Welcome to our March 2025 SEO News Recap! In this edition, we cover March core update, robots.txt, tons of AI updates, and more! Also, don’t forget to check out our latest installment of “ROI Answers” to find answers from our experts to commonly asked SEO questions.
The First Core Update of the Year Is Rolling Out
Google launched the March 2025 Core Algorithm Update on March 13th with little fanfare. The update is expected to take about two weeks to complete, but other than that, there has been little information about its focus forthcoming from Google. Your ROI Revolution SEO team is monitoring the rankings and chatter, and we will provide updates to our clients as needed.
Sorry, There Still Aren’t Any Shortcuts in SEO
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were shortcuts available to get your site indexed more frequently by Google? Unfortunately, that’s not the case when it comes to SEO. Google’s John Mueller recently reminded the SEO community that if you want your site crawled faster, you need to provide an excellent experience for both users and Googlebot, meaning:
- Your site and each page should load quickly.
- The technical foundation of your site should be solid.
- You need to offer high-quality and unique content.
- The site should provide a strong value-add across the whole site.
Control Your Crawlers: Google’s Robots.txt Guide
Google’s new guide breaks down your robots.txt file from the basics to more advanced uses, showing you how to manage bot behavior and improve your site’s crawling efficiency. Using robots.txt to improve crawling efficiency is crucial for SEO because it reduces unnecessary crawl requests, which conserves server resources.
Some advanced uses of robots.txt include:
- Targeting specific crawlers with different rules.
- Blocking URL patterns like PDFs or search pages.
- Having more granular control over specific bots.
- Including comments for internal documentation.
You can read the new documentation here:
Robots Refresher: robots.txt — a flexible way to control how machines explore your website
Gemini unveils Deep Research Functionality
Google’s generative AI chatbot, Gemini, received some major upgrades in the race for LLM supremacy. Here are the major highlights:
- Gemini’s context window has expanded.
- Files can be uploaded to Gemini.
- Gemini’s Deep Research feature, which crawls the internet to capture up-to-date information, has added Flash Thinking Experimental, showing the user its work and sourcing in real-time.
- Personalization is increased, including Gems, a custom GPT that specializes in topics.
Google Search UI is Ever Evolving
Tenured Google users know that one thing you can always expect from the search engine giant is change – whether that means new features, tabs, or results – all in the name of providing more helpful search experiences. Lately, the iOS user interface (UI) has seen some pretty big changes.
Lens introduced select and search features. iOS users can now investigate specific areas of their screen while browsing within Chrome or the Google app to prompt a visual search. Although select and search is relatively new, Google didn’t pioneer this concept – Amazon Lens and Pinterest have been offering similar features for a while.
How to use select and search on mobile:
- Open the three-dot menu.
- For Chrome, it’s in the bottom toolbar.
- Choose the visual search option.
- For Chrome, select “Search Screen with Google Lens”.
- For the Google app, select “Search this Screen”.
- Pick what you’d like to learn more about by drawing, highlighting, or tapping.
- Optionally, you can also add a textual query to supplement your visual search when the results populate.
The desktop version of this feature has been available since last summer, and it works a little differently from mobile.
Lens searches will trigger more AI Overviews. This expands upon existing capabilities to identify objects visually. In the rollout announcement, Google stated that they are leveraging their newer, more powerful AI models to understand “more novel or unique images” than they could previously.
Switching between Google and Gemini is different. Early last year, a toggle was added to the Google iOS app, allowing users to easily navigate between the ‘regular’ search and AI chat experiences. Recently this toggle was removed, and users were directed to the Gemini app instead. We have mixed feelings about this one.
Google Search’s Growth and Growing Pains
Despite its market share declining in recent months, the number of searches on Google has grown to more than 5 trillion per year. With that growth, it’s no surprise that the company claims that more than a billion people are using AI Overviews (although, we wonder if scrolling past them counts as usage).
This month, Google upgraded AI Overviews to use Gemini 2.0, and we’ve seen the results, which can now include dozens of sources. The new version can answer more complex queries, like coding, advanced math, and multimodal questions, with higher quality responses.
