Google’s been acting a little weird lately. If you spent any time checking your analytics in October 2025, you probably saw some spikes that didn't make much sense. Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable was all over it, tracking the "chatter" while most of us were just trying to figure out why our best-performing pages suddenly took a nosedive—or, in some lucky cases, jumped to the moon.
The big takeaway? October wasn't actually a "Core Update" month by name. But it sure felt like one.
Search Engine Roundtable Google Update October 2025: The Ghost in the Machine
Most SEOs spent the month waiting for a formal announcement that never came. Google had promised "more core updates, more often" earlier in the year, but then they seemingly went quiet. Barry Schwartz noted significant ranking volatility around October 7–8, then again from October 15–17, and a final spooky surge near October 28, which he jokingly dubbed the "Halloween Update."
It's kinda frustrating. Google’s Search Status Dashboard remained green for most of the month, yet the SERP trackers were screaming. When you see a "normal" reading on the Seismometer but your own traffic is down 40%, it feels like gaslighting.
Honestly, the reality is that the Search Engine Roundtable Google update October 2025 wasn't a single event. It was a series of tremors following the massive August 2025 Spam Update. That update took almost a month to roll out and ended in late September, but the "aftershocks" in October were where the real ranking shifts happened.
Why your rankings might have wobbled
During these October fluctuations, a few specific things kept popping up in the forums:
- The "&num=100" removal: Google killed off the ability to see 100 results at once. This broke a ton of third-party rank trackers. If your report looked wonky, it might just be because your tool couldn't "see" the SERP correctly anymore.
- AI Mode Expansion: Google pushed its "AI Mode" (their answer to SGE and Gemini-integrated search) to dozens of new countries. This shifted how links were displayed, often pushing traditional organic results further down the page.
- The "Goldmine" Leak Influence: We started seeing the effects of how Google scores "title candidates." If your H1 and your meta title didn't match the actual content "intent" perfectly, Google started swapping them out for what it thought was better.
What actually changed under the hood?
While we didn't get a "November 2025 Core Update" until later, October was the month Google refined its Spam-fighting heuristics. They weren't just looking for keyword stuffing. They were looking for "pattern correlation."
Basically, if you had a bunch of doorway pages combined with a suspicious ratio of low-quality backlinks, the system finally connected the dots. Sites that relied on mass-generated AI content without human oversight got hit the hardest during the October 15–17 spike.
I saw one case where a service-based site lost 50% of its visibility in 24 hours. They went from ranking top 3 for sixteen major keywords to only six. That wasn't a "glitch." It was Google’s automated systems recalibrating what "satisfying content" actually looks like.
The Rise of Query Groups
One of the few "official" bright spots in October was the rollout of Query Groups in Search Console. This is actually pretty cool. Instead of obsessing over whether you're ranking for "best red shoes" versus "red shoes for sale," Google now clusters these under a shared intent.
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It’s a move toward Semantic SEO. Google is telling us they don't care about the specific word as much as the topic. If you're an authority on a topic, you'll stay stable through these "unconfirmed" updates. If you're just chasing keywords, you're going to keep seeing those Search Engine Roundtable "volatility" reports and panicking.
Survival steps for the post-October landscape
Stop waiting for the "all clear" signal. It’s not coming. Google is now in a state of constant, rolling updates that they often don't even name. To keep your traffic from falling off a cliff, you've got to tighten things up.
Check your HTML semantics. If your H1, H2s, and schema aren't telling a consistent story, Google’s "Goldmine" system will rewrite your snippets for you, and usually, it does a worse job than a human.
Clean up the "thin" stuff. If you have pages that only exist to target a specific long-tail keyword but don't actually offer a unique answer, delete them or merge them. The October tremors proved that "scaled content" is a liability now, not an asset.
Audit your internal links. The sites that recovered the fastest after the October 2025 volatility were the ones with clear, logical site structures. If a human can't navigate your site without getting lost, a search bot is going to struggle too, and that struggle leads to lower rankings.
Focus on "Answer Targets." At the top of your articles, give a crisp, 2-4 sentence answer to the primary question. Google’s AI Mode is hungry for these, and being the "source" for an AI overview is the new "Position Zero."
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If you're still seeing drops, check your Search Console for any "indexing quirks" or "crawling bugs." October had a few of those too, especially with video content files. If Googlebot can't fetch your media, it might demote the whole page thinking it's "low quality."
Keep an eye on the chatter, but don't let it dictate your entire strategy. The Search Engine Roundtable Google update October 2025 was just another reminder that the "old" way of doing SEO—gaming the system with volume—is effectively dead.
Next Steps for Your Site:
- Run a Content Gap Audit: Use Search Console's new Query Groups to see which "topics" you're losing ground on, rather than just looking at individual keywords.
- Sync Your Headers: Ensure your Meta Title, H1, and first paragraph all align with a single, clear user intent to prevent Google from auto-rewriting your SERP presence.
- Monitor Core Web Vitals: With the "Halloween Update" volatility, site speed and stability remained a massive tie-breaker for sites caught in the ranking shifts.