Google’s May 2026 core update handed Reddit a significant ranking boost across every content category an SE Ranking study measured, while YouTube’s regular organic footprint shrank and most sites that lost ground in March still have not recovered.
SE Ranking tracked 100,000 keywords from a consistent New York vantage point across December 2025, March 2026, and May 2026. That fixed keyword set makes the cross-update comparison more reliable than a single snapshot, though the results represent one US location and one curated keyword pool.
Reddit’s top-3 share climbed to 10.24% after May, up from 8.56% after March and 9.19% after December. Put differently, one in roughly ten top-3 results in SE Ranking’s dataset now points to a Reddit thread. The platform also ranked first more often: 13,872 keywords returned Reddit as the top result after May, a 54% increase from the 8,993 keywords it held after March.
The gains were not distributed evenly. Categories where users want first-hand experience moved most. Pets added 3.18 percentage points (14.87% to 18.05%), education added 3.03 points, and sports and exercise added 3.02. E-commerce and retail rose 2.61 points to 14.11%.
Your Money Your Life categories moved far less. Healthcare inched from 0.93% to 1.33%, a gain of 0.40 points. Real estate barely shifted (0.06 points). News and politics added 0.78 points. That YMYL restraint matters for teams whose content touches health, finance, or legal topics: Reddit’s advantage appears tied to experiential intent, not domain authority across the board.
Those niche-level splits are also the right unit for competitive analysis. A 10% aggregate figure obscures a situation where Reddit now controls 18% of pet-query top-3 results and under 2% in real estate. Search managers working in experience-heavy verticals are dealing with a categorically different SERP than those in regulated categories.
YouTube moved in the opposite direction. Its top-3 organic share fell to 2.14% after May, down from 2.50% after March and 2.40% after December. SE Ranking notes that this data covers organic blue-link positions only, not video carousels or other video features, so YouTube’s actual SERP presence may be larger than these figures suggest. Top-3 monopolies (a single domain sweeping all three results for a given query) fell from 3.24% to 1.99%, with YouTube remaining the most frequent holder of those clean sweeps.
One notable reversal: Amsive’s post-March research had found that UGC platforms including Reddit gave up US search visibility while branded domains picked up ground. The March figures from SE Ranking pointed the same way. May’s data flipped that picture entirely. That swing across two consecutive updates shows how quickly UGC fortunes can shift, and why drawing permanent conclusions from a single core update remains an unreliable practice.
Volatility overall was moderate. Position shifts touched 76.03% of top-3 results in May, and 88.39% of the top 10 moved at least one spot. Both readings came in below the March mark yet above the December baseline. The exit rate told a similar story: 19.87% of top-10 pages fell outside the top 100, sitting between March’s higher 24.10% and December’s lower 14.70%.
Recovery data is the most sobering figure in the study. Of the domains knocked out of the top 10 by the March update, only 32.20% had climbed back by May. The other 67.80% remain absent. At the same time, 17% of the current top-10 domains were absent from all three previous snapshots in SE Ranking’s data.
For sites still waiting on a March recovery, this pattern suggests that back-to-back core updates do not reliably restore prior positions. The recovery clock does not reset simply because another update rolls through.
Search teams in pets, education, and retail should assess how much top-3 real estate Reddit now controls for their core keyword sets. The answer will shape whether UGC-style content, community partnerships, or entity-differentiation strategies deserve more investment in the next planning cycle.
Search Engine Journal reported these findings on June 9, 2026, citing an SE Ranking analysis of 100,000 keywords tracked across the December 2025, March 2026, and May 2026 core updates.
