Google search rankings today are showing significant volatility, with multiple third-party tracking tools registering sharp swings on May 13 and 14, 2026. The disruption, reported by Search Engine Roundtable on May 14, is not accompanied by any confirmed algorithmic announcement from Google - which, according to Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz, is typical. Google generally confirms only the larger, formally planned updates.

The latest volatility arrives roughly five weeks after the March 2026 core update completed on April 8, and weeks after a string of smaller unconfirmed movements that practitioners observed on May 8, April 27 and 28, and April 23. It is also unfolding against a separate and worsening backdrop: a surge in deindexing activity that has been building since at least early April, with more site owners reporting that pages previously accessible to Googlebot are no longer appearing in the index.

Together, these two parallel problems - ranking instability and shrinking indexation - are generating unusual levels of anxiety inside the SEO and publishing communities.

What the tracking tools are showing

Multiple independent ranking monitoring services are flagging the disruption simultaneously. According to Search Engine Roundtable's documentation of the event, the tools showing elevated volatility include Semrush, SimilarWeb, Advanced Web Rankings, Sistrix, Wincher, Zutrix, Accuranker, Mozcast, Data For SEO, Algoroo, SERPstat, and Wiredboard's aggregator - which consolidates readings from multiple tools into a single chart.

Sistrix, in particular, is showing what Schwartz describes as extreme fluctuations. The SimilarWeb reading is described as "wild" and possibly a bug. Wiredboard's aggregated view plots the combined tool signals on one chart, offering a wider lens on the volatility level. Not all of these services use the same methodology: some track keyword movements across large panel sets, others use pixel-level SERP scraping or index sampling. The simultaneous nature of elevated readings across all of them makes noise or coincidence a less plausible explanation.

This kind of multi-tool alignment is a reliable indicator that something is happening inside Google's ranking systems - even without an official acknowledgment. It does not confirm whether the movement reflects a deliberate algorithm change, a technical incident, or an incremental quality adjustment of the kind Google increasingly deploys without announcement.

Community reports: standstills, Discover losses, spam in results

The community reaction documented by Search Engine Roundtable adds texture to what the tools are showing. Forum comments on WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable describe a range of experiences.

One commenter reported that Sistrix was showing extreme fluctuations and that a store had "come to a standstill" the previous day, with strong Google traffic but zero sales. A news site in the same report was described as performing well in Discover but with rankings constantly fluctuating. Another participant described the sense that constant ranking changes were making content production feel futile: according to the post, the pattern "feels like the start of another update" and there are "way too many of them now."

A commenter described conditions in the UK as among the worst for spam and poor-quality results they could remember, citing the previous two to three days as particularly bad. Another reported that Discover traffic had gone completely dead since May 13, likening the effect to what happened during the March 2026 core update. A site owner from another thread reported a 30% traffic drop the previous day.

These accounts are anecdotal and self-selected, but they are consistent across multiple independent participants. The pattern of Discover traffic collapsing alongside organic ranking volatility has appeared repeatedly in previous update events - the March 2026 core update showed it clearly, as did the December 2025 cycle, which produced some of the most severe publisher visibility losses in recent memory according to PPC Land's coverage.

The deindexing trend: a parallel problem

Running alongside the ranking volatility is a deindexing trend that Search Engine Roundtable describes as ongoing and apparently worsening. According to the report, more and more site owners are noticing a drop in indexed pages, with the "Crawled - currently not indexed" status rising for many properties.

This particular status in Google Search Console means that Googlebot has visited the URL and processed the page but has decided not to include it in the index. It is distinct from pages that were never crawled at all. The rise in this status across multiple properties simultaneously suggests something systematic - either Google is tightening its quality evaluation for indexation decisions, or something in its crawl pipeline is behaving differently.

