Google Search Ranking Volatility Remains Super Heated

The Google Search rankings continue to be super volatile and heated even through today. This started back throughout most of January and it has really heated up even more so since January 21st or so.

As a reminder, I covered a number of unconfirmed Google search ranking updates including the January 21st, January 15th, January 12th and January 6th. Prior to that, we had the Google December 2025 core update kick off on December 11, 2025 at around 12:25 pm ET and ended on December 29, 2025 at around 2:05 pm ET. It had two spikes, one on December 13th and the other on December 20th.

And it has not calmed down. I am still seeing chatter about traffic drops, ranking changes and the tools are still very heated.

Google Tracking Tools

Let’s start with what the tools have been tracking:

Semrush:

SimilarWeb:

Wincher:

Accuranker:

Mangools:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Wiredboard’s Aggregator of Tools – this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:

Mozcast:

Zutrix:

Algoroo:

Data For SEO:

SERPstat:

Sistrix:

CognitiveSEO:

SEO Chatter

The chatter is still heated both here in the comments and also on WebmasterWorld. Here is just a sampling of those comments:

Big changes again

And for the worse again.

Totally dead today… No traffic, no AdSense revenue, no nothing 🙁 Very bad January.

Is anyone else seeing crazy ups and downs? I’m seeing the average position in Google Search Console yo-yo.

Everything is bad so far in January. Rankings and traffic are terrible (so called core update was small bump that is fizzling out and was too small anyway). Ad revenue is fantastically poor too.

Google traffic is very poor. It looks like this last CU vanished all of gs competence to recognize the intention of the query. Google keeps “adding” keywords to the query that leads to totally mismatched traffic.

January was really extremely brutal for my news site: traffic dropped by around 90 percent, ad revenue by roughly 98 percent, while rankings stayed largely unchanged. I’m hoping this is just the typical January/February slump. Otherwise, it’s hard to justify publishing new articles at all. Well, and then there are the bots. Interestingly, my shop performed quite well in January, which was honestly unexpected for that time of year.

Another thing I noticed: even more low-quality content dominating the top positions in my niche. In Google News headlines especially, cheaply translated sites from China and Vietnam are ranking very prominently. Some of them have extremely slow load times, yet Google seems to favor them. Chinese state propaganda content is also highly visible, alongside a lot of crypto-related articles. Serious news mostly appears only as standard wire reports.

As for Discover, it feels effectively unusable at this point. My feed is filled with low-effort content like “how to turn on a washing machine” or “how to cut bread properly.”

What are you all seeing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.