Monthly SEO Insights: July 2025
July was another busy month with updates and news from Google and the wider SEO industry. From the July 2025 Core Update to the official launch of Google AI mode in the UK, here are some of the key highlights from last month.
The Core Update that launched at the end of June – and took just over two weeks to complete – resulted in very high volatility in the search results. The update was so significant that even those websites that were impacted by the 2023 Helpful Content Update saw rankings partially recover.
Even though Google officially announced in mid-July that the update had finished, the high level of volatility continued after that time and still appears to be quite heated.
From our own observations, we have noticed that websites that were previously not ranking well before the update, and subsequently improved during its rollout, seem to have increased their visibility in the AI Overviews.
This potentially signifies that there is a higher level of AI being applied to the organic results themselves, which is making them align further with the websites featured in the AI Overviews.
We are continuing to monitor this and will comment on our findings and observations going forward.
AI Mode Launches in the UK
Google’s AI Mode, which has been enabled for users in the US for several months now, has just launched in the UK.
AI Mode provides users with an option to use a ChatGPT-style search interface to carry out more in-depth and conversational searches. We wrote a separate blog post about this.
It appears to still be rolling out for UK searchers as this is not visible to all users just yet.
AI Mode is a very important change, from Google’s perspective, as it tries to counteract the increasing use of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, for search.
Google has made it quite clear that AI Mode is the future of search; in fact, it’s what they’ve been working towards since they launched. Whether we like it or not, it’s here to stay and it will become increasingly more prominent for users.
For example, as we have been monitoring and using AI Mode since it launched in the US earlier this year, we have seen that when you expand an AI Overview, Google now offers users at the end of the overview to “Dive Deeper in AI Mode.” It is even displayed with a flashy border! See below:
Additionally, Google has even replaced the search button on their homepage with “AI Mode”:
We’ll be discussing AI Mode at length over the coming month to explain how this is working and the impacts it will have on traffic and sales/leads on websites.
Cloudflare Blocking AI Crawlers
The traffic of approximately 20% of websites on the Internet goes through Cloudflare’s servers. Cloudflare is a network that provides services focused on improving website and application security, performance, and reliability.
Last month Cloudflare announced that it has begun to, by default, block AI crawlers from accessing content on the websites it protects, unless those websites explicitly opt-in to allow access. This means that AI companies like OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google’s Gemini will need permission to scrape content for training their models.
This is a huge move as it impacts such a significant proportion of all website traffic. This is quite an interesting development too as AI companies are being forced into creating partnerships with large data providers in order to train their models. For example, both Google and OpenAI have agreements in place to access Reddit content.
It is important to note that this is only to prevent these tools from accessing content for training purposes. This may not necessarily affect the visibility of that content when the tools perform a web search.
There is a difference and we’ll be explaining this in more detail to our clients through our R&D Insights (see below).
Google Charging for Better AI Search?
If Google’s AI Mode isn’t enough for you, now you can upgrade and get even better AI capabilities!
Google announced that for Google AI Pro and AI Ultra paying subscribers, they will now have an enhanced AI Mode experience with higher capabilities than its standard AI Mode. Here’s how they describe it:
“Deep Search is especially useful for in-depth research related to your job, hobbies, or studies. It’s also a valuable tool when making big life decisions, like purchasing a new house or needing assistance with financial analysis.”
Historically Google has always been “free”. However, the fact that users of new competing products, such as ChatGPT, are willing to pay to use those products, Google is attempting to push through a similar revenue model.
It means that going forward, users may have different search experiences depending on what level of AI models they are paying for…or not paying for!
Our R&D Insights for Artemis Clients
These monthly insights are a general overview of what’s happening in search. However, behind the scenes we spend a significant amount of time and resources every day on our own R&D. This extensive activity enables us to always position our clients at the forefront of search and maximising their websites’ visibility in a very dynamically changing environment.
With the fast-paced changes that are happening with search now, particularly with the focus on AI, we are going to start sending our clients a deeper monthly insight into what we’ve been testing, what we’ve been finding and what we’re doing with that knowledge.
Our clients will receive these new insights at the beginning of each month. We know that these deep insights into our R&D activities will be highly appreciated and we are looking forward to sharing them.
