December 11, 2025
As of December 29, the December 2025 core update is officially complete:
The update was expected to take up to three weeks and in the end, took 18 days to complete its rollout. As a ‘regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites’ there was nothing new to worry about, but as anticipated, the update did cause a lot of volatility in the search results.
This update came as no surprise - we’d seen plenty of volatility in the SERPs prior to the release, as reported by Barry Schwartz:
Schwartz had also warned people via X a few days before the rollout that John Mueller had confirmed an upcoming update, though many didn’t expect it to be as soon as it was.
Google had previously stated there would be ‘more updates, more often’ at the Web Creator Conversion Event in October 2024. However, the December 2025 core update was only the third and final update of 2025, following the March 2025 core update and the June 2025 core update, along with the August 2025 spam update.
As usual, reactions to the update weren’t particularly positive, especially as it was so close to Christmas. Chandan Singh responded to Google Search Central’s announcement on X:
Volatility is typically high during a broad core update. This time, volatility was fairly up and down, spiking a few days after the announcement, then settling before spiking again December 20, then cooling down again.
In terms of effect, Will Flannigan, Senior SEO Editor for the Wall Street Journal, noted that Indian-based news publishers were heavily impacted by the update:
Glenn Gabe commented on Flannigan’s post, saying that it wasn’t just India-based news publishers, many across a number of countries were also hit.
Gabe also reported that YMYL (your money or your life) categories saw a significant amount of volatility, with those in the financial sector seeing the most surges/drops. He also noted that sites affected by the previous update, the June 2025 core update, were seeing reversals - both good and bad.
Overall, this seemed to be quite a big core update, with a lot of volatility for many sites in many countries.
Google releases core updates multiple times throughout the year to ‘make significant broad changes to [our] search algorithms and systems’.
Here’s a timeline of the last couple of years:
This was quite a big update, and many were negatively impacted. However, as with all updates, there is no specific advice to follow. Just focus on creating helpful content and following E.E.A.T guidelines.
Remember volatility can take a while to settle after an update has completed, so don’t panic if you haven’t yet recovered, it may well be temporary.
If you are worried about how this update has affected your site, feel free to get in touch with us today.
