The March 2024 Core Update finished rolling out on April 19th, but Google didn’t tell us until a week later. Reports are that the update has had a massive impact on search results with many sites reporting huge losses in ranking. In other news, Google announced record earnings but also showed that it is worried that AI-generated search results could cause it to lose revenue and reduce profits.
End of the March 2024 Core Update
The March 2024 Core Update started on March 5th and finished on April 19th. The problem was that Google forgot to tell us. Normally the ends of updates are signaled through the Search Status Dashboard as soon as they finish rolling out. Google updated the dashboard and published on X on Friday March 26th “The March 2024 core update is complete, having ended on April 19.”
We were told that it would be a longer than usual roll-out. In the blog post What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update, Chris Nelson said that “As this is a complex update, the roll-out may take up to a month.” It lasted for over six weeks in total, becoming the longest roll-out of a Core Update we can remember. The previous record was 26 days for the November 2023 Core Update.
Many SEO experts advise not to respond to ranking changes during a Google update roll-out, but a lot of site owners were tempted to try and analyze results and start working on improvements if they have seen rankings drop. We saw some sites remove or deindex large numbers of pages in April, believing they were of low-quality (or knowing they were produced using AI). Having many low-quality pages on a site seems to penalize the whole site.
Tools like SimilarWeb SERP Seisometer (shown above), SEMRush and Mangools showed similar patterns in April with fairly constant volatility from April 1st through to April 19th and then calm from April 20th. Barry Schwartz, however, reports in his article Google March Core Update Still Rolling Out & Heated SEO Chatter Continue that this drop in volatility does not correlate with a drop in chatter on SEO and webmaster forums. These seem to suggest that the update had major impacts on ranking for website owners after the official end date.
SEO consultant Glenn Gabe, published daily Core Update Notes on X through to April 26th unaware that the update was finished. He mainly reported that the update was “huge” and “volatile”, giving illustrations of winners and losers from various verticals (like song lyrics, recipes, business directories, forums, parasite SEO, etc.). His findings illustrate just how powerful the update has been.
One of the themes that Glenn kept coming back to is sites that lost ranking during the September 2023 Helpful Content Update. He has been tracking 379 sites heavily impacted by this update as he felt that some would improve rankings during the Core Update (which now includes what was previously a separate Helpful Content system). None of those sites saw positive changes.
Another SEO expert, Lily Ray, published the findings of audits her team performed for sites who thought that they were hit unfairly by the Helpful Content Update but their consensus is “A lot of the content on these sites was found to be… pretty unhelpful”. On April 25th, she also published the comment, “I’ve got some bad news for affiliate/product review sites”. She went on to explain that her research showed that many affiliate/product review sites have lost top positions in Google to ecommerce sites (mainly to Amazon).
I’ve got some bad news for affiliate/product review sites.
It is not looking good with this Google update.
I just dug into several examples where The Wirecutter, arguably the best product review site (section) on the internet, has lost positions in the last 2 weeks.
The drops… pic.twitter.com/w3jTxMlvRL
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) April 25, 2024
Google Q1 Earnings
Those worried that Google may be losing popularity can rest assured that this is not demonstrated in the company’s earnings. On April 25th, Alphabet, the company that owns Google, announced $80.54 billion in revenue for the period from January to March 2024. 9TO5Google reported that revenue rose 15% from $69.8 billion in Q1 2023. The company noted improved revenue from YouTube ($8.09 billion versus $6.69 billion a year ago) and Google Cloud ($9.57 billion compared to $7.45 billion) as well as from Search (although they gave no specific figures for Google Ads, it is thought to be almost entirely the $62.39 billion left after subtracting YouTube, Cloud and “other bets” revenues from total revenue. This compares to $55.37 last year). “Other bets” are small off-shoots created by Google (or Alphabet) such as Waymo driverless cars, Nest, Google Fiber, etc.
Marie Haynes, an SEO specialized in Google updates, followed the 1-hour-long Earnings Call, and reported on X that Google said
- Gemini 1.5 Pro, announced in February, has driven dramatic performance enhancements across a number of Google products.
- It has served billions of queries with AI.
- People like SGE. The data says people are finding it useful.
- It improved the costs and latency associated with SGE.
- It is confident it will “manage the monetization transition” and is excited about the innovation ahead.
- More than 1 million developers use Google’s generative AI.
This gives lots of hints that, as reported last month, that AI-generated results are coming to Google. These were previously only available to users who subscribe to SGE (Search Generative Experience), but some users in the UK and the US have been seeing AI-generated results at the top of Google search results without having subscribed to SGE in recent weeks.
Google considering making AI-powered search a paid feature
Despite the record earnings, some people at Google must be worried that the arrival of AI-generated responses in Google Search will cause the company to lose money if this feature distracts from ads and increases the cost of responding to billions of queries every day.
On April 3rd, the Financial Times reported that Google considers charging for AI-powered search in big change to business model. The article says three separate people have confirmed that Google is exploring the idea of adding AI-based search functions to its premium subscription service Gemini AI assistant. They say the service is under development, but that company executives have not finalized their decision on whether or when to launch it.
How Search Works videos
In April, Google released the final 3 episodes (accompanied by 3 shorts) in the How Search Work series by Gary Illyes on YouTube.
- How Google Search indexes pages. In this episode, Gary covers how Google processes and analyzes a page’s textual content, key content tags, attributes, images, and video to determine signals used in ranking. Some signals also help Google decide whether a page should be indexed. This video contains a long description of canonical URLs if you need help understanding this concept.
- How Google Search serves pages. This video covers how Google Search works technically from the moment a user types a query. From processing and interpreting user queries to ranking relevant pages found in Google’s index.
- Anatomy of a Search Result. This final episode describes how Google creates the organic snippets in search results and how you can influence those results.
These videos give a short (some might say frustratingly short) introduction into how Google Search works. Those interesting in hearing more from Gary how Google serves pages may also be interesting in listening to the Search Off the Record podcast episode “How serving works, hreflang, and more!” from April 2021.
