Google Search Ranking Volatility Gets Heated Again February 10th

I am seeing some early signs of yet another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update with more volatility touching down today, February 10th. The chatter within the SEO community is starting to spike, and some of the third-party tracking tools are showing volatility.

This seems unrelated to the February 2026 Google Discover core update, which started on February 5th.

Previously we had volatilioty during February 2nd, January 29th onwayrds and then around January 26th/27th, then January 21st, January 15th, January 12th and January 6th. Prior to that, we had the Google December 2025 core update kick off on December 11, 2025 at around 12:25 pm ET and ended on December 29, 2025 at around 2:05 pm ET. It had two spikes, one on December 13th and the other on December 20th.

Sadly, Google is not commenting on these unconfirmed updates, but we did see some evidence of Google going after self-serving listicles with those previously unconfirmed updates. And Glenn Gabe believes it was beyond listicles and was a Google reviews system, formerly product reviews system, of sorts.

SEO Chatter

Let's start with some of the chatter within the SEO industry from WebmasterWorld and here:

Whiplash from all the head-shaking over the nonsense this Google update is causing right now

I had proper Discover traffic again, but general rankings are going up and down. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Google’s systems are running amok.

Since yesterday traffic is in free fall. User engagement: 0 Zombies: 100% Bots: up again

We're so depressed of the bad traffic (in more ways than one), that we are still in the Jan 2026 instead of a new Feb 26 post.

The downward swings are just so wild that you just loose complete hope in what you are doing. The recalibration or as we used to say in the earlier days Google Dance has started once again.

Google Tracking Tools

Just look at how heated most of these tracking tools are.

Semrush:

Sistrix:

Accuranker:

Wincher:

Mangools:

Advanced Web Rankings:

SimilarWeb:

Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:

Mozcast:

SERPstat:

Data For SEO:

Algoroo:

Zutrix:

CognitiveSEO:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.