Google’s results moved again on Saturday, October 24, days after the swings of October 20 and 21, and the company has confirmed no update. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the new wave on Sunday, October 25.
Schwartz said many rank-tracking tools registered significant volatility on Saturday, while complaints about traffic and positions piled up across the industry. Taken together, he wrote, the signals point to a ranking adjustment released Friday and carrying into Saturday. That is his inference. Google has published nothing to back it.
The pattern is now familiar. Our earlier report covered the October 20 and 21 movement, and Schwartz also logged an unconfirmed shift on October 16. Before that came the September 2026 spam update, which ran from September 24 to October 8 and which he says produced three waves of its own.
The tool readings deserve caution. Schwartz listed more than a dozen trackers, among them Mozcast, Semrush, Sistrix, AWR, and Wireboard (which plots the others on one chart). He also reminded readers that these tools have struggled for roughly a month, though many say they have fixed the problems. A spike on a single chart proves little. Agreement across several independent tools proves more.
Practitioner comments, collected from WebmasterWorld and the Roundtable’s own comment section, leaned heavily toward Discover and Google News. One news publisher described a brief Discover surge that faded to almost nothing overnight, and called News and Discover broken, saying both surface stale stories. Another commenter said Discover now sends traffic to an article for under six hours at best. A third reported traffic down across the board and confirmed outdated stories appearing in Google News.
Not every report points at rankings. A hotel operator described low website traffic alongside strong walk-in business and normal customer orders, which suggests the web channel and real-world demand are moving apart for that business. It is one anecdote, but it carries a lesson: a traffic dip is not always a ranking loss.
Another commenter saw a steep drop across every monitored site and noted that public broadcasters and Springer Verlag, Germany’s largest publishing house, sat near the top for nearly every query checked. A separate commenter reported heavy bot traffic from Singapore and called it a pre-update pattern. No data accompanies that claim, and the source does not test it.
Forum threads attract people with problems, so they overstate how widely a change landed. The Roundtable post offers no site-level analysis that separates a genuine ranking change from seasonal demand, Discover fluctuation, or a measurement fault. It also does not say which verticals were hit hardest.
Three unconfirmed waves in about ten days leave the cause open, and Google has not said what comes next. Teams should compare Search Console clicks and impressions for October 23 through 25 against the prior week, split Discover from web search, and record the results before changing any pages.
Based on reporting by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, published October 25, 2026.
