As you know, Thursday, March 13, 2025 at around 12:30 pm ET Google announced the March 2025 core update, the first core update of the 2025 year. I was expecting to see a lot of volatility by now and while we are seeing some sites report volatility, it does not feel as widespread or heated as a normal core update – YET.

The time has come for the Google Assistant to be replaced by Gemini, Google’s younger and better assistant (despite it being wrong way too often). Google announced, “Over the coming months, we’re upgrading more users on mobile devices from Google Assistant to Gemini; and later this year, the classic Google Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores."

Google has switched from updating its googlebot.json file, the file that contains the list of IP addresses Googlebot uses, from weekly to daily. Gary Illyes from Google said this was done based on feedback from the community.

Google added returnPolicyCountry to the return policy code examples within the Google Merchant Center structured data document. This is because Google requires returnPolicyCountry for MerchantReturnPolicy.

Imagine you own a restaurant and you get all your reservations online through your booking system; you even tell people to book online when they call, via an automated message. But then, all of a sudden, Google decides to hijack that booking link and replace it with Google Assistant’s calling feature.

Digiday reported that a Google spokesperson told them they made link updates to AI Overviews in May 2024 that added more links and made it easier for searchers to click on links. But I don’t think that is true, that didn’t come until August 2024, and did they really help drive clicks to your sites?

Fabrice Canel from the Microsoft Bing team told SEOs that instead of focusing on traffic and rankings, they should focus on conversions and click value. He said on X, “SEOs should focus on conversion."

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