This past Saturday, October 24th, we saw some significant ranking volatility captured by many of the third-party Google tracking tools. There was also some heavy chatter within the SEO industry about ranking movement and Google traffic changes over the past couple of days. The two together make me believe that there was some Google Search ranking adjustment, a Google Search updsate, released Friday and into Saturday.
This follows the unconfirmed updates I reported on October 20th & 21st and then before than on October 16th. And as a reminder, we had the Google September 2026 spam update start on Thursday, September 24, 2026 at around 12:00 pm ET and completed on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 am ET. That update had three waves of volatility, in our opinion. They include:
Before that, we had unconfirmed updated around September 23/24, volatility on September 15th, then the weirdness with September 4 through 13.
Google Tracking Tools
As a reminder, over the past month or so, the Google tracking tools are struggling but many said they have mitigated the issues by now...
In any event, here is what they are showing:
Google Volatility Chart
Here is the tool-by-tool breakdown:
Wireboard - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
AWR:
SEO Chatter
There is chatter on WebmasterWorld and comments here on the Search Engine Roundtable:
Two days back we had a nice little spurt from Discover and News but like clockwork at 2 am, discover traffic was slowly killed till it reached to negligable numbers. As of now it again feels like Google is just not crawling / indexing and its not just our website, News and Discover appear fundamentally broken. Two months I used to actually find good stories on them but now its old stories. Would love for other webmasters who run news websites to weigh in on this.
It looks like Discover now only sends traffic to an article for less than 6 hours at best
At least you guys still get Discover traffic. My traffic has completely collapsed across the board. Right now, it's painfully obvious that standard search is completely useless, no matter how well you get cited in AI overviews. Also, I can totally confirm the issue with outdated news and weird articles popping up in Google News.
Traffic is again very very depressing. Looks like a bleak weekend ahead.
Low levels of traffic across all sites with the WWW driving zero new enquiries to our global sites but, at the same time, regular customer enquiries and orders at normal levels however what we are noticing on our hotel site is a divergence of website traffic v realworld takings.Until a couple of months ago when we saw a busy website, especially with restaurant menu views, we would experience a busy evening walk-in trade however recently this has not been occurring. We have seen low website traffic and surprisingly good walk-in business. Some are regulars, many are not, plus we have a new chef and menu which are being appreciated.
Is anyone else seeing a noticeable separation of website traffic and actual takings like this in their business?
I can't say much about walk-in customers, but I'm also seeing a massive drop across all the websites I monitor, starting yesterday. On top of that, rankings are bouncing all over the place. Right now, it feels like Google is heavily favoring public broadcasters and Springer Verlag sites (Germany's largest publishing house), as they are sitting right at the top for basically every topic I look up. At this point, you have to admit that since late August, Google has actually managed to make their already poor search results even worse.
I've been getting heavy bot traffic from Singapore the last couple of days. This usually happens before a Google update.
Same, I just blocked Singapore completely
Traffic has been terrible today.
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
