Google updates are one of those things that every business owner with a website should at least have a basic understanding of because they can absolutely wreck your rankings overnight if you’re not paying attention or if whoever built your site was cutting corners.
Probably the most talked about recent example is what a lot of people in the SEO world started calling the anti-AI update, which rolled out around March of 2025. The idea was that Google was supposedly cracking down on websites that were pumping out pure AI generated content with no real human input. And you did see stories pop up of people saying their site tanked out of nowhere and when they dug into it they found out whoever they hired to do their content was just running everything straight through ChatGPT, images and all, and calling it a day.
Here’s the honest truth about that though. There were sites out there that were one hundred percent AI generated, every word, every image, all of it, and they weren’t affected at all. So it’s hard to know what to make of it. It might have been a real targeted crackdown or it might have just been Google’s way of nudging people toward better content habits without actually having the technology to enforce it consistently yet. Probably a little of both.
But here’s the bigger picture on Google updates in general. In most cases, if a site gets absolutely crushed by an update the owner usually deserved it. That sounds harsh but it’s true. Back in the earlier days of SEO a really common tactic was buying spammy links in bulk because Google was counting links without really caring where they came from. People built entire businesses around that loophole. And then Google got smarter and a lot of those sites just vanished from the rankings.
The pattern is always the same. Someone finds a shortcut, it works for a while, Google catches up, and then the people who were doing things the right way all along end up on top anyway. Shady stuff has a way of catching up with you eventually. It might take months or even years but it usually does.
The clients that come in absolutely panicking because their rankings fell off a cliff almost always have a story attached to it. Either they hired someone who wasn’t really doing anything, or they hired someone who was doing the wrong things. Sites that are built well, updated regularly, and earning links naturally tend to weather updates pretty well because they’re already doing what Google wants them to do.
The takeaway is pretty simple. Don’t try to game the system with shortcuts and don’t let whoever is handling your SEO do it either. Build something real, put out real content, get real links from real places, and you’ll be in a much better position when the next update rolls out. And there will always be a next update.
One last thing worth mentioning since we’re talking about the internet going sideways. Every once in a while something completely outside of your control can take your site down or make it unreachable and it has nothing to do with Google at all. Services like AWS and Cloudflare basically power a huge chunk of the internet’s infrastructure, and when one of them has a bad day, half the web goes with it. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. Not much you can do about that one except just take a walk and wait for the engineers to fix it.
