On 11 December 2025 Google announced that it had officially started the “December 2025 Core Update”, the last large update of the year. Completing the update will take somewhere between 2 weeks and 3 weeks. (That figure is an estimate, taken from how long the previous updates have generally run.) Movement in the search results is a situation we meet often during updates. Less than 3 months on from the October 2025 Google update, it has now published a new one.
Right now a great many webmasters, ourselves included, are seeing sharp swings in the rankings. If you sit 3rd for a keyword in the morning and 13th in the evening, the reason is not a mistake in your SEO, it is Google's testing process.
What is happening? During this process Google is reassessing pages against new quality signals. That instability in the search results (the Google Dance) comes from the algorithm testing your site in different positions and measuring user behavior there, things like the click-through rate and how long people stay on the site.
You can check whether your site has a high degree of change in page speed and see the performance figures month by month on the Pagespeed Türk SEM page.
What should you do? Our advice as Türk SEM is plain: be patient. Wait.
- Do not panic: the ranking you lost may not be permanent.
- Do not make changes: changing titles, content or structure in the middle of an update makes it harder for the algorithm to process the data, and it can turn the drop into a permanent one.
- Watch: follow your Search Console data, but wait for the end of the month, meaning the end of the update, before you act on it.
Once the water settles, sites with quality content will come back to the place they deserve.
The Türk SEM Reading: What We Expect Next
We expect the December 2025 update to finish before 2025 is out, and we expect to see some clear changes in the logic of search ranking.
- Fresh data is gaining value: going by Google's first moves in this update, we expect it has made “fresh data”, that is freshness, more valuable than it used to be. Immediate and very recent information is likely to be more visible in the search results.
- Movement by topic and by meaning: there is serious movement not only at the level of sites but at the level of topics. We think Google is also running performance analysis on synonyms, and on the other meaning variations of a word.
- Weak results are the target: we generally see the heaviest movement, the sharp falls and rises, on the queries where Google thinks the current search results are “not good enough” for the user. It is trying to fill the gap there with better content.
Reaching firm conclusions is hard while the update is this new, but we will keep following the process closely and sharing our analysis.
