Google officially announced the rollout of the December 2025 core update on Thursday at around 12:25 pm ET. This core update is expected to take up to 3 weeks to roll out. Google said this "is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites."
This is the third core update of 2025, we also had a spam update in 2025, and that is it so far for 2025. I guess the volatility we reported on earlier this week was not too far off?
In fact, in the past several hours, the chatter within the SEO community around volatility significantly spiked. So I am not surprised we got a core update this week. More so that Google hinted a core update was coming soon.
We previously had the June 2025 core update and then before that the March 2025 core update, and more recently the August 2025 spam update.
I'll be honest, I was beginning to think we wouldn't get a core update again this year and maybe in the future - like Google would not confirm them in the future. I mean, Google did promise us more core updates, more often and that didn't happen but hey, we at least got Google to confirm this one. Google did tell us more core updates will come and it did.
Tracking this one should get easier once Google updates the delayed Search Console reporting.
Google December 2025 Core Update Quick Facts
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
- Name: Google December 2025 Broad Core Update
- Launched: December 11, 2025 at around 12:25 pm ET
- Rollout: Will take up to three weeks to roll out
- Targets: It looks at all types of content
- Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
- Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
- Impact: The normal core update - updating some of the "core systems". Google said this December update is a "regular update."
- Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's core update advice.
- Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.
Google December 2025 Core Update Details
Google said this update will take about three weeks to roll out and "is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites."
That is all we know right now but we will be tracking it.
Video On Google December 2025 Core Update:
I made this video a few hours after posting this story:
Previous Broad Core Updates
Here is a list of the most recent core updates we've seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously, we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.
- June 2025 Core Update: June 30, 2025 through July 17, 2025
- March 2025 Core Update: March 13, 2025 through March 27, 2025
- December 2024 Core Update: December 12, 2024 through December 18, 2024
- November 2024 Core update: November 11, 2024 through December 5, 2024
- August 2024 Core Update : August 15, 2024 through September 3, 2024
- March 2024 Core Update : March 5, 2024 through April 19, 2024
- November 2023 Core Update : November 2, 2023 through November 28, 2023
- October 2023 Core Update: October 5, 2023 through October 19, 2023
- August 2023 Core Update: August 22, 2023 through September 7, 2023
- March 2023 Core Update: March 15, 2023 through March 28, 2023
- September 2022 Core Update: September 12, 2022 through September 26, 2022
- May 2022 Core Update: May 25, 2022 through June 9, 2022
- November 2021 Core Update: November 17, 2021 through November 30, 2021
- July 2021 Core Update: July 1, 2021 through July 12, 2021
- June 2021 Core Update: June 2, 2021 through June 12, 2021
- December 2020 Core Update: December 3, 2020 through December 16, 2020
- May 2020 Core Update: May 4, 2020 through May 18, 2020
- January 2020 Core Update: January 13, 2020 through mostly January 17, 2020
- September 2019 Core Update: September 24, 2019
- Google June 2019 Core Update: June 3, 2019 through June 8, 2019
Previous Helpful Content Update Impact
Here is the list of the previous Google helpful content updates:
- Septemebr 14, 2023 - September 2023 Google helpful content update - completing on Septmeber 28, 2023
- December 5, 2022 - December 2022 Google helpful content update, completing on January 12, 2023
- August 25, 2022 - August 2022 (original) Google helpful content update, completing on September 9, 2022
Recent Unconfirmed Google Updates
We reported unconfirmed Google ranking volatility as recently as December 7th and 8th and then it was December 3rd and 4th. Then we covered one right before Thanksgiving and that one was a very big one. Then before that was November 20th and then November 12th and then before that with what I called the Movember update around November 8th and then the Halloween update and then between October 15th to 17th and then on October 7/8th.
Google Tracking Tools On December 2025 Core Update
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter on the December 2025 Core Update
It was just announced, so I will add more to this as the day goes on. Here are some of the chatter from this morning on this site and WebmasterWorld:
See no updates but traffic looks down. who even knows what's going on. haha. pretty much most of the traffic I get is from Signapore at this point. They are bots of course. Asinine.
Yeah traffic is down like 80% today. Crazy stuff!
Traffic has been tepid at best...quite a bit lower than last year this time. I am also noticing that I have been losing top ranking terms steadily for a month now. Nothing new there, that is a common cycle with Google for years. What does scare me is that some of my top pages are suddenly demoted to page two out of the blue, after being top three for a decade. And it's not just a blip, it's sticking. We won't talk about sales...they are abysmal in the USA since about May, and (almost) non-existent from outside the USA. I was hoping that the lower dollar would help, but it seems not.
Very, very, very worse today. And google doesn´t say anything - apparently there have been more than 1 big update in the past weeks.
It is going downhill, so fast. Traffic is quite bad, but more importantly the conversions are none existent. It seems to be the law, that when the traffic and positions are in decline, it doesn't hit the conversions in equal measures, there are not less conversions, but just gone.
I take it back, traffic has dropped again at lunchtime today, so today is another bad day... I can probably write off December, the news site's revenue isn't even 10 euros, RPM is already digging a hole in the basement. I'm slowly starting to hope that a core update will come soon, which will hopefully bring some improvements.Oh, and I'm seeing the same drop today on dozens of other websites... at exactly the same time. So Google continues to play its game.
For those hit by core updates in the past, do comment below if/when you start to see changes. I hope you all see major improvements with rankings and more importantly, traffic and conversions.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
