Welcome to our round up of the latest SEO news. These are the stories that we have been reading in the past month.
Google August 2025 Spam Update Released
Google released the August 2025 spam update on 26 August. According to the official announcement, the rollout may take a few weeks to complete. The last spam update was in December 2024 and between then and now, we have had two core updates.
Spam updates target websites that use tactics which violate Google’s spam policies to boost their organic visibility. The policies document has a section covering scaled content abuse, one type of which Google states is ‘using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users’.
SEOs have been expecting Google to penalise AI generated thin content for a quite a while now, so is this them finally turning their attention to it? We will find out in the coming days.
Gary Illyes interview
What is Google’s policy on AI generated policy? This month, Gary Illyes from Google was interviewed by Kenichi Suzuki, in the interview he is questioned about Google and AI generated content. Although his advice is on training LLMs, it gives us an overview of how Google views AI generated content and is also applicable to SEO.
He explains that Google does not care how the content is generated, it is the quality and the accuracy of the content that is important. To ensure the content is high quality “typically nowadays requires that the human reviews the generated content”.
He goes on to say,
“…when we say that it’s human, I think the word human created is wrong. Basically, it should be human curated. So basically someone had some editorial oversight over their content and validated that it’s actually correct and accurate.”
There are SEOs who are using AI to scale up their content creation for what at times feels like the sake of producing content. Google has always had an issue with poor quality thin content - it does not differentiate between that which was created by AI or by a human.
In short, use AI as a tool to assist you in generating quality content, not to fully produce content.
In the same interview, Gary Illyes was asked if using AI generated images negatively impacted on SEO. His answer was an unequivocal no - there is no penalty or direct impact from using AI generated images.
He was also asked why Google does not use social sharing as a ranking factor. His answer is that Google “needs to be able to control our own signals …. if we are looking at external signals …. that is not in our control”.
AI and changing search behaviour
A study by the Nielsen Norman Group has shown how search behaviour is changing with the rise of AI. Their research found that AI is gaining ground on traditional search and people are increasingly incorporating AI into their workflows.
They found that hybrid searching is the new normal. Users shift between traditional and AI search, so rather than competing against each other, they complement each other. People are using traditional search in tandem with AI tools, determining which one is best suited to the task at hand.
But old habits run deep, with users sticking with Google’s organic search because it is what they are used to - it has become almost instinctive to begin your search in this way.
Traditional search is not declining
New research shared by Sparktoro has found that traditional search is not declining and is still the dominant way that people search.
They found that 20% of Americans are what they class as heavy users of AI tools, which means they use them on ten occasions or more each month. At least 40% use them on at least one occasion each month.
This contrasts with traditional search, which is used by 95% of Americans at least once a month, with 86% being categorised as heavy users.
Growth in AI adoption is slowing. Since September 2024, no month has seen more than a 10% month on month increase in usage.
With traditional search, the average number of searches per user has increased over time, so we can conclude that AI search is not replacing traditional search.
This data is from users in the US only. According to the study, there is evidence that AI adoption in the EU / UK is 10% higher than in the US.
The previous two studies, to paraphrase Mark Twain, show that reports of the death of traditional search are greatly exaggerated. Search is evolving and users with it.
Statcounter now has data for the market share in the UK for AI chatbots. According to their numbers, ChatGPT currently enjoys an 80.55% share of the UK market, with Microsoft Copilot in a distant second place with a 10.41% share. Between them Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude and Deepseek have less than 10% market share.
ChatGPT is in a very similar to Google is in with organic search. It is hard to imagine the rival AI chatbots eroding the dominance anytime soon.
