On June 30th, Google announced the rollout of the June 2025 Core Update, the 2nd official Google core update this year so far. The update lasted 16 days, and some SEO data providers indicated that it was one of the larger core updates we’ve seen in a while. Significant volatility was also reported before and after the formal rollout of the update.
During core updates, Google aims to improve the overall quality and relevance of its search results by re-evaluating and adjusting how its core ranking systems assess various quality signals across the web. Core updates, often long-awaited by site owners and marketers, can quickly reveal whether or not improvements made to a site will lead to increased organic visibility. This is especially true for site owners who have been negatively impacted by prior Google updates, as major recoveries usually don’t take place until a future core update rolls out.
This appears to be one of the bigger outcomes of the June 2025 Core Update: many sites that were previously negatively impacted by algorithm updates, such as the September 2023 Core Update, September 2023 Helpful Content Update, and/or previous Reviews updates, appear to have seen substantial recoveries as a result of the June 2025 Core update.
For some sites affected by the 2023 Helpful Content Update, although the recovery is small compared to previous visibility (and only still starting), any recovery is welcome news after having experienced suppressed visibility for 2 years:
Google indicated numerous times over the past 2 years that they were making changes to help affected sites – particularly, publisher websites – potentially see a recovery with future algorithm updates. In fact, Danny Sullivan from Google even provided December 2025 as a deadline, before which independent sites could expect to see potential improvements after negative impacts from prior updates.
Also, during the August 2024 Core Update, Google indicated that the work they are doing to “connect people with a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content’ is an area they will “continue to address in future updates.” Data from the June 2025 Core Update reveals that Google may have implemented some of these changes to help independent site owners.
Below, we will analyze 1,000 of the biggest winners and losers of the June 2025 Core Update, along with relevant trends and analysis by industry.
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Methodology of our analysis:
After major Google core updates, we use the SISTRIX Visibility Index to measure the domains with the strongest organic visibility growth and declines on Google.com in the U.S. The visibility index numbers were collected at the announcement of the update (June 30, 2025) until the update formally ended (July 21, 2025). It’s important to note that some sites on the list saw fluctuations after the update was over, which were not reflected in the analyzed data.
Our analysis for this update included 1,000 domains, categorized into four groups: those with the largest percentage visibility growth, those with the largest absolute visibility growth, those with the largest percentage visibility decline, and those with the largest absolute visibility decline. As some domains appeared in multiple lists (for instance, both percentage and absolute winners), the total number of unique domains evaluated was 868.
SISTRIX measures rankings of over 100 million domains for 100 million keywords on Google. The data below will focus specifically on Google’s U.S. index (Google.com). By actively measuring the rankings across a representative keyword set, the SISTRIX data is free from external influences such as seasonality, the weather, vacation times, and other external factors and trends. The data is collected from mobile search rankings only.
To understand the core update’s impact on various categories, we joined Sistrix data with Similarweb categories for trend analysis.
As a sidenote: implementing SEO improvements is one of many variables that can influence how a website fares during these algorithm updates. Organic search rankings may also be influenced by factors such as QDF (query deserves freshness), new SERP features or SERP layouts, site migrations, political and global events, significant shifts in consumer behavior, seasonality, and more.
While many visibility changes can be tied to specific SEO efforts, others could be influenced by these external factors, or could simply be the result of Google developing a better understanding of how to best meet search intent.
Greatest Visibility Winners of the June 2025 Core Update
Absolute Winners
Percent Winners
Greatest Visibility Losers of the June 2025 Core Update
Absolute Losers
Note: max.com was manually removed from this list, as its visibility drops were due to a site migration to hbomax.com.
Percent Losers
Note: max.com was manually removed from this list, as its visibility drops were due to a site migration to hbomax.com.
Analysis of Greatest June 2025 Core Update Winners
YouTube.com was by far the biggest winner of the June 2025 Core Update, earning 307 Sistrix visibility points. YouTube has steadily gained additional SEO visibility for the past 2 years, with a huge jump during this core update (12%), bringing it to its 3rd highest visibility level in 3 years.
Wikipedia was the 2nd biggest absolute winner, also seeing a big visibility jump during the core update and bringing the site to its 2nd highest visibility point on Google in 10 years.
Several of the most significant winners provide content related to movies and entertainment, such as imbd.com, rottentomatoes.com, fandom.com, letterboxd.com, netflix.com, and themoviedb.org:
Major ecommerce player, Macys.com, also saw the start of a substantial recovery (+35%), after a couple of years of downward visibility trends.
A handful of 10+ year old hobbyist websites saw big percentage visibility increases with the June 2025 Core Update. For example, color-meanings.com is a 17-year-old site focused on the meaning behind colors. Explainthatstuff.com is also 13 years old, and its founder has over 25 years of experience writing about science. Although diyvideoeditor.com does not explicitly state when the website was founded, the site has seen organic visibility for at least 10 years, written from “the viewpoint of the consumer or home movie making enthusiast.” The gaming website gamepressure.com is also 20 years old, featuring information about its extensive team and its global reach.
Perhaps these signals – the clear indicators of human authorship and a decade-plus existence – helped these sites see improvements with Google’s updated ranking algorithms, which aim to reward authentic creators. Furthermore, it’s also possible that Google’s prior updates, such as the Helpful Content Update, overreached, inadvertently demoting valuable websites exhibiting genuine E-E-A-T, rather than exclusively targeting those solely focused on driving search traffic.
