely go and take a look. And if you don't want to wait until the next edition of the SEO for Motulondo You Read or the newsletter, go and take a look at this SEO news aggregator in real time, submit your own resources, submit your own news, and check out what are the trending stories to avoid that you miss out. And thank you very much again, Tori, for joining. It has been a pleasure as always to talk with you. And if you enjoyed today's episode, remember to like it, remember to subscribe to the channel, and until the next edition, bye-bye. Bye.