Google algorithm updates: what each year actually changed

Google changes its ranking systems constantly, and confirms only a fraction of those changes as named updates. This page collects what each year brought, what turned out to matter afterwards, and how to work out whether a drop in your own traffic has anything to do with an update at all.

Before you blame an update

Most reported "update hits" are something else: a tracking change, a seasonal dip, a server problem, a robots rule, or a comparison between date ranges of different lengths. Check the confirmed rollout dates on Google's Search Status Dashboard, then compare like-for-like periods in Search Console and look at which page groups moved rather than the site total. If the loss is spread evenly across every page and started on a Monday, it is rarely an update. The recovery playbook sets out that diagnosis step by step.

Year by year

• 2020 — core updates through the year, alongside a shift in how people searched during the pandemic. The 2020 core updates and what they taught and how search behaviour changed.
• 2021 — page experience, passage ranking and MUM. A year of change and MUM and passage ranking.
• 2022 — the helpful content system and product reviews. Decoding 2022 and the helpful content update.
• 2023 — core and spam updates, and the first generative results. Navigating 2023 and generative AI in search.
• 2024 — a heavy year of core changes and spam enforcement. 2024 in review.
• 2025 — continued consolidation and AI-influenced results. Lessons from 2025.
• 2026 — the May core update and June spam update, and AI Overviews reshaping clicks. The July 2026 playbook and what to do about AI search.

What has held up across all of it

Strip out the names and the pattern is consistent. Pages that answer a real question, written by someone who has done the work, on a site that is technically sound and honest about what it is, recover from updates and usually gain from them. Pages built to occupy a keyword do not. Nothing in the last six years has reversed that, and the arrival of AI-generated answers has if anything sharpened it: being the source worth citing is the only durable position.

If your own traffic has moved and you want a second opinion on why, an audit will tell you whether it was an update, the site, or the measurement.