— Timeline

Google algorithm updates, 2011–2026: the complete timeline

From Panda to AI Overviews: the updates that changed how Google ranks websites, all 40 it has confirmed since 2021 with their dates and rollout times, and what to do when one hits your site.

By Level UI15 min read

Google changes its search results all the time, and almost none of those changes are noticed. A few a year get a name, a start date and an entry on Google’s Search Status Dashboard, and those are the ones that move traffic for whole industries at once. This timeline covers the updates that shaped how Google ranks websites, from Panda in 2011 to the spam update that finished on 7 October 2026, and lists all 40 named ranking updates Google has confirmed since November 2021, with how long each one took to roll out. Select an era below for what changed, what it means for your site and the milestones inside it. The dates come from Google’s own announcements and its status dashboard, read on 10 October 2026.

Fifteen years of Google ranking updates, era by era

Each row is one line of change, drawn from its first milestone to its latest. Select one to see what changed, what it means for a website today and the dated milestones inside it.

2011–2016

Panda and Penguin: thin content and bought links

The two updates that ended the cheapest tricks of the 2000s. Panda went after sites built from thin, copied or mass-produced pages; Penguin went after rankings bought with links. Both started as separate filters that ran every few months, and both ended up inside Google’s core ranking systems.

What changed

  • February 2011: Panda launched in the US to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, and Google said it affected 11.8% of queries.
  • April 2012: Penguin targeted sites that broke Google’s guidelines, link schemes above all, affecting about 3.1% of English queries.
  • Panda became part of the core ranking systems in 2015. Penguin followed in September 2016, when Google said it now ran in real time.

What it means for your site

  • Pages that exist only to rank, with nothing of their own to say, are still the first thing a quality change finds.
  • Since 2016, links Google judges to be spam are mostly ignored rather than punished, so money spent on them simply buys nothing.

Milestones

  • Feb 2011Panda launches, affecting 11.8% of US queries
  • Apr 2012Penguin launches against link schemes
  • Sept 2016Penguin joins the core algorithm and runs in real time

Dates are from Google’s announcements, its ranking systems guide and the Search Status Dashboard. RankBrain’s date is Bloomberg’s report, the first public description of it.

Every named Google ranking update since November 2021

UpdateTypeStartedFinishedDays
September 2026 spam updateSpam24 Sept 20267 Oct 202613
August 2026 spam updateSpam18 Aug 202620 Aug 20262
June 2026 spam updateSpam24 Jun 202626 Jun 20262
May 2026 core updateCore21 May 20261 Jun 202611
March 2026 core updateCore27 Mar 20268 Apr 202612
March 2026 spam updateSpam24 Mar 202625 Mar 20261
February 2026 Discover updateDiscover5 Feb 202626 Feb 202621
December 2025 core updateCore11 Dec 202529 Dec 202518
August 2025 spam updateSpam26 Aug 202521 Sept 202526
June 2025 core updateCore30 Jun 202516 Jul 202516
March 2025 core updateCore13 Mar 202526 Mar 202513
December 2024 spam updateSpam19 Dec 202426 Dec 20247
December 2024 core updateCore12 Dec 202418 Dec 20246
November 2024 core updateCore11 Nov 20244 Dec 202423
August 2024 core updateCore15 Aug 20243 Sept 202419
June 2024 spam updateSpam20 Jun 202427 Jun 20247
March 2024 spam updateSpam5 Mar 202419 Mar 202414
March 2024 core updateCore5 Mar 202419 Apr 202445
November 2023 reviews updateReviews8 Nov 20237 Dec 202329
November 2023 core updateCore2 Nov 202327 Nov 202325
October 2023 core updateCore5 Oct 202318 Oct 202313
October 2023 spam updateSpam4 Oct 202319 Oct 202315
September 2023 helpful content updateHelpful content14 Sept 202327 Sept 202313
August 2023 core updateCore22 Aug 20237 Sept 202316
April 2023 reviews updateReviews12 Apr 202325 Apr 202313
March 2023 core updateCore15 Mar 202328 Mar 202313
February 2023 product reviews updateReviews21 Feb 20237 Mar 202314
December 2022 link spam updateSpam14 Dec 202212 Jan 202329
December 2022 helpful content updateHelpful content5 Dec 202212 Jan 202338
October 2022 spam updateSpam19 Oct 202221 Oct 20222
September 2022 product reviews updateReviews20 Sept 202226 Sept 20226
September 2022 core updateCore12 Sept 202226 Sept 202214
August 2022 helpful content updateHelpful content25 Aug 20229 Sept 202215
July 2022 product reviews updateReviews27 Jul 20222 Aug 20226
May 2022 core updateCore25 May 20229 Jun 202215
March 2022 product reviews updateReviews23 Mar 20226 Apr 202214
Page experience update for desktopPage experience22 Feb 20223 Mar 20229
December 2021 product reviews updateReviews1 Dec 202121 Dec 202120
November 2021 core updateCore17 Nov 202130 Nov 202113
November 2021 spam updateSpam3 Nov 202111 Nov 20218

From Google’s Search Status Dashboard, ranking history, read on 10 October 2026, newest first. The dashboard gives a start date and a duration; the finish date adds the two, rounded to whole days. Two "ranking is experiencing an ongoing issue" incidents, in October 2023 and August 2024, are left out because they were faults, not updates.

What counts as a Google algorithm update

Google’s ranking systems change constantly, and almost every change is too small for anyone to notice. The ones that get a name are the broad changes: core updates, which adjust the main ranking systems as a whole; spam updates, which improve Google’s automated spam detection; and, until they were folded into the core, separate systems for reviews and helpful content. Google lists each of them on its Search Status Dashboard, with a start date and how long it took to roll out.

