Updated: December 12, 2025 (Right after the official rollout)
Google officially dropped the December 2025 Core Update on December 11th at 9:25 AM PST!
This is the **third core update of 2025**, and based on the first 24 hours, it looks like one of the harshest we've seen in the last two years.
The volatility we saw from December 3rd to the 8th? That was just the warm-up. The real traffic shake-up has started now. Many sites lost 40–90% overnight. But others are already seeing 100–300% growth.
Below is the freshest, most detailed breakdown of what exactly has changed and what you need to be doing right now.
📌 Update Quick Facts (Official Data)
- 🗓️ **Launch Date:** December 11, 2025
- ⏳ **Expected Duration:** 2–3 weeks (until approx. Jan 1–8, 2026)
- 🌍 **Type:** Global Core Update (hitting all regions and languages)
- 🎯 **Google's Focus (Verbatim):** "Improving the display of helpful and relevant content from all site types"
- 🔗 **Official Source:** Search Status Dashboard — status is "Core update in progress"
📚 Table of Contents (Updated)
📊 December Volatility: From "Phantom" Update to Official Core
What happened from December 3rd to the 10th is already being called the "strongest pre-update in history":
- 📅 **Dec 3–4** — First wave, Semrush Sensor hit 9.2–9.6 (a 2025 record)
- 🌊 **Dec 7–8** — Second wave, many lost 60–90% overnight
- 🚀 **Dec 11 at 7:25 PM Kyiv Time** — Official start of the December 2025 Core Update
Right now (December 12th), volatility has dipped slightly to 8.1–8.7, but that's just a pause—the main shaking is still ahead.
📅 Full History of Google Updates in 2025
| Month |
Type |
Duration |
Main Focus |
| March |
Core Update |
Mar 13–27 (14 days) |
E-E-A-T + Content Quality |
| June |
Core Update |
Jun 30 – Jul 17 (17 days) |
AI Content + Helpful Content |
| August |
Spam Update |
Aug 26 – Sep 22 |
Spam, Parasite SEO, PBNs |
| December |
Core Update |
Dec 11 – Early Jan 2026 |
Helpfulness + E-E-A-T + Freshness + User Signals |
🔄 What Exactly Changed in the December Update (Top 6 Shifts)
- 🤖 **Gemini 3 in the Ranking Core** — AI Overviews are now pulling data not just from the top 10, but also from Reddit, Quora, and forums.
- 📈 **Stronger User Signal Impact** — Bounce rates >55% or Time on Page <45 seconds → huge drops.
- 🔄 **Freshness Decay 2.0** — Articles older than 12–18 months without an update are tanking, even with strong backlinks.
- 👨💻 **E-E-A-T is Now Critical** — Sites without an author block (with a photo, experience, and links) are seeing 40–80% drops.
- 🤖 **Unedited AI Content** — Penalized even harder than back in June.
- 🛒 **E-commerce & AI Shopping** — Product pages without real photos, authentic reviews, and accurate stock are losing 50–90%.
📉 Who Got Hit Hardest
| Site Type |
Average Drop (Dec 12) |
Example |
| Affiliate Blogs (Product Reviews) |
65–92% |
Dropped from 18k to 1.5k per day |
| E-commerce (No Original Photos) |
45–78% |
Categories using dropshipping photos fell more sharply |
| Unedited AI Content |
70–95% |
Blogs that generated 100+ articles/month |
| Sites Not Updated for 1–2 Years |
40–75% |
Even those with strong backlink profiles |
📈 Who Is Already Winning (Real Project Examples)
- ✅ Sites with an author block + real-life experience → +80–350%
- 🗣️ Forum-style sites and UGC (User-Generated Content) → +120–400%
- 📸 E-commerce with original photos and videos → +40–180%
- 📅 Sites that updated old articles in Nov–Dec → +60–250%
📍 Local SEO and Google Business Profile (GBP)
In many niches, GBP is now more important than the actual website:
- 📸 Profiles with 50+ photos and regular posts → +30–70% traffic
- ⭐ Reviews with photos → massive competitive advantage
- 🤖 AI agents are checking product availability via GBP
✅ 9 Steps That Deliver Results BEFORE the End of This Rollout
- 👤 Add an author block with a photo, experience, and links to LinkedIn/social media (on all affected articles).
- 📝 Update 10–30 of your most critical articles: add a "Current for 2025–2026" section, fresh data, and new screenshots.
- 📉 Reduce bounce rate: add an anchor table of contents, videos, and interactive tables.
- 🔗 Check and fix all 404s and broken links.
- 🔄 Aggressively increase internal linking to affected pages.
- 📄 Publish 3–7 new, deep-dive articles in the affected categories.
- 🛍️ For e-commerce: replace all dropship photos with your own, add video reviews.
- 📍 For GBP: add 20–30 new photos + weekly posts.
- ⏳ Wait—the main positions will settle after December 25–27.
❓ FAQ — Answering Everything Being Discussed in the Chats (Dec 12–13, 2025)
⏳ When will this volatility finally end, and when will I see my "final" rankings?
🗓️ Google officially gave a timeframe of up to 3 weeks → until approx. Jan 1–8, 2026.
📊 But based on my experience and data from 40+ client projects in 2025:
- 📅 70–80% of sites lock in their "near-final" positions by the 12th–16th day after the start.
- 🎯 For an December 11th launch, this means **December 23–27** — that's when most will see where their site has "settled."
- 📉 Minor fluctuations (±5–15 positions) might continue until Jan 8–10, but the massive global swings will be over.
- 📚 Historically: The March 2025 Core settled on day 14; the June one, on day 16. This December update will likely fall within 15–17 days.
