As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seems to be a lot of Google search ranking volatility that kicked off on Friday, May 16th and throughout this weekend. The most heated day seems to have been on Friday but the chatter is pretty busy over the weekend within the SEO community.
And I promised in that video to cover it if I felt there was a Google search ranking update that was going on - and I do. There is some big volatility since Friday and the chatter in the SEO community is at levels that warrant a post here.
Yes, I covered previous unconfirmed Google updates on May 12 and 13, May 8th (I didn't cover May 1st, I probably should have) but then it was a couple of weeks, not since April 25th and then before that, 22nd and 23rd volatility and then around April 16th and then before that around April 9th. We have yet to have second official update in 2025, we had the March 2025 core update but no other official update in 2025 - yet.
Google Tracking Tools
Here are the third-party Google volatility tracking tools, you will see that most showed the biggest spike in volatility on Friday, May 16th.
Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
Here is the chatter within WebmasterWorld and comments on site:
Today I am seeing a massive 35% drop in search. USA is -60% at 11am. I checked and hundreds of links from real, high ranking sites have vanished from my GSC panel. My visibility also dropped at SEM across a number of terms all at the same time, so I suspect that this is an update rolling out, and it isn't pretty...
The week was very strange: Google definitely rolled out an update on Sunday, and traffic to the shop and news page dropped. Traffic to the news page started to rise again on Thursday, and today there is extremely high traffic from Google again. The shop started to recover yesterday. Unfortunately, this rollercoaster ride will probably never end.
Traffic: Big intraday swings from Monday to Thursday, best day on Wednesday, yesterday on Friday traffic collapsed to a bare minimum.
USA traffic has just been atrocious day after day now. We had one brief bump up and back down it went. I am not sure that this is all the product of AIO being rolled out, but the combination of AIO and the page being so bogged down with crap that searches just don't yield traffic anymore. The number of sales inquiries has ground to a halt now for weeks. Like, zero. Time will tell if it's 100% Google, or partly a recession-like scenario, seasonal, or a combo of all of the above.
After 4 good days of traffic, there was a sharp drop yesterday afternoon. And again this results in -50% real traffic. In the nights we are getting overloaded with bots coming from Google.
Looks like all US traffic disappeared!
Seeing a lot of volatility in the results on with my clients.
Yeah today is crazy, I'm seeing everything jumping all over the place as well. and makes sense the Semrush is a 9.2 Wonder if a Update is coming soon?
No traffic on Sunday. From Adsense, the drop compared to last month is 70 percent.
Google seems to have pushed a mini update. Now my niche is just full of YouTube videos. Sites are barely showing up, at all
There is just a lot of chatter, that is just a sampling of it...
So, tell me, what are you all seeing over the past few days?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
