Google released the December 2025 core update today, the company announced.

This is the third core update of 2025 and the fourth major Google algorithm update overall. Earlier this year, Google rolled out the August 2025 spam update, which followed the June 2025 core update and the March 2025 core update.

What Google is saying. Google updated its Search Status Dashboard to state:

• “Released the December 2025 core update. The rollout may take up to 3 weeks to complete.”

Google added on LinkedIn:

• “This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”

About core updates. Core updates roll out several times each year. They introduce broad, significant changes to Google’s search algorithms and systems, which is why Google announces them.

• Google also releases some smaller, unannounced core updates.
• It has been a long time since the last core update. While many expected Google to roll out core updates more frequently, that didn’t happen.

Video on this core update. I made this short video a few hours after publishing this story:

What to do if you are hit. Google did not share any new guidance specific to the December 2025 core update. However, in the past, Google has offered advice on what to consider if a core update negatively impacts your site:

• There aren’t specific actions to take to recover. A negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages.
• Google offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update.
• Google said you can see some recovery between core updates, but the biggest change would be after another core update.

In short: write helpful content for people and not to rank in search engines.

• “There’s nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they’ve been making satisfying content meant for people. For those that might not be ranking as well, we strongly encourage reading our creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page,” Google said previously.

For more details on Google core updates, you can read Google’s documentation.

Previous core updates. Here’s a timeline and our coverage of recent core updates:

• The June 2025 core update was on June 30 and ended on July 17.
• The March 2025 core update was on Mar. 13 and ended on Mar. 27.
• The December 2024 core update was on Dec. 12 and ended on Dec. 18.
• The November 2024 core update was on Nov. 11 and ended on Dec. 5.
• The August 2024 core update was on Aug. 15 and ended on Sept. 3.
• The March 2024 core update was on March 5 and ended on April 19.

Why we care. With any core update, we often see significant volatility in Google search results and rankings. These updates may improve visibility for your site or your clients’ sites, but some may experience fluctuations or even declines in rankings and organic traffic. We hope this update rewards your efforts and drives strong traffic and conversions.

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Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally after launching it in the US and India last August. Google also announced Spotlighting subscriptions, a feature that highlights links from your news subscriptions in Gemini and will soon appear in Google Search through AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Preferred Sources. Preferred Sources let searchers star publications in the Top Stories section of Google Search, and Google uses that signal to show more stories from those starred outlets. The feature entered beta in June, rolled out in the U.S. and India in August, and is now expanding globally.

Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search, wrote:

• “We’re now launching this feature globally: in the coming days, it will be available for English-language users worldwide, and we’ll roll it out to all supported languages early next year.”
• “People have selected a wide range of preferred sources — nearly 90,000 unique sources, from local blogs to global news outlets.”

When someone chooses a preferred source, they click through to that site twice as often on average, Google told me.

How it works. You click the star icon to the right of the Top Stories header in search results. After that, you can choose your preferred sources – assuming the site is publishing fresh content.

Google will then start to show you more of the latest updates from your selected sites in Top Stories “when they have new articles or posts that are relevant to your search,” Google added.

Spotlighting subscriptions. Google also announced Spotlighting subscriptions, a new feature that highlights links from your news subscriptions, “making it easier to spot content from sources you trust and helping you get more value from your subscriptions.”

• Google will prioritize links from your subscribed publications and surface them in a dedicated carousel.
• The feature is coming first to the Gemini app in the next few weeks, with AI Overviews and AI Mode to follow.

Why we care. Top Stories can drive meaningful traffic to publishers, so becoming a reader’s preferred source can be a valuable boost. You might look for a tasteful way to encourage loyal visitors to star your site—such as adding a small icon in your site or newsletter that reminds readers they can set your publication as a preferred source. With any luck, this gives publishers more ways to capture traffic and revenue.

Google is updating the links in AI Mode to make them more inviting to click. Google also expanded the Web Guides Labs test to the All tab, though you still need to opt in to try it.

Links in AI Mode. Google is “increasing the number of inline links in AI Mode, and updating the design of those links to make them more useful,” Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search, wrote.

• Google is also adding short contextual introductions to embedded links in AI Mode responses. These quick notes explain why a link might be worth clicking.
• We’ve seen Google test different inline and contextual links styles in AI Mode, and it’s now rolling out some of those experiences.
• Stein told us in August that these features were coming, and now they’re here.

