SEO · · 2 min read
SEO in 2024: Four Core Updates, AI Overviews and What to Plan for 2025
Google ended 2024 with a December core update (12–18 December) and a spam update (19–26 December). Here's a recap of a busy year in search and our SEO priorities for 2025.
In short:
- Google released four core updates in 2024 (March, August, November, December) plus several spam updates.
- The December core update ran 12–18 December, followed straight away by a spam update from 19 to 26 December.
- AI Overviews launched in May and expanded through the year. Useful, first-hand content won. Mass-produced pages lost.
2024 was one of the busiest years for Google Search in a long time. If your rankings moved more than usual, you weren’t imagining it.
The year in updates
- March: a large core update combined with new spam policies on scaled content, expired domains and site reputation abuse. It finished in April.
- May: AI Overviews launched in the US at Google I/O.
- August: core update from 15 August to 3 September, with some recoveries for sites hit in 2023.
- November: another core update.
- December: a core update from 12 to 18 December, unusually close to November’s. Google explained that different systems are often improved in parallel. A broad spam update followed from 19 to 26 December, applying globally and in all languages.
What worked in 2024
- Pages with original information: real prices, photos, tests, data and experience.
- Clear site structure and fast, mobile-friendly pages.
- Brands people search for by name, which are protected from most algorithm swings.
What stopped working
- Publishing large volumes of thin or AI-generated pages to target every keyword variation.
- Buying expired domains or renting sections of trusted sites to rank third-party content.
- Rewriting competitors’ articles without adding anything new.
Our SEO priorities for 2025
- Prune and improve. Audit every page that gets no traffic. Improve it, merge it or remove it.
- Write for questions people ask, with direct answers that AI Overviews can cite.
- Build brand demand through social, PR and ads, so more people search for you by name.
- Fix technical basics: speed (especially INP), indexing and structured data.
- Measure what matters: leads and sales from organic traffic, not just rankings.
PeachTag Team
Led by Zain Ismail, 11+ years in performance marketing. Need help with this? Talk to us.
