Google May 2022 Core Update Is Live - Here Is What We Are Seeing Early On

Google May 2022 Broad Core Update

Google Search has begun to roll out the first broad core update of the year, the May 2022 broad core update. It started on May 25, 2022 at about 11:30am ET and will now roll out for the next couple of weeks.

So far, we are seeing many signs that this May 2022 core update started off strong. Over night, a lot of the tracking tools (not all just yet) picked up big volatility with the Google search results. Also, the chatter starting early this morning is really picking up. The chatter changed from comments like – “oh no, there was a Google core update announced” to “oh no, my site dropped in rankings in a big way.” I embedded and quoted a lot of that early chatter below, along with what the tools are showing. I may update some of the tools as they update later on this morning.

Google May 2022 Broad Core Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

Name: Google May 2022 Broad Core Update
Launched: May 25, 2022 at around 11:30pm ET
Rollout: It will take about one to two weeks to roll out
Targets: It looks at all types of content
Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Danny Sullivan from Google (who is on vacation now, so likely wrote this last week and someone else published it or maybe he did it while on vacation), wrote “Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes, which we refer to as core updates. Core updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of our search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone. Today, we’re releasing our May 2022 core update. It will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out.”

These broad core updates are global.

If you were impacted by this update, check out the Google core update advice story for more.

Below is a recap of the early chatter and data we are seeing on this update less than 24 hours after it started rolling out. Keep in mind, we expect to see more over the next several days but I wanted to share some of the early reports on the impact of this update.

Did Google Test This Update Earlier?

As we’ve been reporting, there was broad core update like updates we’ve been seeing and chattering about since May 16th. Google would not confirm it, in fact, John Mueller of Google said less than 12 hours before announcing this new broad core update “I’m not aware of anything specific. We always work to improve the quality & relevance of the search results, so it can happen that a site becomes more – or less – visible over time.”

Google would tell me that what we saw before May 25th was not related to these unconfirmed updates but honestly, this happens a lot. Maybe Google was testing this core update in the wild? Who knows but we did think whatever was going on over the past week felt a lot like a Google core update.

John Mueller of Google specifically addressed this saying “when we announce core updates, we start the roll-out at that point, not beforehand.” Although he did delete that tweet shortly after this core update was announced, I am not sure why…

Previous Broad Core Updates

So yea, this will take a couple of weeks to roll out and it has been over six months since the last update, which was last the November 2021 core update on November 17th through November 30th. The previous core updates prior to the November update was the July 2021 and then a month prior to that with the June core update. The one before that was 6 months before the June update, on December 3, 2020 named the December 2020 core update. Before that was 7 month gap where on May 4, 2020, the May 2020 core update. The one prior to that was on January 13, 2020, the January 2020 core update and the one before that was on September 24, 2019, the September 2019 core update. Oh, before that was on June 3, 2019, the June 2019 core update and I can go on and on.

SEO Chatter On May 2022 Core Update

Yesterday, things were slow but this morning, things really heated up with the chatter. Here is some of the chatter in the SEO forums and on social about this May 2022 broad core update: