Core Update Analysis

Google's May 2026 core update has officially finished rolling out, and here's what we know so far. On the same day that Google announced this update, they also announced that they were gonna be using Gemini 3.5 Flash in all of their AI-powered search features.

And during this update rollout, every industry saw an impact, but it was finance, online communities, and reference sites that saw the biggest impact. So while we don't know what has changed yet, we do know that Google was upgrading their AI Search features at the same time as this update.

I don't think that's a coincidence in terms of what this means for your site. We saw some major volatility in search results during this rollout, and it is so important that you get that your ranking and traffic changes during this period do not mean anything.

Your new baseline should start from today, June 3rd. Wait at least a week, then you can compare your rankings, visibility, and traffic to before the 21st May to see the impact.

Watch this space.

Google are rolling out their second core update of the year, and over this weekend some serious stuff went down. The update actually started rolling out on the 21st May, but it was on the 30th of May that people started to see some serious movements.

And by that I mean that a lot of sites saw ranking and traffic drop. And this is happening pretty much across every industry.

Before you start freaking out about this, you need to know this happens with pretty much every core algorithm update, and the rankings that you currently have are not necessarily what they're gonna stay at. I've seen this happen loads before with other algorithm updates.

It's not different traffic currently, and where you're currently ranking is not something you should be worrying about right now. Once this update is finished rolling out, that's the time to analyse your site, content, rankings, and what has changed to figure out what you need to do.

Don't freak out. I'll let you know when it's done.

Google just announced a major update to their core search algorithm. I wanna talk about how you should think about updates like these and what they might mean for your business or website.

So Google does three or four of these major updates every year. They used to have fun names like Penguin or Panda.

Now they're just named after the month they came out. So this is the May 2026 core update?

Google doesn't give us any details. They just point us to their generic guidelines about ranking and search.

So it's up to us SEOs to track the results as these updates roll out and try to reverse engineer them. It'll probably be at least a month before we really know what changed here.

But as SEOs, we love to speculate. So let's speculate.

Perhaps the number one expert on evaluating core algorithm updates from Google is my friend Marie Haynes. Shortly after the update, she made a post in her community, which I'm a part of.

She pointed out that right before the algorithm update, Google put out a guide on how to optimize your website for generative AI features in Google...

fter this update. As Marie points out, a lot of the guidance was about how you shouldn't be writing for machines, you should be writing for humans.

You should be sharing real experience. This reminded me of one line in that guide that I keep coming back to.

It's just been stuck in my head. Google said you should avoid writing commodity content.

Things like seven tips for first time home buyers. And I agree.

Seven tips for first time home buyers is a terrible topic. Only because, as Google implies, unless you're one of the top authorities in real estate, it's unlikely Google's even gonna want to index your content on such a common topic.

But also because no one searches that way. No one's searching for seven tips for anything.

People ask specific questions, and if you want to rank for those questions, that question should be in the title of the post. But here's the part that got stuck in my head.

What does Google say you should write instead of seven tips for first time home buyers? The example they gave was, why we waived the inspection fee and saved money...

of what actually works in SEO right now, or Google knows they're giving bad SEO advice. They just want to discourage us from doing actual SEO.

Or we're about to see a fundamental shift in how Google search works. And of course, it could be a combination of two or all three of these factors.

Maybe Google is about to get better at servicing firsthand experience. But my guess is topics that match what people and AI are actually searching for are still gonna perform best.

For now, we're just gonna have to wait and see.