Google hasn’t just changed the colors and icons. Which changes will affect us?

Many of us have noticed that Google has changed its visual design: from a lighter color gradient to updated icons. Behind these changes lie much deeper processes that aren’t visible to the naked eye—on March 27, 2026, a core update was released, the first major search algorithm update of the year.

According to Google, this is a “regular update designed to better filter out useful, high-quality content.” It sounds quite innocent if you’re not an SEO specialist and don’t monitor your Google Search Console data on a daily basis. However, SEO specialists in Lithuania noticed the changes as early as April 20, when they observed a sharp drop in search queries upon opening Search Console. This update followed the February Discover update and the March spam update.

For non-SEO specialists: Google has rolled out several significant updates to its search and content ranking systems in less than a month. Such changes are particularly sensitive for websites in the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) categories, where the content can directly impact users’ financial security, health, legal status, or overall well-being.

Google applies extremely strict credibility and quality requirements to content in the YMYL category, which is why updates in the health sector follow the so-called E-E-A-T principle: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Translated into Lithuanian, this means experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. In other words, Google is trying to determine whether the content is created by a genuine specialist or if it’s just another blog about teeth.

Most Lithuanian health websites that fall into the YMYL category look quite similar: they feature an attractive, representative photo, a description of services, contact information, informational texts, articles, and other factual information. Although this may seem well-organized to the user, when Google analyzes such content, it sometimes finds a lack of trustworthiness, authorship, and expert backing—especially when it comes to health, medicine, or other topics of public concern.

→ The individual pages for doctors and specialists should include not only photos but also links to their LinkedIn profiles (even if they have as few as 5 followers).

→ Doctors’ last names must be clearly related to the content—for example, if an article on gum disease was written by Dr. Petras Jonaitis, Google needs to know that such a person exists and that his expert insights can be trusted.

→ The clinic director could share expert information from their field on LinkedIn at least once a month: about technological innovations, common health myths, treatment methods, or the questions patients most frequently ask.

LinkedIn has long since ceased to be merely a marketplace for job offers and searches—it is a network where communication is essential for any business. After all, people want to know who is behind the services they use, and LinkedIn is becoming an increasingly popular search platform for precisely that purpose.

User behavior is changing because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to earn trust online, so people are turning to user-based platforms (such as LinkedIn or Reddit) where real people share their real experiences.

Looking at the bigger picture, communication among qualified doctors and experts on LinkedIn serves a far more important purpose than Google’s search rankings. Is this important for the healthcare industry? Yes, of course. However, it’s far more important to disseminate expert, science-based information on social media and thus combat misinformation, of which there is already far too much.