The Google Update Calendar

Google ran a confirmed ranking update on 518 of the 1,765 days between 1 January 2022 and 31 October 2026. That is 29.3% of all days, or close to three days in every ten.

Below is every confirmed update Google announced between 3 November 2021 and 8 October 2026, with start date, end date, category and rollout length. Free to use with attribution. JSON and CSV are linked at the bottom.

Every update on one timeline

Each bar is one update, from its announced start to its announced completion. Hover any bar for the name and dates.

Google update statistics at a glance

The numbers writers and analysts ask for most, each worked out from the dataset on this page. Quote any of them with a link back here. Rollout lengths count every calendar day from the announced start to the announced completion.

Rollout length by update type

The remaining four entries are one Discover update, one page experience update and two ranking issues Google acknowledged on its dashboard. Spam updates vary the most: four of the eleven ran two weeks or more, while all three completed in 2026 finished within three days.

Related first-party data: our seven-site Search Console study of AI Overviews and click-through. To check one date against every rollout window, use the Google update matcher.

What the data shows

"It was probably an algorithm update" is not a diagnosis. With something running 29.3% of the time, any given traffic drop has a good chance of overlapping an update by coincidence. The useful question is not whether an update was running, but whether your drop starts on the same day one did.

Rollouts are long and uneven. The median update took 15 days to finish. The shortest was 1 day (March 2026 spam update) and the longest ran 46 days (March 2024 core update). A site can fall in week one of a rollout and partly recover by week four without anyone touching it.

The quiet periods are where self-inflicted problems hide. There were 32 stretches with no confirmed update running, a median of 38 days each and a longest of 118 days. A drop that begins inside one of those windows was almost certainly caused by something on the site, not by Google.

Core updates are far apart, which sets the recovery clock. Across the 16 core updates here, the gap from the end of one to the start of the next ranged from 8 to 176 days, median 95. A site fixed the day after a core update finishes generally waits for the next one before the fix shows. That is the real reason recovery feels slow, and it is covered in more depth in how long Google recovery actually takes.

Updates announced per year

Counted by announced start date. 2021 and 2026 are partial years within the dataset's coverage.

The full dataset

Method and sources

Every row comes from Google's own announcements: the Google Search Status Dashboard and Google Search Central. Nothing here is inferred from third-party rank trackers or from volatility sensors, and no unconfirmed or speculative update is included. That is deliberate. An unconfirmed update cannot be used as evidence.

Start and end dates are the announced beginning and announced completion of each rollout. Rollout length counts both endpoints, so a one-day rollout reads as 1.

The 29.3% figure is computed over 1 January 2022 to 31 October 2026, a span of 1,765 days, counting each calendar day once even when two updates overlapped. The dataset itself begins on 3 November 2021, slightly before that window, so the first two months are excluded from the percentage to keep it to whole years plus the current one.

Dataset last verified 15 October 2026. Coverage runs to 8 October 2026. If Google has announced an update since then, this page has not caught up yet.

Download the data

Free to use with attribution, including commercially.

JSON CSV

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Questions

How often does Google run a ranking update? A confirmed update was running on 518 of 1,765 days between January 2022 and October 2026, which is 29.3% of them. The median quiet stretch was 38 days.

How long does a rollout take? Median 15 days across 42 updates, from 1 day at the fastest to 46 days at the slowest.

Why are unconfirmed updates missing? Because they cannot be used as evidence. Third-party volatility sensors disagree with each other and with Google, and a client decision should not rest on one.

My traffic fell during a spam update. What now? Confirm the date first, then look for the part of the site that breaks a spam policy. Better content will not clear it. The steps are in our spam update recovery guide. If Search Console shows a manual action instead, that is a different job: see manual action recovery. If the spam pages were injected by someone else, it is hacked site recovery.

Is the helpful content update still a separate update? No. The last one listed here is September 2023. Since March 2024 the same assessment runs inside core updates, which changes how you recover: see helpful content update recovery.

Can I use this commercially? Yes, with attribution and a link back to this page.