The May 2026 Core Update was announced on 21st May 2026, following the March Core Update. It was completed on the 2nd June. Data, analysis, examples and rankings for affected domains are shown below in this article.
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- Google’s status page for the Core Update Start date: 21.05.26. End Date: 02.06.2026
- For detailed information and data on all previous Google updates, see the SISTRIX update tracking page
- Information from Google on Core Updates about these broad changes to search algorithms and systems.
- The previous Core Update was in March 2026.
SISTRIX Google Update and Feature Update Radar
The daily view on SERP updates can always be viewed in our Google Update Radar which shows the current level of movement relative to the last 90 days. The radar graphics are an indicator of SERPs changes across 1 million SERPs every day. Graphs for UK and US are shown below:
The feature radars (also available on the SISTRIX radar pages linked above) are not showing any major changes.
Data and Analysis
We have produced two lists for you which combine the top 200 winning and losing domains from US and UK. Use the sort and search features to analyse the tables. These domains have not been hand-filtered and simply represent large VI movements that coincide with the dates of the May Core Update.
Analysis of 451 ecommerce domains in the UK data, covering both General retail and D2C, show very little impact by the May core update. News media domains, on the other hand, show a strong net negative result over 77 news media domains in the UK. Click the image below to view the absolute gains and losses across that selection of domains.
Additional SISTRIX data analysis is available from Aleyda Solis here.
This is what I’d describe as an intent-destination reset, a useful angle to understand why some highly authoritative domains lost, why some aggregators gained while others dropped, and why a broad “UGC lost” conclusion would be too simplistic. – Aleyda Solis
Daily Updates
1st June 2026
Two-stage effects seen in US data: Early US data was showing lower overall change levels on the radars but two data points show us that this is now changing. Firstly, the US radar shows a sharp increase over the last two days. Secondly, domain-level data is showing two clusters of changes. The first starts 1-2 days after the start:
The second shows a reaction nearly a week later:
The UK radar has dropped from peaks seen on the 29th May.
29th May 2026
The radar values continue to rise with the UK radar showing very high values.
If you have a SISTRIX account the following links will take you to the live lists of top changes. Links shown are for UK. (Speed tip: Modify the URL to quickly get other countries and to change the dates.)
- UK Losers by percentage
- UK Losers by absolute values
- UK Winners by percentage
- UK Winners by absolute values
New candidates are easy to find with some well known brands appearing. Here are a few examples from the UK data:
A few examples from the US data:
Changes in US domains appear to be lagging the changes seen in the UK.
26th May 2026
Some candidate domains have been seen in the data. The examples below show changes starting on the 23rd May (crawled data from 22nd May)
The following example is from Google UK data for a well known brand.
Across large, highly visible domains there are also movements. These are primarily being seen across dictionaries at the moment. Example gains can be seen at:
Losers can be seen at:
