What Was the Google Medic Update?

On August 1, 2018, Google rolled out a broad core update that the industry quickly nicknamed Medic because of the visible impact on health sites. Google itself did not name it, calling it simply a broad core update, and advised that there was nothing specific to fix: the update reassessed content overall.

Analysis by Moz, Search Engine Land, and practitioners like Marie Haynes found the volatility concentrated in YMYL categories: health, finance, legal. This tied the update to Google's Quality Rater Guidelines and the E-A-T framework (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) those guidelines describe.

The update made E-A-T a household term in SEO. Google's position has been consistent and nuanced: the guidelines describe how human raters assess quality to train systems, and the systems then learn signals that correlate with those judgments. E-A-T is a framework, not a literal score.

Recovery from Medic-type losses followed the quality playbook: demonstrate genuine expertise with author credentials, cite trustworthy sources, fix thin and ad-heavy pages, and build the reputation signals raters look for. Recoveries typically arrived with subsequent core updates, months later.