Google confirmed the May 2026 core update finished rolling out, and the inboxes started the same week. A flooring contractor in Surrey watched three of his top pages slide off the first page. He did not change a thing on the site. That is what a core update does. It re-scores what already exists.
Here is the part most people get wrong. A core update is not a penalty. There is nothing to "fix" in the way you fix a broken link. Google re-weighted how it judges relevance and quality across the whole index, and your pages now sit in a slightly different order against everyone else's. Panic edits in the first week tend to make things worse.
Who actually moved
Thin service pages and pages stuffed with keywords took the hardest hits. Pages that read like they were written for a crawler instead of a customer lost ground to pages that answered the question plainly. We saw the opposite too: a few clients who had spent the spring rewriting their service pages in plain language picked up positions they had been chasing for a year.
If you run a local business in BC, the pattern is consistent. Pages tied to a real service, a real location, and a real person doing the work held up. Generic pages that could belong to any company in any city slipped.
What to do this month
Wait for the rollout to settle before you judge anything. Then pull your Search Console data and compare the four weeks before the update to the four weeks after. Look at which pages dropped, not just total traffic. One page losing ten positions is a different problem than fifty pages each losing one.
Rewrite the weakest pages for the person, not the algorithm. Say who does the work, where, and what it costs. Add the detail a customer would actually ask about on the phone. That is the same direction Google has pushed for years, and core updates keep rewarding it — and it is the same plain, well-documented content AI assistants read when they recommend a local business.
If you want a read on which of your pages moved and why, that is the kind of thing our SEO & AEO work starts with. No rebuild, no panic — just the data and a short list of pages worth the effort.