Recent Google algorithm updates and their impact on SEO

Google applied major algo updates to rectify it’s mistakes from the HCU SEO update in September.

And we’re seeing better results than Q1 and ranks climbing up even for sites that were impacted. 📈

So, is SEO still alive?

If we zoom out for a moment, digital users will keep seeking information on a daily basis.

Google currently performs about 8.5 billion searches a day.

🤔 So, if Google dies for a reason (new algo bugs, prioritizing reddit, robot Overviews), where would this traffic go?

1. Chatbots – GPT-4o, Gemini etc work well, but don’t dive deep, they halucinate, suck at math, don’t outline proof. Lots of missing points. Even though Perplexity and similar options are getting much better today.

2. Social networks – people who use social for search will keep doing so – Grok is one way to do that, and if you try it, you’ll see how biased and limited it is. Works for specific journalists or thought leaders who use it, but a very limited pool.

3. reddit/Quora – first, the quality is super low – this has been made apparent in the past 6 months after the HCU updates from Google increased their organic visibility by 350% (ranking a ton more reddit and Quora posts). So first, they suck in a number of different areas. Second, thanks to Google prioritizing them, hundreds of thousands of fake accounts are now blasting links and copy-paste answers to threads, polluting the search results big time.

4. Other search engines – Bing traffic has been going up since late Q3. There’s an uptick in DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. Not enough to compensate for Google, so similarly to the other groups, this one is also stealing some of Google’s traffic.

5. Voice-assisted search. Similar problems to chatbots, usually responding with a single answer and no context, and the amount of useless content is staggering (speaking as an Alexa user who has been using Google Assistant for a few years, too)

SEO may look differently in 8-10 years from now if one or two of the channel verticals above gets so accurate and usable that people move organically there, continuously get helpful insights, and recommend this to others.

This is not the case yet. And the leading players will show the way.

💡 The funniest part is – it only takes a single checkbox or a call to revert to a previous version from 12 months ago to suddenly reacquire the entire market back.

No effort, no innovation – just get back to what worked previously.

👉 (Take a note here, LinkedIn – the same applies to your feed!)