What really moved, Why it Moved, and What your Business Should Do About It.
The May 2026 Google core update finished rolling out on 2 June 2026 after almost twelve days of significant ranking volatility. It is the second confirmed core update of the year and, according to the major tracking tools, one of the strongest.
If you’ve noticed your website traffic increase, drop, or shift unexpectedly over the past couple of weeks, this update is likely the reason. Here’s a straightforward look at what changed, which websites benefited, which ones were impacted, and what your business should be focusing on next.
Published 4 June 2026 · 9 min read · By Rebecca Yang
The May 2026 core update in five numbers
- Rollout started 21 May 2026, the morning after Google I/O wrapped up.
- Completed 2 June 2026, lasting 11 days and 21 hours.
- Volatility scores: Semrush 78/100, Sistrix 65/100, Accuranker 72/100. Among the strongest in years.
- Sistrix analysed 8,887 domains: 5,039 winners and 3,845 losers at the halfway mark.
- Second core update of 2026, following the March 2026 rollout.
Google was not chasing a single algorithm tweak. It was reinforcing the direction it has been signalling for over a year.
Google described May 2026 as a regular core update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content from all types of sites. This update is a continuation of the comparative ranking framework that started rolling in with March 2026. Google did not publish a detailed change log, but the patterns in the data are clear.
This update sharpens three things Google has been talking about for years and is now enforcing algorithmically rather than as guidance:
- Experience and expertise demonstrably authored by real people, not anonymous content farms.
- Topical depth across a site rather than a single thin page targeting a keyword.
- Intent match that answers the actual question behind the search, not just the literal words typed.
- Technical clarity so the page can be crawled, rendered and understood by both Google and the new AI Overview layer.
The timing was not accidental either. Google rolled this update out the morning after Google I/O wrapped up, where the company announced the largest search box redesign in 25 years and an aggressive expansion of AI Overviews and AI Mode. The core update and the AI search overhaul are connected. Google is rebalancing its index for a world where every query is treated as an opportunity for AI to synthesise an answer, not just return a list of blue links.
Original sources gained. Aggregators and thin AI content lost.
The Sistrix Visibility Index data tells a consistent story across verticals. Brands with genuine authority and original information gained ground. Sites that re-package information or rely on AI-generated bulk content lost it.
Notable winners
- PriceRunner +45.94% and PriceSpy +30.94% visibility gains, rewarded for first-party comparison data.
- Established media and service brands with named expert voices.
- First-party brand sites and government domains.
- Sites with strong topical authority and demonstrable subject-matter depth.
For Australian businesses, the websites that saw rankings improve were often those demonstrating genuine expertise and creating original, valuable content. On the other hand, businesses that experienced a drop in visibility may find they’re competing against stronger, more authoritative sources covering the same topics.
If your rankings have changed, it’s worth taking a closer look at your content and overall online presence. In many cases, a thorough SEO or marketing audit can quickly identify where you’re winning, where you’re falling behind, and what opportunities exist to regain visibility.
Notable losers
- Amazon lost 222 visibility points, an early indicator Google may be reassessing market-dominant platforms.
- Aggregators with thin or AI-generated content felt the strongest hits in this update than in previous ones.
- Online shops were the biggest losers, with 39 domains in the major-loser group. Sources suggest this was driven by thin, catalogue-style pages with limited supporting content or descriptions.
- Some user-generated content platforms continued the visibility slide that began in March 2026.
This was an SEO update and an AI search update at the same time.
Google now treats AI Overviews as a first-class surface. The May 2026 update changes which sources are pulled into those AI answers, not just the ten blue links underneath. The shift matters because branded trust signals (mentions in trusted publications, consistent citation across other AI engines, named experts) are now actively weighted into which sources the AI synthesises from.
If you have spent the last year building a strong online presence through quality content, backlinks, brand mentions and genuine expertise, this update tends to be more of a quiet rotation than a crisis. The same trust signals that help Google understand and rank your business are increasingly influencing how AI-powered platforms such as Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude discover and recommend brands.
If your visibility relied heavily on long-tail informational keywords without a strong brand presence behind them, this update would have definitely hit harder. The content types proving most resilient to AI commoditisation are exactly the ones AI cannot generate itself: original data, named-expert analysis, and proprietary insight from inside your industry. That is the foundation of any serious Generative Engine Optimisation strategy.
What we learnt from May 2026
The 3 key lessons emerged from the May 2026 Core Update.If you have been following Google’s direction over the past few years, none of these will come as a surprise, but this update reinforced them more clearly than ever.
1. Brand is Becoming A Ranking Signal
Sites with branded search demand, consistent off-site citations and recognisable author bylines outperformed sites of equivalent technical quality without that trust layer. The takeaway is simple. PR, off-site authority and recognisable expert voices are no longer the cherry on top of an SEO strategy. They are part of the core build.
