SEO breaking news: December 2025 Edition

Simone Puligheddu SEO Christmas

  1. December 31, 2025: Google published a new help page explaining how businesses can create and share a link or QR code to request reviews on their Business Profile.

  2. December 19, 2025: Microsoft published an article explaining how duplicate content affects SEO and AI search visibility. The piece highlights that duplication dilutes authority, confuses intent signals (AI systems may struggle to identify which page best matches user intent), and slows indexing, impacting both traditional search and AI-driven experiences.

  3. December 18, 2025: Google announced that users can now verify AI-generated videos in the Gemini app. The feature uses SynthID watermarks and reasoning to identify segments created or edited with Google AI.

  4. December 17, 2025: Google released a “Search Off the Record” podcast episode where John Mueller and Danny Sullivan discussed SEO in the age of AI.

    Despite new acronyms like AEO and GEO emerging, the overarching concept remains SEO. These terms represent subsets of SEO focused on AI-driven formats, but the core principle hasn’t changed.

  5. December 17, 2025: “Gemini 3 Flash is rolling out globally in Google Search”

  6. December 17, 2025: Microsoft Clarity shared five experimental approaches using emerging AI technologies to imagine what an AI-native future of analytics could look like.

  7. December 11, 2025, a new article on blog.google: “Generate a digital version of yourself to virtually try on clothes”

  8. December 11, 2025: GPT-5.2 released

  9. December 11, 2025: Google is testing “Disco,” a new browsing experience designed to help manage complex online tasks.

    More precisely, Disco is an experimental platform by Google aimed at reinventing web navigation, while GenTabs is its first feature, which uses AI to create interactive mini-apps based on open tabs and incoming requests.

    GenTabs would allow users to turn complex activities into personalized tools without writing any code… to understand better, I recommend checking out the specific examples shared in Google’s blog post announcing this new experience.

  10. December 10, 2025: “Supporting the web with new features and partnerships”

  11. December 10, 2025: Microsoft released its “Copilot Usage Report 2025″… the report analyzed 37.5 million conversations. The article is worth at least a quick read!

  12. December 10, 2025: Google announced a new feature in Search Console that introduces weekly and monthly views in the Performance report.

  13. December 08, 2025: Google announced an experimental feature in Search Console that integrates social channel performance data into the Insights report.

  14. December 04, 2025: Google published a video where Daniel Waisberg explains how to analyze site performance using Search Console’s Performance reports.

  15. December 04, 2025: Google announced an experimental AI-powered configuration feature in Search Console’s Performance report.

  16. December 03, 2025: “Virtual Apparel Try On tool comes to the UK and India this festive season”

  17. December 02, 2025: Google published a video introducing Search Console Insights. The video explains how to use the Insights report to monitor content performance, identify trending pages and queries, and more.

  18. December 2025 Latest major updates made to the Google Search Central documentation:

    December 2025 documentation updates seem strongly focused on JavaScript, with clarifications on canonicalization, noindex handling, and execution behavior, alongside some changes to crawling documentation.

    December 09, 2025:

    • Google updated its core updates documentation, clarifying that websites improving their content can experience ranking gains without waiting for the next major core update.

    December 15, 2025:

    • Google clarified in its JavaScript documentation how the crawler handles noindex tags on pages that use JavaScript.

      “While Google may be able to render a page that uses JavaScript, the behavior of this is not well defined and might change. If there’s a possibility that you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code.”

      (Read the updated JavaScript documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics)

    December 17, 2025:

    • Google added specific best practices for handling canonical URLs on sites that rely on JavaScript.

      On December 17, Google clarified canonicalization best practices for JavaScript. The update emphasizes that canonicalization occurs both before and after rendering, so the canonical URL must be as clear as possible. For JavaScript-based pages, this means setting the canonical URL to match the original HTML URL, or if that’s not feasible, omitting the canonical tag from the original HTML.

      (Read the updated JavaScript documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics)

    December 18, 2025:

    • Google clarified how Googlebot handles JavaScript execution on pages with non-200 HTTP status codes. The update notes that while pages returning a 200 status code are sent for rendering, this may not happen for pages with other status codes.

    • Google migrated several crawling-related documents to its crawling infrastructure site:
      • Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs
      • Optimize your crawl budget
      • How HTTP status codes affect Google’s crawlers
      • Debug DNS and network errors

      • ➡️ Read more & source: https://developers.google.com/search/updates#december-2025

  19. December, 2025 Google announced that the December 2025 core update for Search began rolling out on December 11 and was fully completed by December 29.

    • ➡️ Read more: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/DsirqJ1gpPRgVQeccPRv

  20. December, 2025: Google has officially released its “Year in Search 2025” on trends.withgoogle.com, showcasing the most popular topics and queries from around the world.

  21. December, 2025: Microsoft Clarity has published two new case studies:

Curious about more SEO updates?

➡️ Don’t miss the previous editions for a full view! ➡️