Google's May 2026 Core SEO Update: What We Know So Far...

Google's May 2026 core update went live on May 21st. It's the second core update of 2026 following March. Google says it can take up to two weeks to fully roll out. That's confirmed directly from the Google search status dashboard.

Now, this is what Google posted on LinkedIn when they announced it, which is just, this is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites. So that's the official line, pretty standard, but there's a reason this particular update is getting more attention than a typical core update. It's got nothing to do with the update itself. Google actually rolled out three major changes within 72 hours of each other, right?

Which was the core update, a complete rebuild of the search interface around AI and data showing AI mode now has 1 billion monthly users. That figure actually came directly from Google's announcements at Google I-O last week on May the 19th. Corey Nogle, who covers search closely, discovered this as a double wave of SERP disruption. And that framing is accurate because what it means practically is your rankings, your traffic can now move independently of each other.

You could hold position one and still see your clicks drop because an AI generated overview is answering the query above your result. That's not a core update problem. It's an actual AI mode problem. Two different causes, but two different fixes.

And I want to be clear about something before we go further, which is the update started May the 21st and it's still rolling out as I'm recording this. So we don't have solid data on which sites are winning and which sites are losing. Anyone telling you definitively right now that, for example, niche sites are winning or e-commerce is fine, is working from early signals or educated inference, not confirmed numbers. The rollout still needs to settle probably around June the 5th or later before you can read your data cleanly.

What we can say with confidence is what Google has said directly and their own documentation states the broad core updates don't target specific pages or sites. They don't penalize you for something you did wrong. What they do is recalibrate how the entire quality spectrum gets evaluated across the index. Some content that was previously under-rewarded, sometimes gets more credit.

Some content that was over-rewarded gets less. Your competitor's content gets reassessed alongside yours and Google's own guidance says there's nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven't, for example, violated any webmaster guidelines or been subjected to manual or algorithmic penalties, right? So if rankings dropped, the first thing to rule out is that you did something wrong.

You probably didn't. The more likely exploration is that other content around you was actually re-rated. Now, what does this update signal about where Google is heading? Well, for this, I'm drawing on Google's own public statements, not speculation.

Google I.O. on May 19th, Google's Elizabeth Reed announced that they're calling a new era for AI search. Gemini 3.5 Flash now powers AI mode. Google's also announced information agents.

So AI systems designed to browse the web on a user's behalf to complete tasks and gather information. That's from Google's own I.O. announcements. What that signals for SEO is a shift in what you're actually optimizing for.

So the traditional goal was to rank so people click your link. The emerging goal, and Google's own direction supports this, is to be cited as a source by the AI systems that synthesize answers for those billion users. Now, how do you become a cited source? Google hasn't really published specific playbooks for this sort of thing.

From what my tests actually reveal, it seems to be like if you publish a lot of content, targeting the right keywords, and it's good stuff, and it gets engagement, then when you publish across multiple different platforms, AI tends to pull in those sources. And what I've actually seen is like it's a lot faster to rank inside AI search mode with social media than it is for a normal website. So for example, if we create Reddit posts, that will typically rank faster inside AI mode than using a website directly. And so the way that I'll try to look at it is like publish across multiple different platforms.

Some people call me Mr. Everywhere because they see me everywhere. That's the way that I would look at it, right? If you're using SEO in 2026, try and publish in many places, not just one.

And then also that diversifies your content and the results of it. Now, if you actually look at Google's documentation, it's like, okay, focus on ensuring you're creating the best content possible. You know, sometimes they say, for example, is your content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well? These are just like standard fundamental principles.

So like if you actually look at the documentation from Google and the core updates, it's quite generic. The thing that I have seen is like, for example, if we have a brand, like we have the AI profit boredom community, that tends to rank well as a website versus like a generic website domain name, right? And I think that's because AI can sort of pin them all together and organize everything neatly when it's an actual brand that people know about and it gets a lot of mentions. So that's something that I've seen is like just authority and not authority just in terms of backlinks, which help massively, but also authority in terms of like how many brand mentions does that get across the web?

So what do you do next? First of all, don't make any content changes whilst the update is rolling out. Making reactive changes during a live rollout means you can't accurately measure what the algorithm actually thinks of your existing content. So just wait until it settles.

Usually I would try and wait like at least two to four weeks after the core update is rolled out. Don't do anything now. Second, when you do open your data, you want to compare it in search console and compare the 90 days before May the 20th when the update rolled out versus the onward period from June the 5th. And look at impressions and clicks separately.

If impressions are down, there's usually a ranking signal from the core update. The right response is just keep doing more of the fundamentals and also keep diversifying yourself. Like I said before, posting on Reddit, posting on LinkedIn, we post on Twitter as well. We post on Facebook.

When we're posting across different platforms, even if something happens to one of our websites, it's not a big deal because we can rank in many different ways. Also, if you're not already doing it, I would recommend implementing schema on your websites at this point, because the more you can structure your data so that it's easier for AI agents, like Google's information agents, to scan and crawl your website, the easier it's going to be for you to be cited, not just inside Google, which helps massively, but also inside Google AI mode and separately, Google's overviews, right? And these are three different ways you can rank inside Google, but all of them matter and all of them are worth going for. The other interesting thing here is like more people searching than ever, right?

So some people are going to be worried about like, is SEO even worth it at this point? I would say it's more worth it than ever before because AI is so much better to use. That means more people use it and they use it for longer and they get better, more detailed responses, right? So if someone is looking for something like really specific, they can find it very easily from AI and they would never have found that normally inside Google.

And so it makes it even more worth going for these sort of like small keywords that are much easier to rank for as well. So thanks very much for watching. If you want to get a free one-to-one SEO strategy session, you can get that at goldie.agency, link in the comments description. We'll basically look at your website, show you how to rank, analyze your website, give you some tips on link building, and you can ask any questions on the call, one-to-one with us.

And if you want to build like a proper AI-driven SEO system around what's working right now, based on my own tests, I actually put together an agent operating system inside the AI Profitable Boardroom where you can plug in your SEO workflows. So for example, like we can type in a keyword, add a case study, and it will deploy it to like five different websites. And that helps us rank if you've seen any of my recent case studies. And also what it helps is just saving time, right?

It saves a lot of resources. We used to have a big content team. Now we just have an AI agent. And that's a big difference, I think, as well in 2026.

The other thing that I would say here is like when you're using AI agents to create content, they can pull in from a memory system. So for example, we actually built an obsidian vault of all of my memories. It's got thousands of memories. The AI agents write for me automatically.

And then when your agents are creating content for you, it's more personalized, more contextual. It's more relevant to you and your business, far more than any other team member or writer could actually figure out. So that's the power of using this sort of stuff if you build it into a proper system. If you want to get that, link in the comments description or go to the AIprofitboarding.com.

Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you on the next one. Cheers, bye-bye.