Google results now swing 48% more than before
A study cited by Joy Hawkins says rankings started moving around far more after the May 2026 update.
Two people searching the same thing can get different results, and that is happening more often than it used to. Joy Hawkins points to a Yext study that found organic results (the normal, unpaid links in Google) became 48% more volatile after the May 2026 update. An update is a change to how Google decides which pages to rank.
"Volatile" here just means the results move. The same search can show one set of pages this morning and a different set this afternoon, or a different set for the person sitting next to you. The study says that happens roughly half again as much as it did before May.
Why it happened
Nobody has said. The only thing tied to the change in the source is the May 2026 update itself. There is no explanation of what inside that update made results move more, and Google has not addressed it in anything cited here. Treat the cause as unknown.
What this means for your site
If you check your position for a keyword and it looks worse than last week, that drop may not be about your site at all. More volatility means a single check on a single day tells you less than it used to. The same is true in the other direction. A jump to position three is not proof that something you did worked.
This also makes rank tracking tools harder to read. If a tool checks your keyword once a day from one location, it is taking one snapshot of a result set that keeps shifting. We have covered several recent problems with rank trackers showing drops that never happened, and a more volatile set of results gives those tools more room to mislead you.
What to do
Stop reacting to single day movements. Open Google Search Console, click Performance, and set the date range to the last three months so you are looking at the trend in clicks and average position rather than one reading. If clicks are flat or growing over that window, the daily swings are noise.
If clicks are genuinely falling over three months, that is worth looking into. Start with which pages lost the clicks, not with which keyword moved. Search Console lets you sort by page, so you can see whether the loss is spread across the site or sitting on a handful of URLs.
For most small business owners the right response to this news is nothing. It is context for why your numbers look jumpy, not a problem on your site that needs fixing.
Yext found organic results became 48% more volatile post-May 2026 update.
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