Google’s 2025 Algorithm Changes

As the clocks ticked down to midnight on December 31st, 1999, the team at Google celebrated their rise to the top of the search engine list. Less than two years after its founding, it had grown to be the most used search engine in the world, becoming the very face of the internet for millions of users worldwide. Twenty-five years later, Google hasn’t just maintained its position as the most popular search engine, it has dominated the market, eliminating all major competition and vastly outperforming rivals like Yahoo and Bing. Approximately 91% of internet queries go through Google, and for any business looking to use the internet to market itself (which should be every business), success on Google is the foundation for success in sales.

How does Google stay on top of its?pedestal? The answer lies within algorithms – by providing users with the best and most relevant information related to their searches, people are more likely to come back and use Google for future searches. The?algorithms are specifically designed to identify the most relevant pages matching a user’s search query, then present these results in a ranked order for convenient browsing.

Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, but recent advancements are particularly impactful, potentially reshaping your business’s SEO performance. Read on to learn more about some of these?changes and how they might affect your business’s search rankings!

Content Quality & Backlinks

Google’s algorithms take a look through your website and identify the content on your page; this process is known as crawling. When your site is crawled, Google gives your site a score, determining just how credible, relevant, and trustworthy your site is to potential users. This is your site’s authority, and it’s become increasingly important in recent years for sites trying to rank higher for SEO.

First and foremost, your site needs high-quality content – and lots of it. A significant portion of your authority comes directly from the written content on your website, and there’s simply no substitute for well-written information on topics that users want to learn about.

Lately, another important facet of authority has been backlinks. When another website references your webpage and has a link back to your page, Google’s algorithms determine that your website must have a certain degree of credibility. Without these backlinks, or without pages full of authoritative content, it’s unlikely your site will drive the results you’re looking for.

AI Overviews

If you’ve used Google in the last six months, you’ve probably noticed that “AI overviews” tend to be the first result to many simple or question-related queries. Users have mixed feelings about these overviews: they’re extremely convenient at providing bite-sized amounts of information, but their accuracy and trustworthiness is questionable as AI-generated content. What we know for sure, however, is that these overviews have significantly decreased the click-through rate of searches.

The source of this decrease is simple. As people find information they need on the AI overview, they become less likely to click on actual webpages to find their answers, leading to less traffic through to websites, especially those lower on the list. Now more than ever, it’s important for businesses to appear at the top of SEO rankings, or risk not being seen or clicked on at all.

AI Content on Sites

Though AI-generated content often flows well when read, it’s usually not the best option for use on your website. AI-generated content is often easy to detect (oftentimes by using AI itself) and is frequently considered lower-quality by Google’s algorithms. If the content goes over irrelevant topics, or doesn’t fully develop its thoughts about the most important concepts, Google’s algorithm can flag it as poor content, which can then significantly harm your SEO rankings.

A key consideration is whether AI-generated content raises legitimate copyright concerns. Since this content is written using large databases of other people’s writings, it may be vulnerable to future legal developments. It’s important to consider this before filling your site with content that may need to be removed later.

There’s always a lot going on in the world of Google and SEO, and these are just a few of the most important topics as of late. Though it can be difficult to stay on the cutting edge of every little change made to the algorithm, it’s critically important for businesses to continuously optimize their strategies to improve search rankings.

If you’re looking for a partner to help navigate Google’s algorithms and boost your search rankings, look no further than Baer Performance Marketing! We’ve been Google Certified for well over a decade, and we’d love to chat about how we can make your marketing more effective. Reach out to us today for a free consultation!