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Google Search Rankings Show Volatility: What’s New in the Gemini 3 Update?

I’ve noticed some signs that Google might have made a small search ranking update in the past day or so, but there isn’t much discussion about it yet. Many tracking tools showed spikes yesterday, but the SEO community stayed mostly quiet.

It’s unclear what caused this. It could be connected to the recent Cloudflare outage or possibly the rollout of Gemini 3, though both seem unlikely. The Cloudflare issue might have caused short-term indexing problems, where Google temporarily dropped some pages from search results. That could explain why the tools picked up sudden movement. Another idea is that Google quietly added Gemini 3 technology into its ranking system, but that also seems doubtful.

The last noticeable ranking shifts we talked about were on November 12th, then the “Movember update” around November 8th, the Halloween changes, and earlier movements from October 15–17 and October 7–8. Overall, there has been less visible discussion since Google removed the option to view 100 results per page and tracking tools had to adjust.

Still, experienced SEOs can usually feel when rankings shift, even without tools—and it seems like there was a meaningful change around October 16th.

Tracking Tools

Here’s what the tracking tools have shown over the past couple of days:

Semrush:

Wincher:

Mozcast:

Advanced Web Rankings:

CognitiveSEO:

Algoroo:

Wiredboard Aggregated Tool Report – This report combines the data from all the tools mentioned above and displays it in a single chart:

SEO Chatter

As mentioned, discussion in the SEO community is very limited right now. Both WebmasterWorld and this site have been quiet:

““No sales yesterday not using cloudflare but most of my competitors do, that means that only zombies seen our ads damn it?””

“”In most cases this are one-hit visitors from US, India, Singapore …. This traffic comes in surges and lasts for about 10 to 15 minutes.
If it is not Google spinning the wheel, it is hard to explain why real Google traffic is completely (100%) gone, while this “bot” or “Google fake” traffic hits our site? It was completely gone for 3 weeks, and on Thursday, the abnormal traffic is back and gets worse every day. And it started soon after we got an email from Google to increase our visibility on GSA.””