Whenever Google announces a new core update, such as the March 2025 core update announced today, I always want to immediately check the rankings of my clients, especially those who have been trying to recover following a previous core update.

Yes, I know that rankings will fluctuate and we should not check until the update has finished. Still...tell me you don't do the same!

It’s tricky to do this right away though. It used to be that you could look at hourly Google organic traffic in GA and get a sense of whether it was significantly higher than usual. However, with GA4, the traffic data is often delayed.

What I tend to do is this:

  • Look at the average ranking position for queries over the last 7 days in GSC.
  • Manually check in an incognito window to see if anything has changed.

Now, keep in mind that we really can’t say anything about ranking changes until after the core update has fully finished rolling out.

I thought of a cool way to have my new assistant, ChatGPT Operator do this for me. I exported the last 7 days of data from GSC. Then I took the top 15 keywords, and copied them along with the reported ranking positions.

Then I opened up ChatGPT Operator. If you’re not familiar with Operator, it is an AI system that uses a browser to accomplish things. I prompted this,

“Here is a list of queries and ranking positions for [my client]. Do a google search for each of these terms and make me a new table showing the previous ranking position, and what you find today.”

I watched as Operator opened a browser, and performed a Google Search for each of these queries.

After about 10 minutes, it notified me it had finished the task and gave me this table.

Let’s hope these stick!

I expect we'll find more and more use for agentic systems like this. Google's Project Mariner, an agentic tool that uses a browser, is expected to be out this year. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that within 2-3 years he expects these tools will be deeply embedded into our workflows.

Marie

This is one of the many entries in the private area of the Search Bar Pro community for Marie’s Tips, Strategies and Prompts. Membership is on sale this week only, for $18/m instead of the normal $42.

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