In the same announcement, Google introduced the new Labs experiment called AI Mode, which “expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions. You can ask anything on your mind and get a helpful AI-powered response with the ability to go further with follow-up questions and helpful web links.”
The experiment is available in Labs as the search giant tests it for accuracy and gathers feedback from users. Google says AI Mode is rooted in its core quality and ranking systems combined with Gemini 2.0’s advanced reasoning capabilities. To see it in action, sign into Google AI Premium and opt in through Labs.
In the meantime, SEOs and publishers are questioning how many users will actually click on any of the dozens of sources that might be listed in the more advanced AI Overviews answers. Google responded on X that “The team is really focused on how we make it easy to click to sites — we have a lot more UI updates coming that we showed in our announcement post.”
With or without clicks, AI Overviews are coveted real estate at the top of the SERP that shows Google trusts a website’s authority on a subject. Your ROI Revolution SEO team is constantly experimenting with ways to capture those coveted source links in AI Overviews, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. If you’re ready to take your SEO to the next level, reach out to schedule a meeting with us.
Chegg Sues Google for Hurting Traffic with AI Overviews
Education company Chegg has filed a lawsuit in a federal district court claiming that Google’s AI Overview summaries have hurt their organic traffic and revenue. In a statement, Chegg’s CEO accused Google of “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.”
The lawsuit, in part, claims that Google has violated sections one and two of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which address individuals and corporations forming monopolies in commerce. They note a federal judge’s 2024 ruling that Google holds a monopoly in the search market.
A core part of Chegg’s business is their extensive library of questions and answers to help students study a wide range of topics. They argue that they are forced to allow Google to scrape this content if they want to rank and compete in organic search results, but by doing so Google can now use their data to generate answers to the same questions and place them at the top of search results, pushing Chegg’s content further down the page.
As AI Overviews and the overall Google search results landscape evolve, the ROI SEO team continues to experiment and work toward the best solutions to surface your content and links within AI overviews while also maximizing qualified traffic that makes it from the search results page to your site.
Google Ditches Breadcrumbs for Mobile Snippets
To offer a “cleaner, more streamlined look” for mobile users, Google simplified the visible URL element in search result snippets by removing breadcrumbs. Mobile users will now see the website’s domain URL only. Here’s what the change looks like:
Above: Previous mobile snippet format, with breadcrumbs.
Above: New mobile snippet format, displaying the domain only.
The Verge and Vox Media Survey Refutes Google’s Claims
Despite Google’s claims (mentioned above) that over a billion people use AI Overviews and over five trillion searches are made per year, a recent survey from The Verge and Vox Media shows 42% of people said search engines, including Google, are becoming less useful.
52% of respondents said that AI Chatbots (a category that ironically includes Gemini) or platforms like TikTok are where they prefer to get their information because the quality of information available in traditional search engines is deteriorating.
Additional points of interest from the survey results:
- Nearly half said they would rather participate in communities that don’t allow AI-generated content.
- One percent of people in digital communities do 80% of the content creation, while 9% post occasionally, and 90% consume the content quietly.
- The Verge concludes, “Smaller, purpose-driven communities are the future.” People are looking for smaller, tight-knit communities over massive platforms. “Brands and platforms that can foster these personal, human-scale interactions are going to be the winners.”
What does this mean for businesses? Diversification is necessary. Don’t abandon Google because over five trillion searches per year require answers. At the same time, double-down on being human, go back to the basics of making connections with your customers, and show up where they are (as long as the platform makes sense for your brand), like YouTube, TikTok, and other digital places that foster an authentic sense of community.
ROI Answers: SEO FAQ of the Month
Q: Will putting our product description in a drawer that is automatically closed when the PDP loads impact our SEO?
A: Product details should be visible by default. Googlebot can have trouble “seeing” copy in tabs/drawers sometimes, which can hurt your quality scores and make it harder to rank for important keywords. Product details can convince a user to purchase your product over a competitor’s, so we want to make sure this text is always visible.