Pedro Dias, a former Googler, raised the question publicly on X in late April, asking whether others were noticing Google deindexing URLs at a higher rate since the beginning of April. According to Search Engine Roundtable's reporting on the topic, the responses were largely confirmatory. Cory replied that it appears to be "a regular occurrence with updates" and described it as involving "some type of freshness/stale evaluation and quality component" - a mechanism for purging content to reduce index size. Alex Gramm reported noticing the pattern since December 2025 and observed some media websites with only two pages left in Google's index. Valentin Pletzer raised the possibility of a reporting bug, suggesting that at least some of the data could reflect a Search Console display issue rather than actual deindexation.

John Mueller from Google responded to the question by stating: "Some sites go up, some sites go down - I don't see anything exceptional there." That response, posted on Bluesky on April 30, 2026, did not address the indexing angle directly. Mueller has previously explained that the "Crawled - currently not indexed" status reflects Google's quality evaluation, not a technical error.

Google's relationship with indexing has grown increasingly complex. PPC Land documented in detail how Google's absence from the IndexNow protocol leaves webmasters reliant on traditional crawling infrastructure, with no push-based mechanism to signal content changes. That absence becomes more consequential when crawl behavior changes unexpectedly. PPC Land also reported in detail on a separate incident in August 2025 when crawl rates dropped across multiple major hosting platforms due to unexpected behavior in Google's systems.

One commenter in the Disqus thread attached to the deindexing article reported 300 extra deindexations of old pages between April and May, affecting pages with no actual traffic. Another described the situation as hitting a record low and likened waking up to the condition as arriving in "a different world." A third user reported that Google had removed virtually everything from their index except the root index page - a property that had previously generated 30,000 to 35,000 clicks per day at over 10% click-through rate.

The AI content angle keeps surfacing in community explanations. Schwartz himself noted a suspicion that, with the volume of AI-generated content being pushed into the web, Google is becoming more selective about what it indexes. That hypothesis is consistent with what PPC Land documented regarding the March 2026 core update's impact on aggregators, where SE Ranking data showed 79.5% of top-three URLs changing positions and 24.1% of top-10 pages dropping from the top 100 entirely.

No confirmed update, but the pattern is familiar

Google has not confirmed any ranking update for May 13 or 14. The company's standard position is that it confirms the larger, more planned algorithmic events and that many smaller modifications are deployed continuously without announcement.

This is not an unusual situation. PPC Land has tracked the shift from predictable, episodic updates toward continuous high-intensity fluctuations, drawing on SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra's five-year visualization published in late December 2025. That analysis found that confirmed updates fell from 10 per year in both 2021 and 2022 to just 4 in 2025 - even as perceived volatility increased substantially over the same period. The paradox has a structural explanation: as John Mueller clarified during the March 2026 rollout, core updates involve multiple independent components deployed step by step rather than simultaneously. That architecture inherently produces uneven, wave-like volatility even during events Google has confirmed.

For unconfirmed events - like what appears to be happening this week - the diagnostic challenge is more severe. There is no official start date, no projected end date, and no guidance on which types of content or signals are being reassessed.

What is clear from the tracking tool data is that the magnitude of the movement on May 13 and 14 is large enough to sit above normal daily noise. Whether it constitutes a discrete update, a delayed component of the March 2026 cycle, or something else entirely is not determinable from current data.

Context: a stressful spring for publishers

The May volatility is the latest episode in what has been a difficult period for site owners and publishers. The March 2026 core update, which ran from March 27 to April 8, produced sharper ranking disruption than December 2025, with SE Ranking data showing that 79.5% of top-three URLs shifted and 24.1% of top-10 pages completely disappeared from the top 100. In December 2025, the equivalent figure was 15%, itself a historically high number at the time. The directional trend across successive update cycles has been toward more disruption, not less.

The March 2026 update was also notable for the categories it moved. PPC Land's detailed analysis found that rankings shifted away from intermediary and aggregator sites toward what Aleyda Solis described as stronger destination sources - official and institutional sources, specialist and niche sites, and established brands. The New York Times and The Guardian were among the publishers that gained visibility. The mechanism is not publicly disclosed by Google, but the pattern is consistent across multiple consecutive update cycles.

