Welcome to our April Digital Digest!

Another month, another round of Google updates! This month, it’s all about quality rating, as Google updates its Quality Rater Guidelines, and we also take a look at the impact of the now-completed Google core update.

The Google Core Update

The latest Google update was completed on March 27th. So, a month later, what impact has this update had?

The initial period following the update saw a period of volatility, like the aftermath of the December 2024 core update, as Google adapted to the modifications made to its core ranking system. Google stated that creators did not need to prepare their websites for this update, provided that they were making relevant, useful content, and the overall impact appears to be more contained than that of previous updates.

This isn’t to say that most sites were unaffected – there were plenty of sites that saw big drops in visibility, including forum websites which suggests that Google is making true its promise to penalise content that offers little user value and promote content that actively addresses user needs.

Fact or Fiction?

Google cracks down on what it calls ‘exaggerated or mildly misleading’ statements.

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines now include Section 5.6 which warns that little white lies are no longer harmless when advertising services or products. This new section advises that overstated experience, or skills and credentials that cannot be verified, are now enough to earn a Low rating; even if they are not found to be deliberately deceptive.

Content that is regarded as outright deception, and included in a deliberate effort to mislead the website user, will now warrant a Lowest rating, rather than just a Low. So, it might be time to take a look back through your website and make sure that your ‘About Us’ page contains verifiable facts and customer reviews, rather than marketing spin!

Low or Lowest

AI-generated content will now receive a Low or Lowest quality rating from Google.

The generative AI market was valued at $67 billion in 2024, and the annual growth rate is expected to remain at 24.4% until 2030. With so much AI-generated content out there, it’s no surprise that Google is taking steps to penalise AI content that doesn’t meet its quality standards or tries to pass as organic content.

Google quality raters will now assess whether content is AI-generated and assign it either a Low or Lowest quality rating. If content is published that was clearly made using AI, and no efforts have been made to optimise or adapt it, it will now receive a Lowest rating. However, if content is generated using some AI tools, and there has been minimal effort to improve its relevance, this will be categorised as Low rated content.

Google AI Overviews

AI Overviews prioritise ‘useful’ content over top-ranking results.

Google has certainly been busy this month. After trialling links within AI Overviews for a few weeks, the platform has now introduced this practice as a standard feature.

This means that, despite a platform-wide effort to tackle AI-generated content, Google AI Overviews can now link to useful webpages within these summaries. It is also worth noting that, possibly as a result of the ranking volatility caused by the March core update, the Overviews don’t tend to link to the highest-ranked results from organic search.

Instead, they favour pages that have not previously been found at the top of Google’s organic search results, but still contain relevant information that the Overviews find helpful. This offers these websites improved visibility, but as organic click-through rates continue to fall it may simply mean that all websites are (once again) competing with Google’s own AI-generated summaries in the search results.

The Future of Backlinks

Are backlinks still a useful SEO practice in 2025?

Building link authority is essential for pages hoping to rank high in search results, particularly if they belong to a new website. However, industry developments prove that you shouldn’t lean on links alone when establishing your sites’ authority, and make sure that you steer clear of these common mistakes that will do more harm than good:

• Using irrelevant or overused keywords
• Creating weak or pointless internal links
• Getting backlinks from low-quality websites
• Using too many keywords in the anchor text

The Digital Digest

That’s all for now! Don’t forget to come back next month, and feel free to reach out to our team for support addressing the SEO challenges raised in this month’s digest.