If your website traffic has felt a bit unpredictable lately, you’re not imagining it. Google has been unusually active in early 2026 — and a couple of significant updates have already rolled through that are worth understanding, whether you’re managing your own site or working with an agency.
Here’s a plain-English breakdown of what’s happened, what it means, and what (if anything) you should actually do about it.
February 2026: The First-Ever Discover Core Update
On February 5, Google rolled out what it described as the February 2026 Discover Core Update — notable because it’s the first core update in Google’s history targeted specifically at Discover rather than traditional search results. It finished rolling out on February 26, taking three weeks to complete.
Google Discover is the content feed that surfaces on mobile devices and the Google app — articles and pages Google thinks you’ll find relevant based on your interests, location, and past behaviour. If you’ve been getting referral traffic from Discover, this update may have affected it.
The stated goals of the update:
- Show more locally relevant content — surfacing sites based in the user’s own country more prominently
- Reduce sensational and clickbait content from the feed
- Highlight more original, in-depth, and timely content from sites with demonstrated expertise in a given area
Google also clarified how it evaluates expertise for Discover: it’s assessed topic by topic, not site-wide. So a local news site with a strong gardening section can have established expertise in gardening — even if it covers other topics. A site that wrote one gardening article probably won’t.
What this means for you: If your business publishes content consistently within a specific topic area — and does it well — you’re in a stronger position for Discover visibility than generalist content farms. Local businesses publishing locally relevant content should see this as an opportunity.
March 2026: Spam Update + Core Update
March brought two updates in quick succession.
March 24: Spam Update
Google’s first spam update of 2026 — a standard, global rollout that completed in under 24 hours. Google described it as a “normal spam update” targeting content that violates its spam policies. If you saw a sudden drop on or around March 24–25, this is worth investigating.
March 27: Core Update
Three days later, Google launched its first broad core update of 2026, expected to take up to two weeks to fully roll out. Core updates are the big ones — they reassess content quality across the entire index, not just specific spam signals.
The themes Google has consistently reinforced with its 2025–2026 core updates:
- Prioritising people-first content over pages built primarily to rank
- Greater weight on originality, usefulness, and credibility
- More nuanced interpretation of search intent — matching content to what someone is actually trying to accomplish
- Continued pressure on thin, templated, and AI-generated content with no unique value
The Bigger Picture: AI Is Now Built Into Search
Beyond the individual updates, the more significant shift in 2026 is structural. Google has woven its Gemini AI models directly into the search experience.
AI Overviews — those generated summaries that now appear at the top of many search results — have become a standard part of how Google answers questions. When users ask a follow-up question inside an AI Overview, they’re now taken directly into AI Mode: a full conversational interface powered by Gemini. The goal is to keep the conversation inside Google rather than sending people to external sites.
This raises an obvious concern: if Google answers the question directly, does anyone click through to your website?
Is Organic Search Actually Dying?
Short answer: no. The data doesn’t support the panic.
A large-scale analysis by Graphite, examining organic traffic across more than 40,000 major U.S. websites, found that SEO traffic has declined modestly — around 2.5% year-over-year — rather than catastrophically. Overall search engine traffic actually increased slightly, with Google traffic up around 0.8%.
AI Overviews do eat into click-through rates on informational queries — particularly for simple, factual questions. But for transactional searches (“best web designer in Edmonton”), local searches (“plumber near me”), and anything requiring nuance or trust, people are still clicking through. The intent matters.
The businesses feeling the most pain are those whose content strategy was built around answering generic questions that Google can now answer directly. The ones doing fine are those producing genuinely useful, specific, experience-led content that AI can’t easily replicate.
What This Means Practically
1. Demonstrate real expertise, visibly
Google’s E-E-A-T signals — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — are more important than ever. That means author bios, credentials, first-hand perspective, and cited sources. If your content could have been written by anyone about anything, it’s vulnerable.
2. Focus on content AI can’t replicate
Case studies, local examples, original opinions, and proprietary data are things AI Overviews can’t generate from thin air. Content built on real experience holds up. Content that just aggregates publicly available information is being commoditized.
3. Local businesses are in a strong position
The February Discover update’s emphasis on local relevance, and the consistent strength of local search results against AI disruption, means local SEO is one of the more resilient channels right now. Your Google Business Profile, local keyword targeting, and reviews from your actual service area matter more, not less.
4. Think about GEO alongside SEO
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the emerging practice of structuring your content to be cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode responses, not just ranked in traditional results. It’s still new territory, but the fundamentals overlap heavily with good SEO: clear structure, strong E-E-A-T, and content that directly answers specific questions.
5. Be careful with AI-generated content
Google’s spam updates have consistently targeted low-effort, high-volume AI content — content that exists primarily to capture traffic rather than serve a reader. Using AI as a writing tool is fine; publishing AI output without meaningful human input and editing is increasingly risky.
The Short Version
Google in 2026 rewards the same things it’s always claimed to reward — it’s just gotten better at actually doing it. Original content, real expertise, genuine usefulness, and good technical foundations. Local businesses with strong community presence and consistent, focused content are well-positioned.
The sites struggling are the ones that were built on shortcuts. The ones holding steady built something real.
Want to know how your site is positioned heading into the rest of 2026? Start with a free website checkup →
