Some are wondering when the Google Search ranking volatility will begin to cool down a bit. While many of the tools continue to show heated volatility over the past weeks, some are starting to show signs of cooling.
Google has not confirmed a Google search update outside of that February 2026 Google Discover core update, which started on February 5th and is still not officially completed yet. But outside of that, no confirmation on the heated volatility we've been seeing.
Previously we had volatilioty during the week of February 15th and all of last week, also February 10th and then February 2nd, January 29th onwards 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.
And as I said before, 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.
But if you look, there is just a lot of movement with the Google rankings.
Google Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing, and as you can see, some are cooling but many are not:
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the recent chatter on WebmasterWorld and comments here:
Record low traffic, record low revenue. Everything is worse than ever.
Highest non stop volatility I have seen in a decade, constant massive shifts several times a day back and forth. Sites never seen before pumped to top then dropped a few hours later over and over.
Ten hours into my Google day with traffic at 20% ... Cliff edge on a Friday!
I’ve also noticed fluctuations across local service keywords this month.Pages with stronger topical depth and clearer content structure seem to be gaining visibility.
Has anyone observed whether entity relevance is playing a bigger role recently?
Only spam and slop is gaining visibility. I don't have any spam or slop sites on my own, so nothing is doing well, but even among my own sites, the less value it provides, the less authority and history it has, the better it is doing.
Some charts from Glenn:
And here are two sites showing recovery from the December 2025 core update (but outside of another core update). Again, that can happen if Google pushes a "smaller core update" or even a reviews update that has a lot of impact for a site, but the volatility in January and now… pic.twitter.com/WjMmCD3rst
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 21, 2026
Plus so much more.
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
