It’s been almost ten days since the last time I reported on a Google Search ranking update. But I had to break the silence—because over the past 24 hours, I’ve noticed that Google’s search results are moving around more than usual. There’s clearly more ranking volatility than we typically see.
Most third-party tracking tools are showing a big spike in search ranking changes over the past day or so. And while the SEO community is pretty tired of talking about volatility—especially when it doesn’t seem to bring more clicks—there’s still some chatter in the industry about rankings shifting again.
Just as a reminder, we’ve seen quite a few ranking shifts recently. I last reported on June 9, then June 4, May 29, May 21, May 16, May 12–13, and May 8 (I skipped May 1, but probably should’ve covered it). Before that, it was a couple of weeks back to April 25, then April 22–23, around April 16, and earlier on April 9.
So far in 2025, we’ve only had one official update from Google — the March 2025 core update. No other confirmed updates have been announced yet.
Google Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing:
Wiredboard’s Aggregator of Tools puts all the tracking data from the tools mentioned above into a single chart, making it easy to see overall trends in one place.
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the SEO chatter from WebmasterWorld and comments on this site:
“”Well, it’s fun again. On Friday, Google downgraded my news page. Since then, news traffic has completely disappeared. Even though rankings are slowly going up, regular search clicks are barely coming in — about the same as Bing, which is basically none.
Meanwhile, AI-generated spam and paid promotional content are being featured more prominently than ever.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, my shop was also hit. Despite running AdWords campaigns and spending heavily, there have been zero sales from Google traffic since Friday.””
“”Funnily enough, after several weeks of declining traffic, things are finally picking up again.
That said, we’re still down about 15% compared to last month. To be fair, this drop might not be entirely on Google — I’ve been tweaking the UI recently, so I’m not jumping straight into the blame game this time.””
“”I’ve been observing a website that was hit by the Helpful Content Update (HCU). For the past 6 months, the owner tried to recover by switching strategies — they started publishing around 50 news articles per day, after originally focusing only on tech guides.
While their content did appear on Google News, the traffic stayed low. Eventually, the site was abandoned. They invested time and money hoping for a turnaround, but it didn’t work out.
Honestly, I think it’s time to move on from traditional websites — especially for those who’ve been hit hard. Social media feels like a better opportunity right now. It’s less restrictive, content (even AI-generated) is more widely accepted, and you can cross-post videos to multiple platforms easily. Sponsorships are allowed without headaches, and engagement tends to be more immediate.
The old levels of search traffic probably won’t come back, thanks to AI Overviews and all the recent changes Google has made. It’s frustrating, and sticking to websites might just lead to more disappointment.
Right now, I’m shifting my focus. My goal? Reach 10,000 followers on social media. It’s a fresh start, but it feels like the right one.””
“”Over the past 7 days, I’ve seen a 70% increase in zombie traffic — users landing but doing nothing — likely due to AI Overviews. These summaries are raising “no-click” expectations among shoppers.
It’s becoming really confusing for users, and naturally, that means fewer people are clicking on ads too. If this continues, both organic and paid traffic will suffer.””
“”Today very bad… But my competitor is going up. Discover traffic nonsense, he have 350 000 daily users. My website have 50 000 daily users.””
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
