Ultimately, Google’s “weather” isn’t a natural phenomenon — it’s driven by human choices, reactions, and, occasionally, mistakes. Whether the changes are heuristic or machine-driven, they’re all driven by the same core philosophy and business models.
There is a force of nature behind Google warming, though, and that’s the pace of content creation itself. Content marketing is big business, and the pace of content creation has clearly accelerated over the past 11 years, very likely accelerated by automation (including AI). This forces Google to react faster, which causes content creators to react faster, on and on until the heat death of the universe, or until we quit and open a taco cart (seriously, let’s consider it).
Competition from LLM-based (“AI”) search engines, including ChatGPT search, is also forcing Google to move fast and break things, leaving the rest of us holding the pieces. It’s unlikely that this high pressure front is going to blow away anytime soon.
We can learn a lot from the past 11 years, but ultimately, we have to be able to adapt. More heatwaves and storms are inevitable, and they’re unlikely to slow down. I can only offer one comforting guarantee — as long as people need to find other people, places, and products, both search engines and search marketing will continue to exist.
For a full list of major algorithm updates back to 2003’s “Boston” update, check out our Google algorithm update history. For daily data on Google rankings flux and SERP feature trends, visit our MozCast SERP tracking project.
