Google Search Ranking Volatility & Chatter October 16

It has been a while since I reported on a Google Search ranking update. I blame the tools, but in all seriousness, I am seeing a spike in volatility and, now probably more importantly, a spike in chatter over the past 24 hours, related to Google Search ranking changes, referral traffic changes and overall disruption in the Google Search results.

As a reminder, we had the Google September 2026 spam update start on Thursday, September 24, 2026 at around 12:00 pm ET and completed on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 am ET. That update had three waves of volatility, in our opinion. They include:

Before that, we had unconfirmed updated around September 23/24, volatility on September 15th, then the weirdness with September 4 through 13.

I should note that there seems to be an ongoing increase in manual actions, human-generated Google search penalties.

Now, I am seeing a spike in SEO chatter and at the same time, some tools showing volatility, over the past day or two.

SEO Chatter

Let's start with the chatter at WebmasterWorld with comments from the community about ranking and traffic changes from Google Search over the past 24 hours. Here are some of those comments:

Really dreadful today, indeed. Decline is just the trend the last few years. Nothing to do about it. Not only with Google, but other search engines are also sending just less traffic over the last few years. Almost not noticeable, cause of the time span. But little by little. A new standard after another new standard, until there is no revenue left.

Today is absolutely dreadful. Every single website I monitor or have analytics access to is seeing barely any traffic today. It doesn’t matter if it's an e-commerce shop, a news site, a blog, etc. On top of that, all the stories showing up in the News tab are completely outdated. Some of them are literally 3 months old. Something is definitely way off right now.

Simply said: conversions almost gone, seemingly normal traffic. There is a lot of bot traffic (besides the normal traffic) which I am not wasting my time on, to be honest. Something changed during/after the spam update.

That's exactly the same pattern I'm seeing right now on my site and countless other websites. And to be honest, I'm at a loss right now. Traffic this morning has been such a disaster that I'm wondering why we're even bothering to write anymore; nobody's reading it anyway. (Well, and this month's ad revenue is practically nonexistent.)

I agree traffic has dropped like a stone along with Discover and news visibility. Even the Google News app and Discover in general are showing stale stories. Some of them at least a week old.
Traffic crawls a bit in the morning and by evening it retracts back into the abyss.
Sigh, was hoping that the end of the update would stabilize things, but it's just made them worse.

Yep, my news site. Though by now, the hourly traffic has dug itself an even deeper hole. Fortunately, the shop is doing okay, although traffic there dropped today as well.

Plus a lot more...