Since November 2021 that dashboard has recorded 40 named ranking updates: 16 core updates, 12 spam updates, 7 reviews updates, 3 helpful content updates, one page experience update and one update for Discover. That is about eight a year, one every six or seven weeks, which is why a traffic change almost always lands near some update, and why a date on its own proves nothing.

Panda and Penguin: the end of cheap rankings (2011–2016)

Before 2011 a site could rank with pages that said very little, as long as it had a lot of them and enough links pointing at them. Panda, launched in February 2011, went after the first half of that: Google designed it to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, and it affected 11.8% of US queries. Penguin, in April 2012, went after the second half, demoting sites that used link schemes to inflate their rankings.

Both still shape Google today, just not as separate updates: Panda joined the core ranking systems in 2015 and Penguin in 2016. Since Penguin went real-time, links that Google judges to be spam are mostly ignored rather than punished, so paid links usually fail quietly instead of causing a visible penalty. What that means for a budget is in our guide to what backlinks cost.

From keywords to meaning (2013–2019)

Hummingbird in 2013, RankBrain in 2015 and BERT in 2019 were not penalties for anyone. They changed how Google reads a query, from matching words to understanding what the searcher means. BERT alone affected one in ten English searches in the US when it launched, and Google called it one of the biggest leaps in the history of Search.

The practical effect was to make keyword repetition worthless and clarity valuable. A page that answers a question in plain language can now rank for dozens of phrasings it never uses, while five near-identical pages written for five spellings of one phrase end up competing with each other. It is the same reason schema markup helps Google understand a page but does not make it rank on its own.

HTTPS, mobile and speed (2014–2022)

From 2014, how a page is delivered started to count. HTTPS became a ranking signal in August 2014 and mobile-friendliness in April 2015; mobile-first indexing began in March 2018, page speed became a factor for mobile searches in July 2018, and the page experience update brought Core Web Vitals into ranking in 2021 on mobile and in 2022 on desktop.

Each of these signals is light. At launch Google said HTTPS affected fewer than 1% of queries, and it has always said that great content comes before a better page experience. Speed matters most between pages that are otherwise equal, and it matters to your visitors far more than to your rankings. What to measure, and what a pass looks like, is in our guide to Core Web Vitals.

Core updates: what they are and how long they take

A core update is a broad change to the systems that rank everything. It does not target a type of site or a tactic, which is why one can move a site up or down without the site having done anything new. On the dashboard, the 16 core updates since November 2021 took about two weeks each to roll out at the median, from 6 days in December 2024 to 45 days in March 2024, and arrived about three and a half months apart.

A drop during a core update is not a penalty, and there is no specific fix to make. Google’s own guidance is that pages which do worse in a core update have not broken any rule; other pages were judged more useful. Recovery comes from making the content better, and it can take months to show, sometimes not until the next core update.

Reviews and helpful content (2021–2024)

Between December 2021 and November 2023 Google ran seven reviews updates and three helpful content updates against content written to rank rather than to help: reviews with nothing original in them, and articles that rephrase what other sites already say. The helpful content system was unusual because it judged a site as a whole, so enough unhelpful pages could hold back the good ones.

In March 2024 helpful content became part of the core ranking systems. It no longer arrives as a separate update, but the standard did not go away. Pages that show first-hand knowledge, original numbers and who wrote them are what those updates rewarded, and they are what core updates reward now.

Spam updates and the 2024 spam policies

Spam updates improve SpamBrain, Google’s machine-learning spam detection. They are shorter than core updates, about a week at the median, and they have become more frequent: four of the 12 since November 2021 came in 2026. The December 2022 link spam update taught SpamBrain to find both the sites buying links and the sites selling them.

Since March 2024, publishing pages at scale mainly to rank is spam, whether a person, a template or an AI wrote them. Google’s new policies that month named scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and site reputation abuse, and Google said its March 2024 changes would cut low-quality, unoriginal content in results by 40%. On 30 August 2026, after discussions with the European Commission, Google changed how site reputation manual actions apply to searchers in the European Economic Area.

AI Overviews and AI Mode (2024–2026)

The change with the largest effect on clicks in this period was not a ranking update. AI Overviews, launched in the US in May 2024, put an AI-written answer above the results, and AI Mode, open to everyone in the US since May 2025, turned search into a conversation. A page can keep its position and still lose visits to the answer above it, which is why some informational traffic has fallen in step with the AI rollout rather than with any update. How to split a budget between the two is in GEO vs SEO: where your budget should go.

The pages AI Overviews cite are changing too. In July 2025 Ahrefs found 76% of their citations came from pages in Google’s top 10; after AI Overviews moved to Gemini 3 in January 2026, the same analysis found 38%. Google says there is nothing special to add to appear in them: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. How long it takes before AI tools cite a new page is in how long until AI cites you.

What to do when an update hits your site

Check the dates before you change anything. Put the start and finish of each update next to your clicks in Search Console, and compare the week after it finished with the week before it started. If the drop began on the day you launched a redesign, moved URLs or changed templates, the update is probably a coincidence; our timeline of traffic after a redesign shows what a normal post-launch dip looks like.

If the drop does match an update, look at which pages lost rather than at the site as a whole, and ask the question the update asked: is this page the most useful answer to the query? Then improve the page, rather than chasing a signal. If you would rather have someone look at it with you, our SEO work starts from exactly that diagnosis, and a Technical Audit rules out the technical causes first.

Sources and method

The list of updates since November 2021 is Google’s Search Status Dashboard, read on 10 October 2026; counts, medians and gaps were calculated from it. Earlier dates are from Google’s own announcements and its guide to ranking systems.

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