Last week,I reported on January 15th of a Google Search ranking update with a lot of heated volatility. Truth is, it went through the weekend, but now it is spiking back up again as of yesterday and today - January 20th and 21st.
It seemed like whatever kicked in last week around the 15th burned through the weekend. And now, we are seeing even more spike in volatility and pretty insane chatter from the SEO community.
Could these be adjustments to the December 2025 core update - possibly.
As a reminder, we had unconfirmed Google ranking volatility on start on January 15th, and 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.
It does seem like some sort of Google Search ranking update is brewing right now...
Google Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing right now:
Semrush (updated, even more heated on Friday, January 23):
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
The chatter about this volatility seems to just be kicking up right now in the comments area here on this site and maybe some on WebmasterWorld - here are some of those comments.
Today traffic drop 70 percent. Huge drop. Adsense, Discover, News, Search is dead. Wow...
Same. They've set a website traffic cap, and no matter how hard you try, it won't go beyond that. New articles aren't even shown in Discover, News, or even search. What's happening now isn't even an update, it's something worse.
Same here. Semrush shows volatility spikes again
I've been noticing a lot of spam comments in various languages lately. Clearly Google is no longer displaying what/how it should.
Is it just me or is it slow today? Davos, geopolitics, economies, weather, holidays?
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
