This morning, Google finally announced a new core update – the June 2025 Core update.
 |
They said, “This is a regular update designed to surface better relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”
That “all types of sites” sounds essential to me. Perhaps we will see more smaller, unrecognized blogs surface following this update?
Core updates happen when Google makes significant changes to its ranking systems. It seems lately that core updates tend to align with advancements in Google’s AI capabilities.
The March 2024 Core update happened two weeks following Google’s announcement of Gemini 1.5. Gemini 1.5 significantly improved the efficiency of Google’s machine learning systems, as well as the amount of data they could utilize in calculations.
The August 2024 Core update occurred a few weeks after Google announced improvements to Gemini 1.5 Flash, which enabled faster and more cost-effective use of Gemini.
The December 2024 Core update happened 8 days after Google announced Gemini 2.0.
The March 2025 Core update happened two weeks before Google publicly launched Gemini 2.5.
So what about the June 2025 update that was released today? Perhaps we will hear of a new version of Gemini soon. But I think what’s more likely is that this advancement by Google is behind the changes we will see in this update:
MUVERA: Making multi-vector retrieval as fast as single-vector search.
Last week, Google shared its advancements in using neural embeddings in Search. They told us that this new approach allows them to retrieve an initial set of candidates that can then be re-ranked with “exact multi-vector similarity” with great accuracy.
My understanding of this advancement is that it is now much easier for Google to specifically find the exact webpages (or parts of webpages) that are likely to meet a searcher’s needs.
Google open sourced the code for MUVERA. It is tempting to play with it. However, I am somewhat changing my stance on optimizing for vector search.
I think it’s good to understand how vector search works. I also believe that by understanding the questions your audience has and answering them in a way that is easy to find and parse is a good thing to do. However, I think that if you use tools to create content that appears visually appealing to vector search, but users don’t confirm its quality, you could teach Google’s systems to pay less attention to your content.
My advice is the same as it has been for years. Understand your audience. It is best to answer the questions that they truly have. And create resources that people would consider the most helpful of their kind when compared to other choices they have.
I’m excited to see how this update rolls out. Google states that it may take up to three weeks to do so.
By the way, once the update has rolled out a bit, you can use my scatter plot comparison tool to check keyword rankings before and after the update rollout: