2026 so far. Every ranking update Google confirmed during the year, the stories the most outlets ran, and the news most likely to have mattered to a working site — built from our own archive of 551 stories.
7 named updates, rolling out for 65 days in total.
| Update | Type | Started | Rollout |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2026 Discover update | Discover update | 5 Feb 2026 | 21 days, 17h |
| March 2026 spam update | Spam update | 24 Mar 2026 | 19h 30m |
| March 2026 core update | Core update | 27 Mar 2026 | 12 days, 4h |
| May 2026 core update | Core update | 21 May 2026 | 11 days, 21h |
| June 2026 spam update | Spam update | 24 Jun 2026 | 2 days, 1h |
| August 2026 spam update | Spam update | 18 Aug 2026 | 2 days, 16h |
| September 2026 spam update | Spam update | 24 Sep 2026 | 13 days, 15h |
Ranked by estimated impact on a single site, not by publication time.
Searchers outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), the manual action will apply but not within the EEA.
Policy & Penalties
The update took 2.5 days to roll out and is now complete.
Ranking & Algorithms
Google is replacing site reputation abuse manual actions in the EEA with a system that can rank affected site sections independently.
Ranking & Algorithms Policy & Penalties
Google's spam update caused exceptional search disruption, with dramatic ranking losses across 20 industries, according to SE Ranking data.
Ranking & Algorithms
This spam update took two full days to roll out.
Ranking & Algorithms
The May 2026 Core Update was announced on 21st May 2026, following the March Core Update. It was completed on the 2nd June. Data, analysis, examples and rankings for affected domains are shown below…
Ranking & Algorithms
This week’s SEO Pulse covers Google’s AI publisher dispute, spam update fallout, the GEO debate, AI citation gaps, and ChatGPT’s Reddit behavior in search.
Ranking & Algorithms AI Search & Visibility
The update will take a few days to roll out.
Ranking & Algorithms
This update should only take a few days to roll out.
Ranking & Algorithms
The second Google core update of 2026 was a big one, causing a lot of search ranking volatility over the rollout.
Ranking & Algorithms
Nearly 80% of top results shifted as Google’s latest update hit aggregators and boosted brands, official sites, and data-rich sources.
Ranking & Algorithms
Ranking & Algorithms Local SEO
Assembled from our own archive of 551 stories, which currently runs from 4 October 2023. Ranking is by the impact score described on the front page — an estimate of how much a story is likely to affect one website, not a measure of how much attention it got.
The archive only holds what it has seen. Periods before it started are empty rather than quiet, and it gets more complete every week it runs.