Against that backdrop, the deindexing trend and the May volatility are arriving at a moment when many publishers have limited capacity to absorb further disruption. Site owners who lost traffic in December 2025 were told to wait for the next core update. Those who did not recover in March 2026 are now watching rankings move again - with no confirmed cause and no clear timeline.

The marketing community's interest in this pattern extends beyond SEO. As PPC Land has documented across multiple reporting cycles, organic search traffic underpins the economics of large portions of the publishing and e-commerce ecosystem. Ranking changes affect audience delivery for advertisers, content investment decisions, and the revenue models that sustain specialist editorial operations. The May 13 and 14 volatility, whatever its ultimate cause, is another data point in a pattern that advertisers and media buyers cannot afford to ignore.

Timeline

  • December 2025 - Pedro Dias and others begin noticing higher-than-normal deindexing rates, according to community reports
  • December 11-29, 2025 - Google's December 2025 core update runs for 18 days, producing severe publisher visibility losses; 15% of top-10 pages disappear from the top 100
  • December 29, 2025 - SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra publishes five-year volatility analysis showing confirmed updates fell from 10 to 4 per year between 2021 and 2025
  • March 24, 2026 - Google releases the March 2026 spam update, completing in just 19.5 hours - the fastest spam update on record
  • March 27 - April 8, 2026 - March 2026 core update rolls out; 79.5% of top-3 URLs shift and 24.1% of top-10 pages drop from the top 100
  • March 31, 2026 - John Mueller explains on Bluesky that core updates deploy multiple components step by step, not simultaneously
  • April 8, 2026 - March 2026 core update completes; NYT and Guardian among top visibility gainers; aggregators among hardest hit
  • April 15, 2026 - SE Ranking data published showing March 2026 core update outpaced December 2025 across every ranking tier
  • April 18, 2026 - DemandSphere publishes a tracker covering 173 Google algorithm and AI search updates from 2000 to 2026
  • April 23, 27, 28, 2026 - Unconfirmed ranking movements detected by tracking tools; no Google confirmation
  • April 30, 2026 - John Mueller responds to Pedro Dias's deindexing question on Bluesky, stating "some sites go up, some sites go down - I don't see anything exceptional there"
  • May 1, 2026 - Search Engine Roundtable publishes detailed report on Google's elevated deindexing rates; community confirms "Crawled - currently not indexed" rising across many properties
  • May 8, 2026 - Unconfirmed ranking movement detected; no Google confirmation
  • May 13-14, 2026 - Multiple tracking tools - including Semrush, Sistrix, Accuranker, Mozcast, Algoroo, and others - show sharp ranking volatility; Discover traffic drops reported; SEO community chatter spikes; deindexing trend continues

Summary

Who: Site owners, SEO professionals, publishers, and e-commerce operators using Google Search, along with the broader marketing and advertising community dependent on organic search traffic.

What: A significant and unconfirmed spike in Google search ranking volatility, detected simultaneously by more than a dozen third-party tracking tools on May 13 and 14, 2026. A parallel rise in deindexing activity - with more pages receiving the "Crawled - currently not indexed" status in Google Search Console - has been building since at least the beginning of April.

When: The ranking volatility is being observed today, May 14, 2026, with the disruption appearing to have begun on May 13. The deindexing trend has been building since approximately early April 2026, following the completion of the March 2026 core update on April 8.

Where: The volatility affects Google search rankings globally and across all content categories, based on tool data. The deindexing reports are coming from site owners and SEO professionals across multiple regions and site types. Community discussion is concentrated on Search Engine Roundtable and WebmasterWorld.

Why: No cause has been officially confirmed by Google. The tracking tool patterns are consistent with an unconfirmed algorithmic adjustment, though whether this is a discrete update, a delayed component of the March 2026 cycle, or routine continuous refinement is not determinable from available data. The deindexing trend is hypothesized by community members to reflect Google tightening its quality threshold for indexation - potentially in response to the volume of AI-generated content entering the web - though Google's John Mueller has stated he does not see anything exceptional in the indexing data.

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