Google hit publish on chaos. Here's how to rank anyway.

_{Day 61/100}

Hey - Tim here.

You wake up.
Coffee in hand.
Open Search Console.

Boom.

Traffic’s down.
Rankings are toast.
Your best blog post just got buried under Reddit, Quora, and some dude’s Medium rant from 2016.

No warning. No mercy.
Just Google, casually nuking your SERPs like it misplaced the manual.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, welcome to Q2 2025 - where the algorithm doesn’t tweak, it detonates.

Google Woke Up And Chose Violence (Again)

This year’s BrightonSEO wasn’t about how to write a better meta description.
It was a crisis summit.
A war room for SEOs watching their rankings get clapped by a 2-ton algo hammer.

And while most people were still refreshing Search Console in a panic…

I was watching it happen in real time. On LinkedIn and Twitter.

Two Major Google Updates Wrecked Everything

→ What I saw with Penfriend:
We did this. We made a bunch of content last year, and honestly a lot of it survived. We saw a drop in traffic, but nothing huge.

That being said, I’m making my way through those that got hit and making the decision to remove or update.

The fix? Prune aggressively. Beef up the ones that matter. Add soul.

AI Search Is Here. And It’s Stealing Your Clicks.

Google’s “AI Mode” is now live for premium users.
AI Overviews are front and center.
And the click-through rate for your beautifully crafted article?
Not great.

AI answers pull from anywhere. And increasingly… it’s not the top 10.
It’s Reddit, forums, Wikipedia, and structured content that makes extracting answers easy.

→ What I saw with Penfriend:
I ran a test: I asked ChatGPT and Perplexity five high-volume queries I knew we ranked for.
In three of those cases, Penfriend content wasn’t cited.
The content was helpful - but buried. Too verbose. Not “summary-friendly.”
We reformatted into tighter Q&A style, added FAQs, and guess what?
Next time, Penfriend was the source.

This is the game now.

So… What Do You Actually Do?

Let’s get practical. Here’s what I’m seeing work across hundreds of live articles and user accounts inside Penfriend:

Ranking ≠ Visibility Anymore

That “#1 in Google” badge doesn’t mean what it used to.

AI answers often cite non-ranking pages.
Sometimes content from spot #17 gets featured. Sometimes spot #3 doesn’t.

→ What I saw with Penfriend:
One user ranked #12 for a tool comparison post.
No featured snippet.
But it was getting cited by Perplexity.
Why? Clear structure. Direct comparisons. Easy to pull.

Topic Clusters Still Work - But Only If They’re Human

You can’t just glue a bunch of keywords together and call it a cluster.

→ What we’re doing in Penfriend:
I’ve started encouraging users to map clusters to real conversations — like actual support tickets, sales calls, Reddit threads.

Suddenly the cluster isn’t just good for SEO.
It feels like it’s written for a person with a problem.

And that’s when rankings follow.

AI Content? Cool. But Edit Like You Mean It.

AI can write a decent draft.
But that’s where the job starts.

→ What I’ve told Penfriend users (bluntly):
If you paste the first draft into WordPress and hit publish…
You deserve the drop.

There is a reason one of the first blogs I wrote was on how to edit AI content.
How to make AI content YOURS.

The posts that win are:

• Structured

• Fact-checked

• Enhanced with real insight

Even better if they sound like a person. Not just a machine that read a lot of blog posts in 2019.

SEO Is Now Cross-Platform Whether You Like It Or Not

TikTok. Reddit. Amazon. YouTube. ChatGPT.

→ What we’ve started tracking at Penfriend:
A few clients started seeing spikes in branded search after going viral on TikTok.
The kicker?
That TikTok didn’t even link to their site.
People just saw it, got curious, and Googled the brand.
Which means social presence = SEO discovery channel.

Your Tech Stack Might Be Killing You

If you’re running a site built on a JS-heavy headless CMS - you need to know how that affects crawlability.

→ What I’ve seen firsthand:
A Penfriend user had beautifully designed pages.
But Google wasn’t indexing half of them.
Reason? Lazy rendering. No SSR.
Suggested adding pre-rendering - visibility shot up.

Final Thought

This update hurt.

But it also clarified things.

Here’s what’s still working:

• Real content that helps real people

• Sites that are technically sound and emotionally resonant

• Writers who edit like maniacs and think like strategists

• Brands who show up in the places people actually search

• SEOs who listen to users more than they listen to Google

The future of SEO isn’t just about what’s “optimised.”

It’s about what’s valuable.

So stop chasing rankings like it’s 2012.

Build something worth clicking on — even in a world where clicks are rare.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Not My Algorithm Update" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. If you got hit by this update and still opened this email, you’re my kind of unhinged.
Let’s rebuild. Stronger. Smarter. Slightly more sarcastic.

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