June 2025: AI Search Metrics, Core Update, and Cloudflare's Move Against AI Crawlers

June 2025 Core Update

Any ranking volatility you might have noticed through May and June might be traceable back to testing and early partial release of Google’s June 2025 Core Update, which officially began rolling out on June 30. The rollout is set to take three weeks, concluding around July 20. So far, the volatility appears consistent with prior core updates.

My take: Google has offered very little detail, which is generally a good thing with Core Updates. It means it's a standard, broad update where the goal is to reward “quality content”, not to impose penalties or punish sites. It's also not introducing new signals. This may seem academic because sites with pages which lack substance, originality, or EEAT (experience, expertise, authority and trust) may still feel the pinch – and that pinch won't be numbed by the knowledge that you haven't technically been punished, and it's just that others have been rewarded. The impact is the same either way if you've lost during an update. It does (or at least should) change the route forward, though, from knee-jerk, remedial panic to a more proactive and holistic thought process around quality improvement.

AI Mode arrives in Google Search Console, but with caveats

Google Search Console is now reporting impressions, clicks, and position data for AI Mode users (which is only fully live in the US and India right now, but will be hitting the UK and the rest of the world soon enough, after some regulatory niggles are ironed out). However, the AI Mode data is all lumped in with overall search performance data. There’s no filter yet to split out AI Mode traffic or stats from traditional search data.

My take: The best thing you can do is keep an eye on impressions. Recent studies suggest impression trends remain largely unaffected by AI, which makes sense when you think about it. Roughly the same number of people are searching in Google (i.e. the erosion of Google's market share from AI experiences is negligible in the grand scheme of things) so the scope of opportunity for impressions is the same. Clicks have become the moving goalpost – they have been gradually dropping for about a year since the introduction of AI Overviews, sometimes levelling-off, sometimes increasing momentarily as Google tests new features, but definitely not a reliable benchmark or baseline; and now AI Mode will further reduce clicks and add more complication to forecasting.

From an SEO analyst’s perspective, impressions remain the cleanest, most stable metric for benchmarking and gauging whether or not your SEO footprint is expanding, holding steady, or declining in the new AI-infused Google Search era.

AI Search Experiments: Multimodal Search & Chrome Bar AI Mode

Google and Bing both dialled up testing of richer AI integrations this month:

• YouTube Shorts are surfacing in AI Overviews and Bing Copilot. The convergence of short-form video and AI answers suggests video is about to play a larger role in satisfying search intent directly on AI SERPs.
• Audio Overviews have been spotted in U.S. tests of AI Mode, driven by Google’s NotebookLM (an AI podcast generator). We're hoping that if these features graduate from test to core, transcripts will eventually be made available, allowing some degree of brand visibility tracking. Time will tell.
• Chrome Search Bar has been serving results from AI Mode for some desktop users, hinting at a push to make AI the default search layer in the future.
• Search Live is being tested, letting users point their cameras at real-world objects while querying Google via voice search. Notably, typed queries aren’t yet supported for this feature, which we thought was interesting. This may be in the pipeline for future testing.

My take: Collectively, these changes signal a further shift towards folding AI deeper into search behaviours across image, video, audio... not just text/LLM input. The endgame looks increasingly multimodal. Thinking harder about your brand assets now – quality, formats, optimisation – could pay dividends in the next phase of search's evolution.

Instagram Search Indexing

Instagram has confirmed plans to make its content indexable in search engines in July 2025. Details remain thin, but it’s a safe bet that standard social SEO principles will apply when optimising for Google visibility: keyword usage in profiles, captions, hashtags, and engagement signals (in Instagram and Google) will all likely shape what surfaces in search. This was certainly true of Twitter, for example, and it's how Google looks at it's own platform, YouTube, when surfacing content for Google Search.

My take: Given the platform’s influence and user base, this could become a notable organic channel in the months ahead. Time will tell just how heavily these SERP Features are promoted and engaged with.

Slipping on the tin-foil hat for a moment... the last time Google opened the floodgates to a UGC platform like this, it was due to a highly criticised deal brokered with Reddit. Reddit was promoted in search and Google got to train its AI on all of Reddit's user-generated content. If AI search is becoming more multimodal, perhaps this is the next wave of AI training data acquisition.

Cloudflare vs AI Crawlers

In a significant shift, Cloudflare announced that all new accounts will now block AI crawlers by default. Anyone wanting AI bots to scrape their content must explicitly opt in with a new settings toggle.

Given Cloudflare’s scale as the largest web application firewall, this move could influence negotiations between site owners (as a collective) and AI companies seeking training data. It's empowering. It’s also the clearest sign yet that the web is fragmenting into camps: those who want to be part of AI’s knowledge base, and those who don’t.

My take: From a visibility standpoint, it’s simple: if you block AI bots, you’re opting out of being surfaced in AI-generated answers. Whether that’s a win or a loss depends on your business model and content strategy. Our job is to make brands more visible in search, including generative AI search, so of course we think it would be a bad idea to block AI crawlers. Whether you choose to take a more principled approach, though, is entirely up to you!

Interestingly, somebody asked Google's spokesperson, John Mueller, if they should use the LLMs.txt file (a proposed new standard for controlling AI crawlers, much like robots.txt for search bots and scrapers) and his answer was "Why bother? No LLMs respect LLMs.txt anyway!". Cloudflare appears to be taking the proverbial bull by the horns and wrestling AI crawl control into the hands of the average site owner, giving them leverage and choice.