There is an episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes an inventor. His greatest creation: the Everything's OK Alarm. A device that sounds a klaxon at regular intervals to let you know that everything is, in fact, fine. Nothing has changed. No action required. The alarm exists purely to make noise about the absence of a problem.
The SEO industry's relationship with Google Core Updates is roughly equivalent.
Every few months, Google confirms — or the tools detect — a significant update to its core ranking systems. Within hours, the ranking trackers light up. LinkedIn fills with posts. Newsletters go out. Agencies brief their account managers. Clients get emails with phrases like "wanted to make you aware" and "we're monitoring closely." The Everything's OK Alarm, set to maximum volume.
Why Google keeps updating — and why it matters
Before dismissing the updates entirely, it is worth understanding why they happen — because the reason is actually interesting and genuinely relevant to how you think about SEO.
Google processes an estimated 8.5 billion searches a day. Behind each one is a decision: which pages, from the billions in the index, best answer this query for this person at this moment. That decision is made by systems of extraordinary complexity, trained on signals that include content quality, authority, relevance, user behaviour, page experience and hundreds of other factors — many of which interact with each other in ways that are not fully understood even by the people building them.
The web is also not static. New content is published every second. Existing pages are updated, removed or left to decay. The quality of what is in the index changes constantly. Google's systems need to keep pace with that — recalibrating what deserves to rank, what has deteriorated, what new content has earned its place, and what is wasting crawl budget on pages that serve nobody.
Core updates are not Google being capricious or moving the goalposts. They are the inevitable result of operating at a scale that most people cannot meaningfully visualise. The updates will keep coming because the web keeps changing and the systems trying to make sense of it have to keep up. That is the context. That is why treating each one as a news event misses the point.
What the ranking tools are actually showing you
When a core update lands, the ranking tools — SEMrush, Ahrefs, Sistrix, all of them — show volatility. Positions moving, visibility scores fluctuating, winners and losers emerging. It looks urgent. It feels like something needs to be done.
But ranking position, as discussed elsewhere on this site, is a perspective — not data. What the tools are measuring is movement in the instrument, not movement in the outcome. A position changing from 8 to 12 for a term that generates three clicks a month is not a business problem. It is a data point. The question is always: has this translated into fewer visits, less revenue, lower conversion? If the answer is no, the alarm is telling you everything is OK. You do not need to act on it.
A real example — what the data actually said
Working with a client in an alternative sector, a core update period produced exactly the kind of impression drop that triggers alarm bells. Impressions were down. Visibility had declined. On the surface, a problem.
When we (Claude and I) dug into it, the picture was different. The impressions lost were almost entirely for generic, high-volume, zero-conversion terms — broad category queries that generate thousands of impressions and virtually no commercial value. The kind of terms where ranking highly looks impressive in a report and contributes nothing to revenue.
Google had essentially decided to stop indexing a number of pages because the crawl budget was being consumed by content that was not relevant to the queries it was trying to answer. The update had not damaged the site — it had exposed a structural issue that already existed. A bloated site with pages that were not earning their place in the index.
The visits that mattered had not declined. The revenue had not declined. The conversion rate had not changed. The update was not the problem. The update had just made the problem visible.
What the fix actually looked like
Two things. First: the crawl budget — identifying which pages were consuming Google's attention without justifying it, and either improving them or removing them from the index. Not everything deserves to be crawled. A site that asks Google to process hundreds of thin or duplicate pages is asking Google to waste its time.
Second — and this is the more interesting part — the product pages had no proper content. Not just category pages with thin descriptions. Individual product pages that said nothing about the product, its properties, its uses, why someone should want it or why they should buy it from this particular business rather than anywhere else.
The fix required sitting with the client — actually talking to them about the products. What is this for? Who buys it? What do they need to know? That conversation produced content that no agency writing generically from the outside could have produced. The client knew the products, knew the customers, knew the language. The role was to point that knowledge in the right direction and structure it so Google could understand it.
That is not an update response. That is just good SEO. The update made it urgent. The work itself was overdue.
What you should actually do when an update lands
Check your own data. Not the ranking tools — your data. GSC for impressions, clicks and average position on the queries that actually matter to your business. GA4 for sessions, engagement and revenue by channel. Has anything changed in the numbers that connect to commercial outcomes? If not, the update has not affected you.
If something has changed — look at what moved specifically. Which queries lost visibility? Were those queries driving traffic? Was that traffic converting? The answers to those questions tell you whether you have a problem and, if so, what kind of problem it is.
Most of the time, the answer is that the update confirmed something that was already true about the site. A page that was ranking despite thin content stops ranking. A category with no internal link equity loses ground. A crawl budget that was being wasted on low-value pages gets reclaimed. None of these are update problems. They are site problems that the update made visible.
Disney characters do exist. The people who perform them, who wear the costume, who generate the excitement — they are real. The updates are real. The question is whether you are watching the performance or paying attention to what is actually going on behind it.