@tjrobertson52

Google just announced a major update to their core search algorithm. I wanna talk about how you should think about updates like these and what they might mean for your business or website.

So Google does three or four of these major updates every year. They used to have fun names like Penguin or Panda. Now they're just named after the month they came out.

So this is the May 2026 core update? Google doesn't give us any details. They just point us to their generic guidelines about ranking and search.

So it's up to us SEOs to track the results as these updates roll out and try to reverse engineer them. It'll probably be at least a month before we really know what changed here.

But as SEOs, we love to speculate. So let's speculate.

Perhaps the number one expert on evaluating core algorithm updates from Google is my friend Marie Haynes. Shortly after the update, she made a post in her community, which I'm a part of. She pointed out that right before the algorithm update, Google put out a guide on how to optimize your website for generative AI features in Google.

And this is pretty common for Google to do right after a core algorithm update. They'll make some change to their guidelines, or they'll put out some new guidance. These things are often related.

There's a good chance that the new guidance to release is preparing us for the changes they're making to the algorithm.

A few days ago, I made a video on that guide talking about how I thought the guidance was completely useless. Maybe I was missing the point. Maybe that wasn't guidance for how the algorithm was working.

Maybe it's guidance for how the algorithm will now work after this update.

As Marie points out, a lot of the guidance was about how you shouldn't be writing for machines, you should be writing for humans. You should be sharing real experience.

This reminded me of one line in that guide that I keep coming back to. It's just been stuck in my head. Google said you should avoid writing commodity content.

Things like seven tips for first time home buyers.

And I agree. Seven tips for first time home buyers is a terrible topic. Only because, as Google implies, unless you're one of the top authorities in real estate, it's unlikely Google's even gonna want to index your content on such a common topic.

But also because no one searches that way. No one's searching for seven tips for anything. People ask specific questions, and if you want to rank for those questions, that question should be in the title of the post.

But here's the part that got stuck in my head. What does Google say you should write instead of seven tips for first time home buyers? The example they gave was, why we waived the inspection fee and saved money.

A look inside the sewer line.

I can tell you, I've been tracking traffic to web pages for 17 years now, and more recently tracking citations from AI search. I have never seen such an ambiguous topic be cited or get traffic from Google. But here we have Google telling us that's the perfect topic, and they're giving us guidance right before a core algorithm update.

They're telling us that this topic clearly comes from someone with firsthand experience, and that's the kind of content they want to cite.

So one of three things is true here. Google is completely out of touch of what actually works in SEO right now, or Google knows they're giving bad SEO advice. They just want to discourage us from doing actual SEO.

Or we're about to see a fundamental shift in how Google search works.

And of course, it could be a combination of two or all three of these factors. Maybe Google is about to get better at servicing firsthand experience. But my guess is topics that match what people and AI are actually searching for are still gonna perform best.

For now, we're just gonna have to wait and see.