Wirecutter takes a beating in the SERPs during June 2025 core update

[Ryuzaki]

Source: GSQI

WireCutter Loses on 3.6 Million Queries​

During the June 2025 Core Update, the WireCutter lost even more visibility than it has been losing:

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Google is updating their Reviews Update behind the scenes now (and obviously during core updates) without announcing them.

A lot of queries dropped from the front page to not in the top 100 at all, and overall they lost positions on over 3.6 million queries:

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This is one of those situations where you wonder how an article can be worthy of ranking #7 and #10 to not ranking in the top 100, overnight. Then dummies come in talking about "improve your content". Some stuff is simply algorithmic nonsense and that's been the case across the board for informational sites like these.

Glenn Gabe goes on to point out that for the queries they lost or slipped on, this included removing them from the AI overviews sources and suggested articles.

So What Happened?​

It seems two things happened:

1. WireCutter stopped benefiting from the NYTimes main domain authority finally.​
2. Google made an attempt to boost niche-based review sites over broadly general sites.​

Here's WSJ's Buyside and CNN's Underscored that predicted the fate of NYT's Wirecutter:

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Other broad review sites dropped as well.

Here's some examples of niche publishers that saw gains:

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The see-saw behavior between narrow niche sites and huge general-topic authorities continues, albeit more slowly than in the past. This pendulum behavior keeps everyone in a state of survival and chaos, whether or not it actually improves the SERPs or not.

I guess it also goes to show, as we've known for at least 20 years... if a site tanks for any reason other than a penalty, just slap it on a cheap server and let it live. 5 years, 10 years later it might bounce back after Google contradicts itself again.

 

[chubes]

Niche publisher seeing a gain:

Zoom out to 5 years:

 

[secretagentdad]

Now this is some hella interesting news.

Time to start mapping topicality dilution.

Looks like an opportunity window for the folks around here to do a little winning.

 

[ListAndFuse]

The thing is : reviews and forums help gaining expertise and authority in the eyes of Google AI search. So an AI will gather all reviews and make a summary out of it.

But AI search results tend to give answers and explanations, right on the search page. As a result, the user gets his answer without having to click on a link.

For example, if I ask Google "what is the best video editor to make cartoons like ads" ? Gemini will make a summary of all reviews, and give its answer. This means that I won't have to click on the links provided by Gemini to answer my question.

But this that's not enough for me, if I am looking for a review, I want to read it from the users themself.

Let's wait that the users change their behavior, and stop being satisfied with just machine answer. At the end of the day, we all want to read and compare with pour own reasoning.