The May 2026 Core Update started rolling out on May 21 and is still mid-rollout as of today. If your rankings have been moving up or down unpredictably this week, this is the direct cause. What’s interesting is that the sites holding their positions — and in some cases gaining — share a clear pattern in their technical setup that is worth understanding before this update finishes.
The Update Is Hitting Unstructured Pages Hard
This is the second broad core algorithm update of 2026, and it arrives after weeks of visible ranking volatility that led many SEO professionals to suspect changes were already underway before the formal announcement. Sites reporting the biggest drops share a common characteristic: pages that are informational but light on structured signals.
No schema markup, no clear author attribution, no obvious signals of expertise or authority. Pages with FAQ schema, Article schema, and Review schema are holding better because Google’s systems can understand and categorise them more accurately during a turbulent rollout period. Structured data is not a magic fix, but it is one of the clearest signals you can give Google about what your page is and who it is for.
What to Do Right Now — And What to Avoid
The worst thing you can do during an active rollout is start deleting pages, rewriting content in bulk, or making major changes to your site architecture based on a few days of fluctuating data. Rankings will continue to move for the next week at minimum. Wait until the rollout is confirmed complete before making any big structural decisions.
Use this time productively instead — audit which of your most important pages have schema implemented and which don’t, run them through Google’s Rich Results Test, fix any errors you find, and prioritise adding FAQ schema and Article schema to your highest-value URLs. That is productive work you can do right now without risking anything.
Schema is not a silver bullet, but in a core update focused on surfacing relevant and satisfying content, it matters more than usual.
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