✅ **Takeaway:** You can make final conclusions and plan major changes for January right after Christmas (Dec 27–30).
❓ Why did my site drop 50–90% even though I have no manual actions and didn't violate any rules?
🔍 A Core Update isn't a penalty or a spam filter. It's a global re-evaluation of usefulness and relevance.
📉 The most common reasons for "clean" sites to drop in December 2025:
- 🏆 **Competitors Got Better** — Someone updated their articles in Nov–Dec, added real-life experience, screenshots, videos → your content automatically became "less helpful."
- ⏱️ **High Bounce Rate + Short Time on Page** — Google sees users entering and quickly leaving. The threshold became stricter in December: bounce >55–60% and time <50 seconds → sharp decline.
- 📅 **Freshness Decay** — Articles from 2023–2024 without an update are losing weight, even with strong backlinks.
- 👨💻 **Missing or Weak E-E-A-T** — No author block with a photo, experience, or links to LinkedIn/social media.
- 🤖 **AI Overviews Are Pushing You Out** — Your content simply isn't making it into Gemini 3, and the answer is being generated from Reddit/Quora.
⚠️ **Important:** A drop during a Core Update is not guilt; it's a signal that you need to meet the new quality standard.
🔄 Is it realistic to recover during this same update, or should I wait for the next one?
🚀 Absolutely realistic—and many are doing it right now!
✅ Google officially confirms: If you make **significant improvements** (content depth + E-E-A-T + freshness), the algorithm re-evaluates pages during the rollout.
📈 Examples from real projects (Dec 12–13, 2025):
- 📝 A site updated 25 old articles + added author blocks → +340% in 4 days.
- 🛍️ E-commerce replaced dropshipping photos with their own + added video reviews → went from -78% to -12% in a week.
- 📅 A blog added an "Current for December 2025" section to 40 articles → went from -64% to +87%.
⏳ **Conclusion:** Those who act fast in December get traffic before the New Year. Those who wait until January lose 2–4 months.
🚫 Should I do a redesign, change URL structure, or mass-delete pages right now?
⛔ **Absolutely not!** This is one of the most common mistakes during a Core Update.
🤔 Why:
- 🤯 The algorithm is already "going crazy"—extra radical changes confuse it even more.
- 📉 In 90% of cases, positions drop even lower after a redesign during a rollout, and recovery drags on for 3–6 months.
- ⚠️ Google itself asks: "Do not make large technical changes until the update is complete."
✅ **Allowed now:** updating content, adding author blocks, fixing 404s, internal linking, publishing new articles.
❌ **Forbidden:** changing templates, URLs, deleting hundreds of pages, migrating to a new domain.
🤖 Has AI content been permanently banned?
🚫 No, there is no ban and there won't be. Google clearly states: "We don't care who created the content—a human or AI. The main thing is that it is helpful."
🔗 You can read more about this in the article:
AI Content 2025: Why 87% Get Penalized and How to Write.
📊 But the requirements have become sky-high:
- 📉 Simply "paraphrasing the top 10 via Gemini" → 80–95% drop.
- 📈 AI text + deep human editing + original case studies, screenshots, 2025 comparisons, personal conclusions → grows faster than purely human content (I've seen +270% on such articles).
🎯 **The rule is simple:** If, after reading the article, the user says, "Wow, this really helped and was interesting"—the algorithm will notice. If it's "just another article about the same thing"—bye-bye.
⚡ What should I do right now, Dec 12–15—a specific checklist for the next 72 hours
- 🎯 Take the top 20–30 affected pages in Search Console → update them: add an "Current for Dec 2025 – Jan 2026" section, fresh data, screenshots, videos.
- 👤 On every affected article, add an author block with a photo, years of experience, and links to LinkedIn/Telegram.
- 📑 Create an anchor table of contents + detailed FAQ at the bottom of the article—this sharply reduces the bounce rate.
- 📄 Publish 3–5 new, deep-dive articles (2000–4000 words) in the categories that dropped the most.
- 🔄 From strong pages (that are growing), place internal links to the affected pages.
- 🔧 Fix all 404s and redirect chains you have.
- 🛍️ For e-commerce: urgently replace dropshipping photos with your own, add video reviews and current stock.
- 📍 For GBP: add 20–30 new photos + 2–3 posts with promotions/new products.
- 📊 Daily monitor Semrush Sensor and Search Console Performance—react instantly.
✅ Anyone who completes at least 50% of this list by December 20th has a good chance of getting back into the green before the New Year.
📌 Conclusions
🎯 **The December 2025 Core Update** is not an "apocalypse," but Google's next step toward a search engine that truly helps people. 🤖 The algorithm already knows how to distinguish "content for content's sake" from material that genuinely solves a user's problem.
🏆 Who will win in 2026:
- 👨💻 Sites with clear authorship and experience
- 📅 Resources that regularly update old content
- 📊 Projects with strong user signals (low bounce, long time on site)
- 🛍️ E-commerce with current photos, reviews, and GBP integration
💪 It hurts now—but this is the perfect moment to restructure your site for the new reality and surge ahead for many months.
🌟 Hang in there, create quality content—and by January, many of you will write: "Traffic didn't just return, it's bigger than it was before the update" 📈
👋 **Respectfully,
Vadim Kharovyuk**
☕ Java Developer, SEO Expert, and Founder of WebCraft Studio
🔗 **Sources and Monitoring:**
Google Search Central • Search Status Dashboard • Semrush Sensor • MozCast • Reddit (r/SEO, r/bigseo) • WebmasterWorld • proprietary data 📊