What it looks like. Here’s a screenshot.

Expanding Web Guide to All tab. Google first added the Web Guide feature in the Web tab for those who opted into the search experiment. Now Google is rolling out Web Guide to the All tab. You still need to be in the search experiment.

• “We’ve heard positive feedback from users and websites about Web Guide, which helps people find links they may not have previously discovered and uses AI to organize links into helpful topic groups,” Google wrote.
• Google also said it doubled Web Guide’s speed.
• We spotted Google testing Web Guide in the All tab earlier.

What is Web Guide. Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways, pulling together pages that address specific parts of your query, Google said. It also uses a query fan-out technique – similar to AI Mode – by firing off multiple related searches at once to surface the most relevant results.

Google told me:

• “Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web, creating more powerful search capabilities that better surface web pages you may not have previously discovered.”

Why we care. Encouraging clicks from Google’s AI experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews, is welcome. We hope it drives more traffic to publishers and websites. Web Guide is also an experience that many in the search marketing community value. We’d like to see Google release it more broadly, without requiring a Search Labs opt-in.

Google Discover is less aligned to Google Search ranking, Andy Almeida from the Google Trust and Safety team, said yesterday at the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich yesterday.

A slide he posted on how existing systems help the Google Discover team solve problems, the slide says:

“Minimal alignment to search ranking gives us the tools we need to combat emerging abuse.”

What this means. It seems that this is an admission that Google Discover is not using Google’s search systems as tightly as it may have in the past for when it comes to combating abuse on that platform.

I asked Andy Almeida at the event what this means, and he said it means that Google Discover aims to surface lesser-known, less-established, and smaller publishers in the Discover feed. So while Google Search may not rank these smaller and less known publishers, Google Discover does. It does this by relying less on Google Search ranking and more on its own systems.

The spam problem. As I mentioned, Google Discover has a big AI spam problem. You have new sites using expired domains, or new throwaway domains, and finding loopholes to get spammy content surfacing in Google Discover. This is something that does not work as well in Google Search.

In 2019, Google told us that the core ranking systems do impact Google Discover, specifically that being hit by a core update can impact a site’s visibility in Google Discover. This seems like a step back from this.

Why we care. As we also said, Google is working hard on fixing the spam issues on Google Discover. Tweaking the balance of allowing new or lesser-known sites to perform well on Google Discover, while also preventing spam from showing up, is hard. Google is working on that now and hopes to find a solid solution for it.

But it also means Google is looking for ways to reward smaller publishers, who may write more about niche topics, within Google Discover. This is a good thing for smaller, and upcoming publishers – if Google can also solve the spam problem on Google Discover.

Google added a new section to the core updates search developer documentation that confirms it releases smaller core updates without announcing those updates. Google has told us this before, but has now added it explicitly to the search documentation.

What is new. Google added this new paragraph:

However, you don’t necessarily have to wait for a major core update to see the effect of your improvements. We’re continually making updates to our search algorithms, including smaller core updates. These updates are not announced because they aren’t widely noticeable, but they are another way that your content can see a rise in position (if you’ve made improvements).

What Google said. Google explained this section was added “To clarify that site owners that make content improvements can see a rise in position in Google Search results without having to wait for the next major core update.”

In fact, Danny Sullivan, the former Google Search Liaison, told us this in August 2019. He said then:

Broad core updates tend to happen every few months. Content that was impacted by one might not recover – assuming improvements have been made – until the next broad core update is released.

However, we’re constantly making updates to our search algorithms, including smaller core updates. We don’t announce all of these because they’re generally not widely noticeable. Still, when released, they can cause content to recover if improvements warrant.

A larger core update is coming soon. Today at the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich, John Mueller from Google said a core update is being worked on and hopes it will be released soon. He added, he would be surprised if it was released within a couple of weeks. But he had nothing to announce.

Why we care. This just confirms what we already know, that Google is often pushing out smaller core updates. But do expect a new core update to come sooner, rather than later. And then, you may see even bigger changes to the search results and its rankings.

Google added weekly and monthly views to Search Console performance reports. These options give you clearer, longer-term insights instead of relying only on the 24-hour view.

What it looks like. Here are a few photos I took during the announcement at the Google Search Central event in Zurich this morning:

Why we care. This small update gives SEOs, publishers, and site owners access to more detailed data. It can help you pinpoint why your performance shifted in a specific month, week, or day.