Google’s search results got noisy again this week. Rank trackers and SEO forums both lit up on 20 and 21 October 2026, and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reckons an unconfirmed ranking update is running. Google hasn’t said anything. Its Search Status Dashboard still lists the September 2026 spam update, which finished on 8 October, as the latest ranking event.
Nothing official, then. But this is the second big spike in under a week, after another round on 16 October, and the industry has been waiting on a broad core update for months. If your traffic graph looked strange on Monday or Tuesday, you’re not imagining it.
What happened on 20–21 October
Schwartz reported rankings turning sharply volatile, with community chatter climbing to unusual levels over a 24-hour window. He called it an unconfirmed update and floated a theory: Google may be testing the waters before a core update that many in the industry expected by now, and some expect before the end of October.
It caps off a messy couple of months. The September 2026 spam update started on 24 September and ran until 8 October, with three noticeable waves of movement (25–27 September, 30 September and 4–6 October). Before that came unconfirmed shifts in early September, around 15 September and again on 23–24 September. Then 16 October brought another spike, which kept going through the weekend.
Don’t trust the volatility charts too much right now
This bit matters more than usual. Third-party rank trackers have had a rough year, and their charts are less reliable than they used to be.
Google dropped support for the num=100 parameter in September 2025, which means a tool now needs ten requests to see the top 100 results instead of one. Between June and late August 2026, Google also started routing result links through a google.com/goto redirect. DemandSphere says blocking got far more aggressive from around 11 September, and that Google now returns spurious results on roughly 11% of the search pages it collects each day. AccuRanker reported a further tightening on 15 October, mostly on mobile.
Glenn Gabe gave a good example of the gap. He tracked two sites that dropped out of Google and then recovered, and said Ahrefs, Semrush and Sistrix each showed the wrong dates or missed the recovery altogether. So treat the Semrush Sensor, Mozcast and Sistrix charts as a rough signal. Your own Search Console data is the thing to rely on.
What site owners are reporting
The forum reports from Search Engine Roundtable and WebmasterWorld don’t point in one direction. Some of the patterns that keep coming up:
- Discover is behaving oddly. Several publishers say Discover traffic arrives for an hour or two and then dies. One suggested Google has shortened how long a story stays in the feed, so rivals replace it faster.
- Rankings up, clicks down. One site owner said impressions and average position rose sharply while clicks fell 60–70%, with most keywords still in the top three. They suspected more AI Overviews in their category.
- Weak conversions. Another described their worst Monday for conversions in about three years.
- Some winners too. A few people reported improved traffic, including one site up 70% on last October.
Search Engine Watch made a fair point earlier this week. Discover and Google News run on separate systems from core web ranking, and many of these complaints date back to late August, a month before the spam update even began. Rising visibility with flat or falling clicks also fits a change in how the results page looks better than a ranking loss.
Sites vanishing from Google, then coming back
The strangest report came from Glenn Gabe. He said two sites in the same ultra-YMYL niche dropped out of Google’s results completely, even for their own brand names. Both came back on the evening of Friday 16 October, at the same minute. He linked it to a similar disappearing act around 4 September and suggested a security-related system may have misfired.
If this happens to you, check Search Console’s Manual actions and Security issues reports first. If both are clean, it may be a problem on Google’s side. Don’t start tearing the site apart while you wait.
Is a core update coming?
Probably, though nobody outside Google knows when. The last broad core update ran from 21 May to 2 June 2026, so it has been about five months. Google has already shipped three core-level updates this year: a Discover-only core update in February, then the March and May core updates.
There’s a precedent for quick follow-ups. In October 2023 Google released a spam update on 4 October and a core update the very next day. That said, a spam update isn’t a reliable signal that a core update will follow, and the timing has varied a lot over the years.
The bigger picture: Google is sending less traffic anyway
Separate from any single update, the trend for publishers is down. Chartbeat’s 2026 data shows Google Search referrals to news and media sites fell 40.2% between July 2025 and July 2026, and Discover referrals dropped 34.3% over the same period. AI Overviews and AI Mode keep more people on the results page.
Google did announce on 15 October that AI Overviews and AI Mode would show more inline links higher in responses. It didn’t share any numbers on what that does for clicks. For local service businesses and ecommerce sites, the impact looks different from news publishing, but the lesson is the same: a business that relies on one Google traffic source is exposed.
What I’d do right now
Honestly? Not much. Not to the site, anyway.
The first job is dull, but it pays off later. Add an annotation in GA4 and Looker Studio for 16 October, and another for 20–21 October. When the core update finally lands you’ll want to know which dip came from which event, and nobody remembers that three weeks on.
Then open Search Console and look at Search, Discover and News one at a time. A lot of the forum panic lumps all of it together as “Google traffic”. Discover can fall off a cliff while your web rankings don’t move an inch.
Put impressions next to clicks. Impressions up, average position fine, clicks down? Go and search a handful of those queries yourself. More often than not there’s an AI Overview or some new SERP feature sitting on top of your listing. That isn’t a ranking problem, and rewriting the page won’t fix it.
Search your own brand name too, even if nothing looks off. If you’ve vanished for it, head straight to Manual actions and Security issues. Both clean? Then it could be on Google’s end, like the YMYL sites Glenn Gabe flagged.
Before you send a client a scary screenshot from a rank tracker, check it against Search Console first. Tracker data has been shaky since September.
And leave the pruning and big rewrites alone for now. If Google confirms a core update, its own advice is to wait at least a week after the rollout ends before you analyse anything. Fair enough.
Our take
We’ve seen this pattern before, and recently. Across several client sites we manage, Search Console started showing rankings and traffic sliding once the September spam update kicked off on 24 September. At the same time, Semrush and Ahrefs struggled to pick up those rankings at all, so for a while the third-party data was close to useless.
Once the update wrapped up, most of those sites began recovering from roughly the first week of October. The tools caught up as well, and rankings showed close to where they’d been before.
This week it’s happening again. Search Console is showing ranking drops across multiple client accounts, and the tools are either reporting declines or not showing some keywords at all. Whether it ends the same way, with a recovery once things settle, is what we’re watching now.
We’ll update this post if Google confirms an update.
Sanjeev Kumar is a digital marketing expert with over 14 years of experience in SEO, PPC, content marketing, and online growth strategies. He specializes in search engine optimization, AI-driven marketing, and digital strategy for businesses and agencies worldwide.
