Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Google’s March 2026 core update appears to have caused a much more dramatic reshuffle than the December 2025 update, with significantly heavier movement across top rankings and far less stability in the results. According to SE Ranking data reported by Search Engine Land, 79.5% of top-three URLs changed position, while 24.1% of pages that were in the top 10 dropped out of the top 100 entirely. That is a much sharper level of disruption than we saw after the December update.
For anyone working in digital marketing, this matters because core updates can quickly affect visibility, traffic and lead generation. They are not niche SEO events. They can alter how discoverable your brand is in Google almost overnight. We have already covered how these kinds of changes can ripple into newer search experiences too, particularly in our article on how AI Overviews are affected by Google core updates.
What is a Google core update?
A Google core update is a broad change to the main systems Google uses to rank content in search. Rather than targeting one specific tactic or technical issue, these updates affect how Google evaluates the overall quality, relevance and usefulness of pages across a huge range of queries.
That is what makes them so important. A core update is not just about whether a site has done something wrong. More often, it is Google reassessing which pages deserve to rank most prominently.
In practical terms, core updates matter because they can:
- shift rankings across entire sectors, not just individual websites
- reduce traffic even when nothing on your site has changed
- reward pages that Google now sees as more useful, relevant or trustworthy
- affect leads, enquiries and revenue, not just SEO reports
If you need a simpler backgrounder for clients or colleagues, this fits with the same pattern we discussed in our piece on Google’s November 2024 core update and what digital marketers need to know. We also looked at a completed rollout in our coverage of the June 2025 core update.
Why this update matters
The March 2026 update looks more severe than December because the search results were far less stable at every major ranking tier. In the top three positions, only 20.5% of URLs held their exact place, down from 33.1% in December. In the top 10, that dropped to just 9.3%, compared with 16.9% previously. This was not a light reordering of similar results. It was a deeper reset.
That matters commercially too. When pages drop out of the top 10 or disappear from the top 100, the consequences are rarely limited to reporting dashboards. The knock-on effect is often felt in:
- organic traffic
- lead volume
- enquiry quality
- overall revenue performance
For brands that rely heavily on organic search, a volatile core update can quickly become a much wider business issue.
We were already expecting something like this
What makes this update interesting is that the scale of disruption was large, but the fact that something bigger was coming did not feel completely unexpected.
In the days before official confirmation, many marketers were already seeing unusual ranking turbulence. Search results were moving more than normal, visibility looked unsettled across multiple sectors, and there was a sense that Google’s results were wobbling before the formal announcement arrived. That kind of pre-update instability often points to broader recalibration already taking place.
The logic is fairly straightforward. Google rarely goes from total calm to full-scale disruption with no signs at all. More often, there is a period where results begin to fluctuate, some sectors become noisier than others, and tools start showing elevated volatility before Google confirms a rollout.
That is why this March update felt less like a bolt from the blue and more like a formal confirmation of what the SERPs were already hinting at. In practice, this is one reason it is worth watching turbulence patterns closely instead of relying only on Google’s official announcements.
A useful way to think about it is this:
- isolated ranking drops can happen for all sorts of reasons
- wider volatility across sectors is more meaningful
- sustained turbulence often signals that Google is testing or preparing broader change
- by the time an update is confirmed, the effects may already be underway
Why the timing made everything feel even noisier
Another reason this rollout felt especially messy is that it came immediately after Google’s March 2026 spam update. That spam update finished unusually quickly, in less than a day, and the core update began just after it. The overlap makes attribution more difficult because some of the disruption may have been amplified by the proximity of both changes.
We covered that separately in our article on Google’s March 2026 spam update, but the key point here is that when two major Google systems shift close together, the search landscape can look more chaotic than usual. That does not always mean every ranking swing should be taken at face value in the moment. It often makes more sense to step back and watch the wider direction of travel once the dust settles.
What marketers should take from this
For marketers, the biggest takeaway is that core updates are not abstract SEO events happening in the background. They shape who gets seen, who loses visibility and which sites Google currently trusts to answer users’ questions.
This also reinforces the importance of building content that offers real value, not just surface-level optimisation. Stronger brands, clearer expertise, original insight and more useful pages are generally better placed to weather this kind of turbulence. That broader shift also connects to what we explored in our piece on keyword research and search intent, because ranking well is no longer just about matching terms. It is increasingly about being the result Google believes best satisfies the intent behind the search.
There is also a wider search context to keep in mind. Google’s search experience is changing beyond the traditional blue links, which is why articles like our look at Google’s move towards AI Mode matter too.
For marketers, the practical takeaway is to focus on:
- genuinely useful content
- stronger signals of expertise and trust
- clearer alignment with search intent
- a broader view of visibility beyond simple rankings
Final thought
The March 2026 core update looks more volatile than December’s, but the early signs of turbulence suggested Google was already preparing to make bigger changes. In that sense, the update was dramatic, but not entirely surprising.
For digital marketers, the lesson is simple. Pay attention when the SERPs start to feel unusually unstable. Those moments often tell you that Google is preparing to make a broader judgement about what deserves to rank, and by the time the official announcement lands, that process may already be well underway.
I can also make this a bit more punchy and blog-like, with stronger subheadings and a slightly more opinionated tone.
