Google Promises To Improve Your Search Rankings by December 2025

Will Your Visibility Improve?

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Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, responded to a post on X about Google’s aim to surface more content from independent sites in the SERPs. When pressed if the December 2025 deadline is accurate, Sullivan said:

Yes. With the important caveat that this doesn’t mean all sites will go back up to wherever they were if they were down from a previous peak.

Our results have continued to change since 2023, including showing more social content, for example. The results are going to continue to evolve.

In addition, some sites that have been impacted, they should have been impacted (sorry the site that complained about not ranking for the login page of a medical web site you had nothing to do with).

Some sites with great content and hearts in the right place still don’t provide a satisfying page experience (which isn’t a guarantee of top ranking but it should be considered).

But our systems themselves need to get better; it’s not all on creators sites that really do have good, solid content. And possibly, those sites might do better than previous peaks.”

From this, it’s clear that December 2025 is the target to improve visibility for some, but not all. Google isn’t making direct promises outside of the timeline. Instead, Sullivan doubles down on Google’s primary aim, which is to improve its internal systems and display the most appropriate content to searchers.

➡️ Google penalized publishers (which saw the drop of Forbes Advisor) in late 2024 for violating its site reputation abuse policy, specifically targeting third-party and spammy content.

What Can Businesses Do?

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As with most Google algorithm updates, businesses and publishers have to ride the ups and downs as the search landscape evolves. While the December 2025 commitment from Google sounds promising, there’s no guarantee that your website will see a positive increase in search visibility.

That said, there are a few things you can do to get your website into the best position it can be:

• Focus on quality content – provide valuable and helpful content for your target audience that actually addresses their needs, instead of just writing for search engines
• Carry out SEO basics – optimize your pages with meta titles and descriptions, add alt text to images, and more
• Prioritize page experience – as Sullivan said, you can have great content but a bad page experience, so make sure you structure your content well, break up text with visual elements, and make navigating your site easy

Finally, know that you can’t predict Google’s actions – all you can do is produce high-quality content, create positive experiences for website visitors, and work at optimizing your website for search engines and customers.