I am seeing some signs of a Google search ranking update over the past day or so but the chatter is super limited right now. Many of the tools spike yesterday but like I said, the SEO community chatter was calm.
I wonder if this volatility was related to maybe the Cloudflare outage or Gemini 3 rolling out. Probably neither but maybe the Cloudflare outage caused some short term indexing issues where Google temporarily removed some pages from its search results, causing the tools to pick up volatility? Or maybe Google Search quietly incorporated Gemini 3 models into the core ranking systems – I doubt it.
The last time we reported on Google ranking volatility was on November 12th and then before that with what I called the Movember update around November 8th and then the Halloween update and then between October 15th to 17th and then on October 7/8th and to be honest, there has been a lot less chatter since Google turned off the ability to see 100 results per page and the tools began to recalibrate. But that being said, SEOs can tell, outside of these tools, when there is a ranking adjustment and it seems there was a significant one around October 16th.
Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing over the past couple of days:
Semrush:
Wincher:
Mozcast:
Advanced Web Rankings:
Mangools:
Accuranker:
SimilarWeb:
Data For SEO:
SERPstat:
Sistrix:
CognitiveSEO:
Algoroo:
Zutrix:
Wiredboard’s Aggregator of Tools – this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
SEO Chatter
Like I said, the chatter in the SEO community is super limited. WebmasterWorld and this site is 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.
Yes, and not just a little bit. According to Sistrix, my website’s ranking has improved significantly in the last 24 hours. (Sorry, I can’t take a picture of the charts with my phone at the moment.)
— Micha (@michaz42) November 20, 2025
** “Seeing a subtle pattern: volatility is clustered around pages with fluctuating intent signals.
Not huge swings — more like micro-rebalancing. Almost looks like Google recalibrating entity-to-query mappings rather than rewriting rankings.”**— Stefano Galloni (@achille610) November 20, 2025
So what are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
