Google Search Ranking Volatility Heats Up April 22 Through 23 (2025)

Apr 24, 2025 - 7:55 am 37 — by Barry Schwartz

Over the past few days, I've noticed signs of increased Google Search ranking volatility. I held off reporting on it until now because I wanted to see how things settled, but it does seem like Google is testing ranking algorithm updates, on and off, over the past few days.

The last time we covered a Google ranking update was unofficially around April 16th and then before that around April 9th. We have yet to have second official update in 2025, we had the March 2025 core update but no other official update in 2025 - yet.

Today seemed to calm down but the previous couple of days seemed heated.

Google Tracking Tools

Here are what the tools are showing, notice how many are showing volatility spikes up starting April 21st and 22nd and continue throughout the 23rd:

Semrush:

Advanced Web Rankings:

SimilarWeb:

Mozcast:

Cognitive SEO:

Accuranker:

Wincher:

Algoroo:

Mangools:

Sistrix:

Data For SEO:

SERPstat:

Wiredboard's Aggregator of Tools - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:

SEO Chatter

Here is some of the SEO chatter from WebmasterWorld and from this site over the past few days. I should note, WebmasterWorld is deploying some security stuff which is giving me a hard time seeing posts here and there, and I suspect causing issues for people posting.

Anywhere, here is what I am seeing:

Another 25% drop to start this week. Wow!

Huge drop today...USA is -40% at noon. Search is -24% at noon. This is not a holiday in the USA but are people taking the day off after Easter? The stock market is tanking today too...

My news site has had record numbers every day since Friday thanks to constant traffic via Discover (this will certainly be over again tomorrow). The store also has a lot of visitors, but no sales, which is getting really weird. Other store owners have experienced the same thing since Friday. Well, the Easter business is completely ruined. Thank you, Google.

This month has been horrendous. Book sales, zero. Paid memberships, low. Adsense, lowest ever for April. Guest posts, normal. Most page 1 results, gone. It’s a brave new world.

Today -50%. It is not google serps anymore its google spam.

Another wave of SERP volatility seems to be on the way. My project usually sees a spike in traffic during these periods, along with increased sales and ad revenue - though it tends to drop again after these smaller updates settle.

Seen the same. I commented on here that i had seen drops again as per the March update (5 days ago), that got reversed a couple of days later. Those same negative results have returned again. Fingers crossed its not permanent.

Came here to say the same. something is going on. traffic is 50% what it usually is.

Something happened. Analytics show 90 percent down online users.

What's up with traffic? I thought perhaps it was the Easter holiday, but my USA traffic is still crap today. It's -44% this morning. Certain search terms have been blitzed and traffic is down to those pages by half. I ws demoted for one from #2-#4 to #10-#14 for no reason and never recovered. Yesterday and Monday search was also down on the day about 8%, while direct traffic was down even more...

Same here in USA. This morning my traffic is about half of what it was yesterday with no changes in my rankings. My Adsense traffic has plummeted too. This is very strange.

Seeing the same thing, big drop in traffic today.

And another big drop since yesterday evening. Meanwhile, there are more and more complaints on Reddit about how bad Google has become.Normal users seem to catch up with these bad serps and the annoying ads all over the place.

I should add, there was GA4 real time issues yesterday.

Are you noticing big movement over the past few days?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.