Earlier this month, the Google May 2026 core update was completed on June 2, 2026. But the volatility has not seemed to calm down. I am seeing a lot of chatter spike up from within the SEO community over the weekend. The SEO chatter started Friday, June 5th and continued through the weekend. Meanwhile, most of the third-party Google volatility tracking tools seem somewhat calm.
I will say that this May core update was much more volatile than the March 2026 core update. So maybe folks are feeling that a little bit after the update finished rolling out? Or maybe, Google is doing some post-core update tweaks. It is really hard to know.
As a reminder, the Google May 2026 core update was announced on May 21, 2026, and then that following weekend, we saw some significant ranking volatility, and then again, this past weekend, we saw even more volatility. But today, I am seeing even more volatility spike up - yes, on a Tuesday - June 2, 2026 right before Google said the update was done.
Now, we are seeing more volatility over the weekend following the core update being marked as done.
SEO Chatter
There is chatter within the WebmasterWorld forums and on this site - here is a sampling of that chatter:
What happened Friday about 12.00 PDT?My traffic across all sites, including niche UK, fell off a cliff edge and are still dead. After 12 hours today I am at about 10% of average!
Anyone else?
Good question; it's the same for me. Traffic has been very low since around noon yesterday, and the shop has practically come to a standstill.
Our week-over-week Google traffic has been up most days lately (anywhere from single- to double-digit percentages). The increases are almost academic, though, when you consider that AI Overviews have lowered the baseline to a pittance.
With 2 hours of my Googleday to go my global site is at 20% of average, this makes Xmas Day look busy!
EU traffic is really crashing since yesterday.
Things are looking great. I was hit by the 2023 core update and I'm seeing a recovery. My traffic is back to 90% of what I used to get.But my revenue is still down. I guess it is just bot traffic.
Yep traffic is up but not in the revenue, I agree, its all bot traffic. As I posted below , it quoted Cloudflare now saying over 50% of traffic is bots now earlier than had been predicted.
Google Tracking Tools
But the majority of the third-party Google tracking tools are showing little volatility, so I am not sure what is up.
Here is my interactive chart that plots all of them in one chart:
Google Volatility Chart
Data Sources
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
