July 2025 SEO Industry News Highlights: Key Updates and Trends
Google Core Update: Two Waves of Ranking Changes
Google’s June 2025 core update concluded with two waves of ranking changes. Sites previously impacted by the 2023 Helpful Content Update are now showing signs of recovery, indicating Google’s continued focus on improving search quality and rewarding authoritative, user-centric content.
Search Console Insights: New Performance Metrics
Google Search Console now offers enhanced insights reports, providing performance metrics for individual pages. These data-driven reports serve as a starting point for deeper analysis, helping site owners identify underperforming pages and optimize their strategies.
Web Guide Experiment: AI-Driven Topic Grouping
Google Search Labs introduced the Web Guide experiment, leveraging AI to group related search results by topic without generating summaries. This feature aims to enhance user experience by presenting cohesive topic clusters, potentially reshaping how users interact with search results.
AI Summaries in Discover: Impact on Publisher Traffic
Google Discover now includes AI-generated summary cards for search results, a move that could reduce direct traffic to publishers. SEO professionals must adapt by prioritizing content visibility and optimizing for AI-driven discovery features.
Google Trends API: Alpha Testing for SEO Analysis
A new Google Trends API is in Alpha testing, offering scalable and comparable trend data for SEO analysis. This tool promises to provide valuable insights into search behavior, helping marketers make data-driven decisions.
Source: Lumar.io blog