Google Algorithm Updates: Every Confirmed Ranking Update in 2025 and 2026

Google has posted 12 confirmed ranking updates since the start of 2025: six core updates, five spam updates, and one Discover update. The newest is the November 2026 core update, which began on November 10, 2026, and was still rolling out when this page was last checked.

Last verified: Wednesday, November 11, 2026. We update this page whenever Google posts a new ranking update or marks one complete. Every date here comes from Google’s Search Status Dashboard, and the rollout lengths are worked out from its start and end times.

Below the list are three calculations the dashboard doesn’t show. If your traffic just moved, the section on checking your own site is near the end.

Every confirmed Google ranking update in 2025 and 2026

Newest first. Dates are US Pacific, the time zone the dashboard’s pages use, and each update name links to Google’s entry for it. Rollout length is the end time minus the start time, in days (d), hours (h), and minutes (m).

We’ve written about four of these in detail: the November 2026 core update, the May 2026 core update, the August 2026 spam update, and the September 2026 spam update.

The February 2026 entry is a different kind of update. Google’s announcement describes it as a broad update to the systems that surface articles in Discover, released first to English-language users in the US. It’s on Google’s ranking list, so it’s in the table, but it’s left out of the core and spam figures below.

How long core and spam updates take to roll out

The method is one subtraction. For each completed update, take the dashboard’s end time minus its start time, then group the results by type. The November 2026 core update is excluded because it has no end time yet.

The five completed core updates all took between about 12 and 18 days. For planning, a core update has meant two weeks of moving rankings, sometimes two and a half.

Spam updates don’t have a typical length. Three of the five finished in under three days, one took just under two weeks, and one took almost four weeks. The nine-day mean describes none of them, so quote the median. Five updates of each type is a small sample either way.

How often Google finished inside its own estimate

Every release post carries an estimate. Seven completed updates were given one in weeks, which can be scored against what happened. Counting two weeks as 14 days and three weeks as 21:

Six of the seven finished inside the estimate. The exception is the Discover update, which ran 7 days and 17 hours past its two-week ceiling. The five core updates used between 79.7% and 99.0% of their ceiling, 87.3% on average, so when Google says a core update may take up to two weeks, expect it to take most of them.

The other four completed updates, all spam updates, came with wording that can’t be scored: a few days for March, June, and August 2026, and a few weeks for August 2025. Each of the three announced as a few days finished in under three. Google doesn’t explain how it sets these estimates.

For the update in progress, the two-week mark falls on November 24, 2026, at 10:06 a.m. Pacific. The five completed core updates finished between 3 hours and about 4 days ahead of their ceilings.

How far apart the updates land

Measured from one start to the next, the 11 gaps between these 12 updates have a median of 55 days and a mean of 55.2. The shortest was 2 days and 14 hours, between the March 2026 spam and core updates. The longest was 109 days, between the March and June 2025 core updates.

None of the 12 overlapped. The same March 2026 pair came closest, with 1 day, 18 hours, and 30 minutes between the spam update ending and the core update starting. On any date since March 2025, at most one confirmed update was rolling out.

Counting only updates of the same type, core updates started 109, 164, 106, 55, and 173 days apart. November’s 173-day wait after May is the longest gap between core updates in this set. Spam updates started 210, 92, 55, and 37 days apart, each gap shorter than the one before.

These are announced updates only. Google’s core updates documentation says it also makes smaller core updates that it doesn’t announce, so a quiet stretch on the dashboard doesn’t mean rankings stood still.

How to read the Search Status Dashboard

Google’s old address for its list of ranking updates, developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking, now redirects to the dashboard’s Ranking history page linked at the top of this article. Google’s help page for the dashboard says it lists the ranking updates relevant to website owners and keeps entries for five years.

A rollout is two posts. The first is labeled Service information (System information on the help page) and announces the release with an estimate. The second is labeled Available and says the rollout was complete as of a given date. An entry with only the first post, like November 2026’s today, is still rolling out.

The pages use Pacific time and the data feed uses UTC. Incident pages state that all times are US/Pacific. The dashboard’s JSON feed gives the same moments in UTC, where the November 2026 start reads 18:06 instead of 10:06 a.m. Convert before lining an update up against your analytics. A late-afternoon Pacific time is already the next day in UTC.

The start and end times aren’t the post times. Across the 12 updates, the release post went up anywhere from under a minute to 23 minutes after the start time in the entry’s header. Nine of the 11 completed updates show an end time up to 58 minutes before the completion post, and two from 2025 show the post ahead of the end time. Lengths in this article use the header times, so figures measured from post to post can differ by minutes.

The Duration column is rounded. Multi-day rollouts appear to be rounded to the nearest hour, so the dashboard shows 13 days, 16 hours for the September 2026 spam update where the table above shows 13d 15h 45m. Google doesn’t state the rule, so that’s our reading of the rows.

