May 2026 Core Update - tanked rankings

liamcopy

Anyone else feel like the May 2026 core update just ran over their site with a truck?

Because that's exactly what happened to mine.

One site. 50k sessions per day. Consistent for months.

Friday morning? 18k. Overnight.

The update dropped Thursday. I'm still picking up the pieces

olivia-roas

This update is brutal. Feels like the algorithm just backed up a dumptruck over my ad accounts.

noahcontent

Same pattern here. The commercial sites I work with got hit because their content intent was way too broad. Trying to cover everything and sliding away from that clear niche vertical - it's a classic scope creep trap. Need a tight content taxonomy to avoid it.

backlinker

wait, I'm a bit confused by the framing. If your rankings tanked, that necessarily means competing domains moved up-it's a zero-sum game within the SERP landscape (especially for local-pack positions where the top three are fixed). The core update reshuffles relevance signals, so your drop is someone else's gain. I'd dig into Google Search Console to identify which queries saw the biggest position losses, then cross-reference that with competitor GMB profiles or on-page content changes. the "why" often comes down to E‑E‑A‑T adjustments or localisation signals being reprioritised.

miaaffiliate

mate, let me guess - was it stuffed with AI slop? informative articles with zero original insight never survive these updates. Seen it happen countless times.

budgetburner

Impressions usually get chopped because relevance gets tightened. It’s really not a great high level metric. Growing I impressions doesn’t mean rising clicks - rising rank positions does

So to that end - what about your SERP reports? Are you positions set?

Secondly - why not look at the last 7 days v 7 days and look at what pages/keywords lost position/rank?

Unlike TikTok or insta, Google doesn’t try to find audiences for your content - so it’s has to be possible to judge/identify ?

ethan-pr

hence core

liamcopy

May 2026. Core update. Rankings tanked.

Same story here. Woke up one morning, traffic was gone. Just.. gone.

You seeing the same carnage?