How the May 2026 Core Update Changed SEO

A few weeks ago, an SEO named Schieler De’Land messaged me and said he was seeing something very odd. He found people searching the exact same keyword at the same time were seeing different results on Google.

A thread over at the Local Search Forum shared something similar. The user said:

“We have a set of locally focused keywords that we track weekly and have been tracking for years. These keywords include the city name within the query and have historically shown consistent results no matter the user’s location. Also historically when checking ranking positions for these keywords any automated checks would match human checks in private windows. Within the last month or so that changed. Now our automated tools […] frequently show different results than what humans see”.

Someone at Black Hat World said something similar: “People are noticing this shuffling a lot recently.”

I had also seen some weird patterns but wasn’t sure how significant it was so I reached out to Mark Kabana over at Yext to pull some data for me and what he found was significant.

What is the Dynamic SERP Update

Using data from ranking reports for 8.16 million location-specific screenshots of search results, Yext found that volatility in the search results for organic rankings became 48.7% more volatile starting the week of May 18, 2026, when Google rolled out the May 2026 Core update.

In fact, 97% of the reports they looked at became more volatile. This update had the biggest impact on organic results on mobile for keywords that include a geomodifier (explicit geo terms).  For example, “divorce lawyer seattle” would show more fluctuation than “divorce lawyer”.

While this update did impact local pack results as well, the change was not as substantial as what we saw with mobile organic results.

For example, before this update, this SERP was previously fairly consistent. The business ranked well organically for this keyword unless you were inside the Phoenix city limits. 

After the update, the grid doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at first glance. Rankings are all over the place and vary a ton.

Then if I fast forward to August, the pattern is just as unclear. Nothing looks stable.

Isn’t This Just Personalization?

Google has been personalizing results for a long time. This means you are more likely to see websites in the search results that you’ve clicked on before. I wanted to make sure people didn’t confuse what was happening here with that. These results we looked at with Yext were search results from logged out users without click history.

What Does This Mean?

SEO isn’t dead. There are still clear winners and losers in the search results and the businesses that dominate are still there the majority of the time and are there more than competitors. 

However, I think we need to make sure people understand there is no such thing as position 1. If you do a search on Google, what you personally see on your device is not a picture of what everyone else sees. This has been true for a while but this update made it even more necessary to understand this since the results are a lot more volatile. 

In order for you to have a clear understanding of who is winning for a particular keyword, you need a lot of data. One scan is not going to cut it. For example, this chart shows me who the winners are in a particular market because it did thousands of scans. 

There are a lot of popular tools in the SEO marketplace that do not do that. If they are doing a single scan on a single keyword, that data has become a lot more inaccurate. 

If you are a business owner reading this, please stop measuring your SEO campaign based on what you see in the search results. You should know your SEO is working because over time your phone should start ringing more and your reports should show more leads from Google. 

In this example, one person could be seeing the search result that’s red (ie: you’re invisible) whereas the majority of people are seeing it in position 4-6.

It’s more important than ever to make sure you are tracking your SEO properly. The 2 things that will help you do that best are:

1. Call Tracking – this will let you know what pages send you what calls. This has been huge for our clients. Knowing which pages send you the best leads will be huge for increasing ROI.
2. UTM tracking – this will let you see which keywords got you clicks on your Google Business Profile.

If you’re not seeing this trend yet, remember that like most updates, trends are often more visible in some industries than others. Here are the industries we looked at:

Keep in mind, volatility is nothing new. These fluctuations were happening before, just not at the same frequency. Also, volatility trackers in SEO often look at whether rankings changed from one day to another. The Places Scout index was looking at whether the same query returns different ordered organic results from nearby geographic locations during the same report run.

Does this update make SEOs’ lives more difficult? Probably. But rankings were never the end goal. Revenue is. If you stay focused on helping clients get more business from Google, not just more #1 rankings, you’ll be just fine.