As a reminder, the Google March 2025 core update touched down on March 13th, and as Google said, not before. And while many sites were hit super hard in the early days, the net of this update didn't seem as wide as other core updates. Now, I am seeing the third-party tracking tools explode this morning - but is it a tool issue or real core update volatility being detected?
Many of the tools are superheated this morning but it might be related to some tracking issues a number of the tools had over the past couple of days.
Laura Chiocciora mentioned on X that Ahrefs and SE Ranking confirmed issues with Google tracking. Glenn Gabe also noticed the issue and posted on X as well:
Ranking tool issues, again... and right in the middle of a core update! This is a screenshot from Ahrefs, but I see issues on SERanking too pic.twitter.com/emSO1aztbk
— Laura Chiocciora (@LauraChiocciora) March 20, 2025
Tracking the core update? A big heads-up that some visibility tools are having issues as of 3/19. E.g. ahrefs posted a message today explaining that they have identified some SERP inconsistencies around 3/19 and there's incomplete keyword data starting then. So you could see… pic.twitter.com/xFcZJaoHfm
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 20, 2025
So to see huge volatility reported by third-party tools the next day has me scratching my head.
That being said, here are what these tools are showing today - look at the intense volatility they are reporting:
Mozcast (I've never seen it this high):
Advanced Web Rankings (what happened here?):
Sistrix (highest ever maybe?):
Mangools (looks broken?):
So not all of the tools seem to be going nuts but plenty are.
The chatter is there but I am not sure if the chatter is high because of the tools or because they are noticing real ranking changes? I mean, the chatter is not at levels that represent how high the volatility that some of these tools are reporting.
Here is some of the chatter on social media and WebmasterWorld:
Today at 12am just another round kicked in. Very sharp drop. I don´t think that we will reach 40% of the usual traffic today.Sers are really a pretty mess. Google ignores completely some query keywords and returns not even close results.
BIG drop today...
Oh yeah, traffic was zooming an I was in the green today until 1pm. Then traffic dropped off a cliff at 1pm and has stayed very low for four hours straight so far
My URLs have stopped getting indexed. The console says the URL is on Google, but it does not show up. It shows up after 3-5 hours, then it disappears again and shows up after a day. and all the time console says URL is on Google.Crawling is fine. Everything is normal. What am I supposed to do?
Stagnation continues. Top positions for our keywords (country wide), adwords campaign running. Nothing but zombies, Dead as, 0 sale, 0 enquiries the entire week.Yes we did try a number of test purchases, the website works fine, the traffic is sick as.
It's mind boggling.
Well, I'll join in, today was a disaster. Ranking is stable, but hardly any traffic from Google, only zombies above the ads and the best: according to statistics, most of today's visitors came from the US, even though the site is only designed for the German-speaking area. Sale = 0At least the news page was stable, but only old articles.
Exactly the same over here!
Continued decline here. Google Discover is at anemic levels of growth, with my personal feed only displays about 4-6 websites at an absolute maximum.Theory: Google is prepping for a future where it's clear it's only going to pay select publishers for the right to their content and they're doing a cleanout of the people at the bottom now.
Further drop this morning while our rankings are getting better. I can´t see anything good going on with this core update. Not for users nor for webmasters. The only one that is winning is Google again. Sales yesterday were down 50%. Today started with ZERO. Traffic over the day is very inconsistent. It seems to be owed by switching data centers. One hour there is (rubbish ) traffic, the next our traffic has vanished completely. As this forum is very quiet, it makes me think that this update is related to specific (Shop) websites.
You describe exactly how it is going in my business today. What is striking, however, is that Google sends more and more visitors to the website who visit the website and then immediately leave again.News site: Search Console data shows that the main category has lost a huge amount of impressions since Wednesday. So Google is definitely sorting out. And if anyone tries to tell me again that articles have to be of high quality and offer added value for readers to rank well, I'll flip out.
Yes, a lot. Went positive for the first few days to now a steep decline.
— Billy Parisi (@ChefBillyParisi) March 21, 2025
I am not sure if this is real volatility from the March 2025 core update or something else - but it is something to keep an eye on.
Note - this story is not in my Friday video recap - I recorded that before I published this.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
