Google rolled out another core update in late March, and the SEO industry did what it usually does. People started dissecting title tags, word counts, and rankings, hunting for the tactical explanation. I’m sure we’ll see new “courses” popping up any day now, promising to decode it for you.
I’ve been watching this conversation play out in LinkedIn threads and on client calls, and I want to translate what it actually means for service businesses. Most of the analysis is pitched at marketing directors at larger companies. If you’re a coach, therapist, consultant, or founder of a service-based business, the implications look different. In most cases, they’re in your favour.
The misreading: AI content is being penalized
A common assumption after every core update is that Google has figured out how to detect AI content and is punishing it. I myself have been known to make that same assumption. But as time goes on, I have noticed that isn’t quite what’s happening. Kishan Panpalia, a founding team member at Pepper, captured this well in a recent breakdown of the update. The sites losing ground aren’t losing because they used a language model. They’re losing because nobody with direct knowledge of the subject was ever involved in what ended up on the page.
The issue isn’t AI. It’s what people are doing with it.
What Google is actually rewarding
The March update absorbed what used to be called the “helpful content system” directly into core ranking. Translation: there’s no longer a separate quality gate. Pages that don’t genuinely help a real person reading them can’t pass the bar on clean on-page optimization anymore.
Three things Google’s quality systems want to see in your content:
- original information or analysis rather than rehashed information,
- value that goes beyond what similar pages already offer,
- and real expertise from someone who actually knows the subject.
If the honest answer is no to all three, the content is drag, not lift. And that drag is now evaluated at the site level, not just the page level. One or two thoughtful articles on a site full of thin filler content doesn’t rescue the site anymore. Google is looking at the average, not the best piece.
Why this is mostly good news for service businesses
If you run a coaching practice, a therapy practice, or a consultancy, you already have the thing that’s hardest to fake: you have actual expertise. You’ve sat with clients and watched patterns emerge over years. You have language for things most people haven’t figured out how to articulate yet. You have case stories, opinions, and genuine nuance.
The challenge is that most service business websites hide all of that under generic copy. “I help ambitious women build businesses they love” could be written by a thousand different coaches, and honestly, it has been. The website strips out everything specific and replaces it with something safer and more polished. Safer and more polished is now exactly what Google is moving away from.
The AI visibility question everyone is asking
I’ve had three calls this month with clients asking some version of “how do we show up in ChatGPT?” It’s a reasonable question, but it’s often the wrong place to start. AI Overviews, AI Mode, and third-party AI tools draw from the same underlying quality signals Google uses for search ranking. There’s no separate playbook for AI visibility.
Which is good news if you’ve been doing the work of writing with substance. It’s harder news if you’ve been leaning on AI to generate articles you’d never actually read yourself.
What this looks like in practice
A few things worth doing if you’re thinking about this for your own site:
Audit your existing content honestly. If there are blog posts or pages on your site that were written to hit a keyword and never got read by a real human, they’re probably hurting you now. Either bring them up to standard or take them down.
Write what you know in detail. Share the actual frameworks, misconceptions, and real patterns you’d walk a client through on a call. Generic content competes with generic content. Specific content doesn’t have much competition.
Don’t abandon AI (although there are arguably other factors in deciding whether you use it at all). Use it the way most of us are using it now: as an editor, a formatter, a thinking partner. Not as a replacement for your perspective. The tool isn’t the problem. Outsourcing the thinking is.
A note on timing
One more thing worth saying. Recovery from these updates takes time. Google’s systems need months of consistent signal before they confirm a site’s quality has genuinely changed. If you’re starting now, you’re starting. There isn’t a shortcut.
The playbook that worked in 2018 is now actively working against a lot of sites. The one that works now rewards what you already have, which is the real experience and specific perspective you bring to your clients. The hard part is getting that onto the page in a way that sounds like you.
If that feels like an overwhelming project on top of everything else, that’s usually where we come in. A website rebuild grounded in your actual positioning, written in your voice, is the fastest way to get what’s in your head onto your site in a way that works for everyone who finds you.
Kishan Panpalia’s full breakdown of the March 2026 update on Substack is worth reading if you want more detail.
If any of this landed, the next step is a quick call to talk through your own site.
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