2. Thin AI Content Is Now Struggling to Compete
Through 2024 and much of 2025, many websites were still able to rank reasonably well with high volumes of AI-generated content, as long as the basic on-page SEO was in place. But from March 2026 onwards, that “loophole” started to close.
The 2026 Google core update has now widened the gap even further. Sites relying on thin, low-value AI content are finding it much harder to rank in competitive search results. Moving forwards, content with clear human input, editorial refinement, and real subject matter depth proved far more resilient.
3. Comparative Ranking Is the New Normal
Google is no longer assessing your website in isolation. It is asking whether your website is better than the alternatives currently ranking for the search query.
To get visibility on page 1, the page needs to offer something more valuable than the current top 10 results. That might be fresh data, stronger examples, clear structure, more useful tools or a more credible author. Without a clear point of difference, even a technically sound page can struggle to gain traction in search results now.
What to do now (and what to avoid)
Step 1. Audit the Damage (or the Gain)
After a core update, the instinct is often to start making changes straight away, but please hold off and wait. Google recommends allowing at least a full week after the rollout finishes before drawing any conclusions, as Search Console data is delayed. As an SEO expert, I would recommend waiting until at least 9 June 2026 before starting to review your website’s performance and rankings.
- Pull a 28 day comparison window in Google Search Console with non-brand clicks isolated.
- Sort by lost impressions and lost clicks, not just position changes.
- Group pages by intent type (transactional, informational, comparison) and look for category-wide drops, which point to a content quality issue rather than a single page problem.
Step 2. Audit Your Content, Honestly
- Does the page answer the actual question behind the query in the first screen, before any scroll?
- Is there a real, named author with verifiable subject-matter expertise?
- Is the data original, current, and either sourced or generated by you?
- Does the page add anything the top three competing results do not?
Step 3. Strengthen the Technical Foundation
Core updates expose weak technical foundations. Site speed, structured data, internal linking architecture and crawlability all matter more in the AI Overview era because the layer that decides whether to cite you is reading your markup in real time. If hosting, page weight or schema is holding you back, a focused web development and hosting fix often returns more visibility than any content rewrite.
Step 4. Build YOUR Brand Layer
This is the slowest lever, but one of the most powerful over time.
Earned media, named author bylines, consistent presence in trusted publications, and citations across multiple AI engines all compound.
None of it delivers instant results.
But over time, it builds durable authority, and that tends to show its value across future core updates rather than immediate rankings.
What to avoid
- Do not strip a page that just lost rankings before the data has stabilised.
- Don’t chase the loudest voice on LinkedIn or any social media channel telling you to make changes within 24 hours of an update.
- Do not publish more AI-generated content to compensate for traffic loss. This is the single most common mistake we now see.
- Do not assume the next update will reverse this one. The comparative ranking framework is not going anywhere.
What this means for Australian Businesses
If you have been doing the work properly, publishing original content, building genuine authority, looking after your technical foundation, May 2026 was probably a small positive nudge or a flat result. If your strategy has relied on volume, content at scale, or recycled information, May 2026 was the warning shot. The next update, likely in late winter 2026, will sharpen the same comparative ranking framework even further.
The good news for honest businesses in Australia is that this is the approach I’ve been guiding clients toward over the past year. Original work wins. Brand wins, and overall SEO patience wins.
May 2026 core update FAQ
Should I make changes to my site right now?
Only if you find a clear technical issue (broken canonical tags, indexation problems, server errors). Wait at least one full week after the 2 June completion date before drawing conclusions from ranking or traffic data. Google itself recommends this.
Is this related to the new AI Overviews and AI Mode?
Yes. Google announced its largest search redesign in 25 years at Google I/O the day before the rollout began. The core update rebalances the index for a world where AI answers sit on top of search results, and brand trust now influences which sources AI Overviews pull from.
My traffic dropped. Was I penalised?
A core update is not a penalty. It is a reassessment of what Google considers the best answer for each query. Negative ranking impact does not necessarily mean anything is wrong with your pages. It may simply mean a competitor now has a stronger signal set.
How long until rankings settle?
Search Console data lags by two to three days and remains delayed for about a week after rollout completion. The earliest reliable analysis window for this update opened around 9 June 2026. Final clarity usually arrives two to three weeks after completion.
Will another core update arrive soon?
Absolutely! Google has been running roughly two confirmed core updates per six month window through 2026. Expect the next one between September and November. The underlying comparative ranking framework will not change. Sites that lean into original content, brand authority and technical clarity will keep gaining ground.
Not sure how the update hit your site?
We will pull your Search Console data, isolate the non-brand drops, and tell you whether the update hurt you, helped you or skipped you entirely. No obligation, no sales pitch.