Fastly evolving search engines, Instagram SEO and a Google Core Update  – SEO News July 2025

These are fast moving times for SEO. AI-based tools are adding new features and expanding into new markets. Google is evolving to maintain market dominance. Changes may have a negative impact on the traffic and conversions for many websites, but changes also open new opportunities for visibility, traffic and conversions.

Our advice is to keep doing SEO work you should have been doing before. Creating content, optimizing tags, adding structured data and getting links from relevant sites remain useful in these changing times. News on Instagram opening up to search engines, also means that you could also do some SEO in this social network.

Also be aware of the real rate of adoption of AI tools by your target audience. Relatively few people are replacing Google with new search tools. Google remains, by far, the biggest source of traffic for websites.

In this edition we talk about search tools Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity and DuckDuckGo. SEOPress helps you rank in all these search tools.

July 17th – End of the June 2025 Google Core Update

Launched on June 30th, Google’s June Core Update officially finished rolling out on July 17^th. The information was given via the Search Status Dashboard, with no other message coming from Google about this update. SEO chronicler Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Land that the Core update was big. Some sites hit by previous updates have seen improved ranking after the June 2025 Core Update.

He also reported later on Search Engine Roundtable that volatility remained heated after the official end to the update (and this seems to becoming the norm). SERP tracking tools show volatility until the end of the month as illustrated by the SERP Seisometer below.

As we mentioned last month, you should check your rankings in Google after any update. Did they change for better or for worse? Use our resource Recovering from an Google update if you need help. Ranking in Google’s organic results is a first step to being visible in Google’s AI-generated responses AI Overviews and AI Mode. As you can read below, it may also be important for featuring in ChatGPT.

Instagram is now indexable by search engines

On July 10^th, Meta notified Instagram users that their public photos and videos can now be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing. Search engines were previously blocked from indexing this content. The Instagram help page states that access has been given to search engines for posts from 01/01/2020 and for professional account holders over 18 only.

Instagram posts can show up as webpages in Google search results, but it is more likely that this change will impact image search results. If you are interested in Image SEO, make sure to download our eBook More visibility with Image SEO to see how you can optimize image SEO in WordPress.

To check whether your Instagram page has been indexed by Google, use the site: command plus the URL of your Instagram account. For example, site:instagram.com/wp_seopress. The initial results will show the posts that have been indexed. Click on the “Images” tab to see the photos indexed; And the “Videos” tab for videos.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent and plans browser

On July 17^th, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hosted a livestream to announce the release of ChatGPT Agent. This new feature in ChatGPT brings together Deep Research and Operator to make an agent that can surf the web on a virtual computer to find information and perform tasks. It also integrates a terminal that can produce charts and reports.

The live demo uses an invitation to a wedding as an example, asking ChatGPT to find an outfit, a hotel on booking.com and a gift idea. ChatGPT not only finds responses to these questions but can operate websites to accomplish reservations and orders.

Earlier in July, TechCrunch reported that OpenIA was planning to release a browser, integrating ChatGPT. This was in reaction to the launch of Comet by AI-search competitor Perplexity.

Many web browsers are linked to search engines of course. Google has Chrome, Microsoft Edge integrates Bing and now Copilot. Even lesser-known search engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave have released their own browsers. It now seems that AI tools want to get in this space, and it is easy to imagine that a future OpenAI browser will integrate ChatGPT Agent.

In the article No more links, no more scrolling—The browser is becoming an AI Agent, VentureBeat speculates on how these new browsers will be different, but it also doubts that they will be real challengers to Google Chrome. Eli Goodman of Datos is quoted as saying, “Short of a miracle, I have a hard time seeing any new browser having any kind of material impact on Google’s browser dominance for quite some time, if at all.”

What does this mean for you? ChatGPT Agent is only available to ChatGPT users with a paid subscription. It is unlikely to be widely used now, but this demo signposts a future where traffic to your website will not only be from human users.

What can you do? If you have access, you can ask ChatGPT Agent to visit your website and perform tasks. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Google’s John Mueller specifically recommended e-commerce owners to test their sites using common agents. Doing this, you can check that your site works correctly with this new technology. In the future your website will need to consider both human and bot user experience (UX).

DuckDuckGo Search adds a feature to remove AI generated images

You may not have heard of DuckDuckGo. It is a search engine that has existed as an alternative to Google since 2008. It is also the 4^th most popular search engine in the US (after Google, Bing and Yahoo), but with less than 1% of users (a fact that may explain why you haven’t heard of it).

On July 14^th, the search engine announced via X that it has added a new feature allowing users to hide AI generated images from search results. They also offer a no-IA version of their search engine at noai.duckduckgo.com.

This is the first search engine to add such a feature, but it is in response to a popular request for tech giants to help users identify fake content. Facebook added AI labels to AI-generated content in April 2024. The illustration of baby peacocks used by DuckDuckGo makes reference to criticism launched against Google in October last year when a post on X by @notengoprisa highlighted the number of fake images showing for the “baby peacock” search term.

It is probable that Google has been filtering out AI-generated images algorithmically – there are certainly less images of fake baby peacocks in Google search results today compared to last October.

What does this mean? Image SEO is an interesting source of traffic for many websites. This news seems to show that tech companies are finding ways of identifying AI-generated images. Rather than filtering them out, Google probably treats them as images with less SEO value than an original photo or illustration – it does this with stock photography for example. Real photos and illustrations are more likely to rank better, but you must be sure to optimize the name of image files before you upload them to WordPress and add relevant ALT text to images when you do upload them.

ChatGPT is using Google search results

In her article, Confirmed: ChatGPT uses Google SERP Snippets for its Answers, published on July 24^th, Aleyda Solis showed evidence that ChatGPT gets answers from Google as well as Bing. It follows on from other research by Alexis Rylko (in French) published on July 6^th which discovered the same thing – ChatGPT uses content from Google search results to answer questions.

This discovery is a major surprise because OpenAI officially partners with Bing for ChatGPT search (Microsoft, the owner of Bing, is a shareholder in OpenAI). Google is a competitor.

Aleyda concluded that ChatGPT uses Google when it can’t get information from Bing. Alexis concluded that ChatGPT was discretely abandoning Bing to use Google instead.

We can expect some fallout from this discovery. It seems impossible that ChatGPT can abandon Bing or continue to use Google search results without permission. The core problem could be the same one that explains why Google is so much more popular than Bing as a search engine: the quality of the results.

Google AI Mode updates and UK launch

After being released in the US and India last month, Google’s AI Mode was released in the UK on July 28^th. The tool – rumored to be the future of Google search results – continues to be available in English only. New features in AI Mode were also launched in July, including the capability to ask questions about images and PDF files, Canvas mode and Search Live. The article by Google also announced a new feature for the Chrome browser called “Ask Google about this page” that will allow you to ask for AI Overviews of webpages you are visiting.

If your WordPress site is meant for audiences in the US, India or the UK you should be interested in how your site is showing up in AI Mode. You can test it with your target keywords and ask it questions about your website.

However, be aware that a study released by iPullRank in July concluded that AI Mode is not sticky yet. 50 % of Google users have tested AI Mode once and haven’t tried it again. Only 9 % of users sampled used it 5 times or more during the research period (from May to mid-July).

By Benjamin Denis

CEO of SEOPress. 15 years of experience with WordPress. Founder of WP Admin UI & WP Cloudy plugins. Co-organizer of WordCamp Biarritz 2023 & WP BootCamp. WordPress Core Contributor.