Things are starting to be getting a bit clearer now that Google’s December 2025 Core Update seems to have bedded in. For many news publishers, the landscape looks very different than it did earlier in the year.
If you haven’t seen the data yet, Press Gazette’s recent analysis shows how at the mercy of Google’s updates news publishers are. While a select few like The Times and Substack celebrated search engine visibility gains, the broader industry took a bit of a beating. The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent all saw double-digit drops in search visibility.
For the commercial and adtech teams inside these major publishers and broadcasters watching these developments, this update arrived just in time for Q1 (and the dearth of programmatic demand that it brings with it). It’s a reminder of the volatility inherent in relying on big tech to provide a stable environment in which to grow your business.
Google’s UX Paradox
Google is always careful to frame every core update with the same kind and benevolent narrative. They are refining their systems to surface relevant, satisfying content, saying it is all about the user experience.
For any publisher who has relied on Google over the last few years, it is a hard narrative to buy into.
While Google penalises publishers for intrusive interstitials or slow load times, their own search results page has become a masterclass in user hostility. Anyone using Google today already knows what where I’m headed with this. A full page of above the fold search ads, a row of shopping widgets and an AI overview before you see a single organic result. They have effectively pushed the entire organic internet below the fold. Notably, this is a practice they would penalise any other website for doing.
This hypocrisy was laid bare during the recent US Department of Justice antitrust trial. We learned that the “user first” mantra is often secondary to the “revenue first” reality. Internal communications revealed during the trial highlighted conflicts between the search quality and advertising teams.
Most enlightening was the testimony regarding pressure to increase query volume. Internal emails showed executives discussing how to boost engagement and ad revenue, with some engineers expressing understandable concern that the drive for revenue was compromising the product. The implication being, if search is too helpful, the user finds their answer and leaves. If the user has to refine their query or click back and forth, they generate more data and more ad impressions.
It is hard to square this reality with the advice given to publishers to simply write better content. Writing the best journalism in the world doesn’t guarantee results when it comes to search visibility.
Control What You Can
So, what can publishers do? Raging at the algorithm is cathartic, but it is not a strategy. As someone who trafficked my first ad nearly 25 years ago, I have seen this play out on repeat for decades. Google arbitrarily and unilaterally changes the rules, leaving entire industries to scramble. Rinse and repeat.
The only viable path forward is to focus ruthlessly on the variables you actually control.
Technical Precision
This is where many publishers are missing out on revenue, often without realising it.
The status quo for publisher ad tech is a mess and you’ll find no shortage of think pieces on LinkedIn complaining about the adtech market’s complexity. Complexity is baked into the DNA of programmatic adtech. A piecemeal collection of header bidding, video player wrappers and third-party analytics scripts all held together with sellotape.
If you work in publishing, you’ll already know this. And you’ll know that these technologies are rarely able to work together harmony out of the box. They are built by different vendors, with different goals, each prioritising their own value extraction over the publisher’s site performance.
The result is a heavy, sluggish site that fails Core Web Vitals tests.
The Holistic Approach
When you piece together an ad tech stack with sellotape, you introduce latency and layout shifts that frustrate users and flag your site as “poor experience” to Google’s crawlers. It is an unforced error.
It’s worth considering whether you view your ideal ad tech stack as a collection of disparate plug-ins, or whether you view it as a single, strategic product, which forms the engine of your entire business. This is why we built our platform as a unified whole. As a Google MCM Partner, our product is designed around the tenants of Core Web Vitals from the ground up.
The December 2025 update is nothing new to publishers. The space on the SERP is narrowing and the competition is getting fiercer. You cannot control Google’s next move, but you can ensure your own business is built on solid ground, not a patchwork of conflicting code.