The feed only goes back so far. When we fetched it on November 11, 2026, it held 10 incidents, the oldest being the December 2025 core update. Earlier updates have to be read from their own pages. One of the 10 is a serving disruption from the evening of February 24, 2026, Pacific time, which isn’t a ranking update.

How to check whether an update affected your site

Google’s help page says of ranking updates, “Often, there’s no action needed.” Its guide to debugging traffic drops lists an algorithm update as one possible cause among several: “We post about notable improvements to our systems on our list of ranking updates page.”

That list is the table above. To use it:

1. Date the drop. In Search Console’s Performance report, find the day the decline began and compare it with the dates in the table. A decline that began before an update started most likely has another cause.
2. Wait for the rollout to finish, then a week more. Google’s core updates guidance recommends waiting at least a full week after completion, then comparing that week with a week before the update began.
3. Rule out reporting errors and seasonality. Google’s guide points to the Search Console data anomalies page for logging errors, and to the Performance report’s Compare tab for setting a period against the previous one or the same months a year earlier.
4. Size it. Look at your top pages and queries, and check Web, Images, Video, and News results separately. In Google’s examples, a slip from position 2 to 4 is small and doesn’t call for drastic action, while a fall from 4 to 29 deserves a closer look.

What to do next depends on the type of update. Core updates are broad and don’t target specific sites or pages. Google advises against quick fixes and calls deleting content a last resort. Some changes take effect in a few days, it says, but others could take several months, and sometimes that means waiting for the next core update.

For spam updates, Google’s spam updates documentation tells affected sites to review its spam policies. Improvement may come as Google’s automated systems learn, over a period of months, that the site complies. Link spam updates are the exception. After one of those, Google says, making changes might not bring an improvement, because any ranking benefit the spammy links gave is lost and can’t be regained.

As a hypothetical, say a site’s clicks started falling on April 1, 2026. The table puts that inside the March 2026 core update (March 27 to April 8), so the core update guidance applies, and under Google’s wait-a-week advice the analysis starts on April 15 at the earliest. And because a spam update ran on March 24 and 25, a clean baseline week is one that ends before March 24.

The November 2026 core update is at step 2. Until Google posts completion, export a baseline from Search Console and hold off on reactive changes. The four posts linked under the table go through the core and spam versions of this check in more detail.

If rankings held and clicks still fell, look at what changed on the results page too. Our post on what AI Mode did to organic traffic covers that case.

Frequently asked questions about Google’s updates

What is the latest Google algorithm update?

The November 2026 core update. Google released it on November 10, 2026, at 10:06 a.m. Pacific, said it applies globally and to all languages, and estimated up to two weeks to complete. As of November 11, 2026, it was still rolling out.

How many Google updates were there in 2025 and 2026?

Google’s dashboard lists four in 2025 (three core updates and one spam update) and eight in 2026 through November 11 (three core updates, four spam updates, and one Discover update). The count covers announced updates only.

How long does a Google core update take to roll out?

The five core updates completed since March 2025 took between 11 days, 21 hours and 18 days, 1 hour, 35 minutes, with a median of 13 days, 20 hours, 35 minutes. Google estimated up to two or three weeks for each, and all five finished inside the estimate.

How long does a Google spam update take?

It varies widely. The five completed since August 2025 ran from 19 hours, 30 minutes to 26 days, 15 hours, with a median of 2 days, 16 hours, 22 minutes. Three of the five finished in under three days.

What is the difference between a core update and a spam update?

A core update is a broad change to Google’s ranking systems that doesn’t target specific sites or pages, and Google says it makes significant ones several times a year. A spam update is an improvement to Google’s automated spam detection, such as its SpamBrain system. After a spam update, Google’s advice to affected sites is to review its spam policies.

How we checked this

The list comes from the Ranking history page of Google’s Search Status Dashboard, read on November 11, 2026. Start and end times for the nine most recent updates were taken from the dashboard’s JSON feed, fetched the same day. The three earliest 2025 updates are no longer in that feed, so their times come from their incident pages, converted from Pacific Daylight Time to UTC before any arithmetic.

From those timestamps we calculated each rollout’s length (end minus start), the gaps between updates (start to start, and end to next start), and each rollout as a share of Google’s stated ceiling where the estimate was a number of weeks.

The guidance in the checking section is paraphrased from Google’s core updates, spam updates, and traffic-drop documentation, each showing a last-updated date of December 10, 2025.

This page doesn’t use third-party volatility trackers, doesn’t cover changes Google didn’t announce, and doesn’t measure how large any update’s effect was.

When this page changes

The next edit comes when Google marks the November 2026 core update complete, or sooner if another update is posted first. The table, the averages, and the last-verified date at the top change together.

If you want a second pair of eyes on a drop that lines up with one of these dates, start with our SEO service.