Analysis of Greatest June 2025 Core Update Losers
To start, Amazon.com was the biggest loser of the June 2025 Core Update. And while huge visibility swings are common with such large websites, this drop does appear to be significant, relative to Amazon’s overall trajectory:
Amazon was not the only ecommerce player negatively affected by the June 2025 Core Update – a handful of other major ecommerce sites, such as ebay.com, target.com, nordstrom.com, lowes.com, wayfair.com and bestbuy.com, all saw big visibility drops during the core update rollout.
Another significant loser of this update was Linked.com, which dropped by just over 50 visibility points (-18% of the site’s overall visibility). Digging into individual subfolders, it appears the largest drop stemmed from the /company/ folder, which houses individual company and business pages. But other major subfolders, like /in/, /jobs/ and /company/ also saw declines, which could indicate that the effect was sitewide in nature.
Some YMYL (your money, your life) sites, like betterup.com and patient.info, the June 2025 Core Update was the latest jolt in a bumpy ride due to recent Google core updates. Both sites followed a similar trajectory throughout most of 2025, seeing big gains during the March 2025 Core Update, only to see massive drops with the June update. This type of volatility is common with websites containing health and other YMYL content, as Google continually tries to surface the most trustworthy and authoritative content on topics that can potentially cause harm to the user.
In a recent article by Glenn Gabe, also analyzing the impact of the June 2025 Google Core Update, Glenn also observed that this update caused significant volatility across YMYL verticals.
Analysis of Visibility Change by Category
The table below joins Sistrix visibility index data with Similarweb website categories, which represents the main business industry for each site.
The first column shows the total visibility change for all sites in that category. The second shows the average percent visibility change across all sites in the category. The third column shows the total number of sites per category, and the final column shows the average visibility change per site.
Below are some key trends and takeaways upon analyzing the core update impact by category:
Major growth in the Arts & Entertainment Sector:
The “Arts & Entertainment” category had the greatest total visibility change (589.86) across 110 sites, averaging 5.36 points per site. The main driver of this growth was the biggest overall winner, YouTube.com, but many other music, lyrics, movie, and image sites also saw big gains, such as:
- lyricsondemand.com (+448.9%)
- letterboxd.com (+190.25)
- plyrics.com (+150.3%)
- movieinsider.com (+121.3%)
- amoyshare.com (+120%)
- songfacts.com (+111%)
- what-song.com (+110%)
- shazam.com (+67%)
- netflix.com (+66%)
- gettyimages.com (+21%)
- disneyplus.com (+19%)
- hulu.com (+17%)
- imdb.com (+13%)
- rottentomatoes.com (+12%)
Some popular entertainment publications also saw visibility increases, such as:
- deadline.com (+34%)
- celebritynetworth.com (+34%)
- eonline.com (+32%)
- cbsnews.com (13%)
- pbs.org (+9%)
- people.com (+8%)
Internet & Telecom Growth:
The “Internet & Telecom” category saw significant growth, which can mostly be attributed to Wikipedia.org, which saw a massive 276 visibility point increase. However, this is only a 3% overall uplift for the site, which is technically the largest visibility holder in the U.S. index.
Instagram.com also saw significant gains (+75.4 points), which might tie into their recent announcement that public Instagram content could now be indexed on Google.
Other sites in this category seeing big gains include:
- mapquest.com (+20%)
- hostinger.com (+18%)
- wordpress.com (+18%)
- tiktok.com (+11%) (although TikTok saw a big drop after the update finished rolling out)
- google.com (+2%)
- reddit.com (+1%) (not as big as previous increases seen for Reddit last year)
Moderate Gains the ‘Health’ Sector
The ‘Health’ category saw increased visibility overall (+74.4 points), largely carried by the gains seen among highly authoritative health websites, such as:
- empr.co (+74%)
- examine.com (+48%)
- acl.gov (+44%)
- cancer.gov (+37%)
- pennmedicine.org (+37%)
- everydayhealth.co (+34%)
- health.gov (+30%)
- drugbank.com (+29%)
- kaiserpermanente.org (+28%)
- samhsa.gov (+24%)
- nih.gov (+8%)
The health and supplement site, examine.com, struggled with algorithm updates in recent years, but saw a huge recovery with the June 2025 Core Update.
Categories with the Greatest Declines in SEO Visibility
This update appears to have negatively impacted a few verticals, including sites in the ‘Retailer & General Merchandise’ category, plus ‘Computers & Consumer Electronics’ and ‘Travel & Tourism.”
Below are some example sites from those 3 categories that saw the greatest declines after the June 2025 core update:
- spiceworks.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-37%)
- wayfair.com – Retailers & General Merchandise (-23%)
- unsplash.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-21%)
- cnet.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-16%)
- bestbuy.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-14%)
- poki.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-13%)
- target.com – Retailers & General Merchandise (-12%)
- geeksforgeeks.org – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-10%)
- istockphoto.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-9%)
- tripadvisor.com – Travel & Tourism (-9%)
- booking.com – Travel & Tourism (-5%)
- ebay.com – Retailers & General Merchandise (-5%)
- amazon.com – Retailers & General Merchandise (-3%)
- microsoft.com – Computers & Consumer Electronics (-3%)
Takeaways
The June 2025 Core Update was a massive re-evaluation of Google’s ranking signals, leading to significant shifts in organic visibility. While some industries like ‘Arts & Entertainment’ and ‘Internet & Telecom’ saw substantial gains, others, particularly in ‘Retail and Consumer Electronics’, experienced notable declines.
The update also brought welcome signs of early recovery for many sites previously impacted by earlier algorithm changes. Site owners should continue to focus on comprehensive quality improvements across all aspects of their sites for long-term stability and potential future recoveries.
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