March 2026 Google Core Update

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that the March 2026 Google Core Algorithm update was as one of the most impactful Google updates in recent years.

Across the board, 80% of all top 3 results shifted with aggregator sites being the hardest hit, as well as sites publishing “best of” style content which was being used to game both AIOs + LLMs. The biggest winners from the March 2026 Core update were brands and sources credited with publishing original content. Sites publishing low-quality, programmatic content were once again hit hard with many sites using scaled content seeing >90% drops in traffic.

The March 2026 update came hot on the heels of the March Spam update which was announced on the 24^th of March and wrapped up just 19h30m later on the 25^th March.

The update was announced through the Google Search Central LinkedIn account:

“Today we released the March 2026 core update to Google Search.

This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.

We’ll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete.”

The update was also confirmed on the Google Search Status Dashboard where it was confirmed that the updated started on 27 March 2026 at 02:14PDT with the following description:

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that the March 2026 Google Core Algorithm update was as one of the most impactful Google updates in recent years. Across the board, 80% of all top 3 results shifted with aggregator sites being the hardest hit, as well as sites publishing “best of” style content which was being used to game both AIOs + LLMs.

The biggest winners from the March 2026 Core update were brands and sources credited with publishing original content. Sites publishing low-quality, programmatic content were once again hit hard with many sites using scaled content seeing >90% drops in traffic.

We originally predicted that the March Core update would be relatively mild given we had just had the March Spam update, however, we were proven wrong.

• 80% of top 3 rankings changed
• 90% of pages ranking in the top 10 changed during the rollout
• Niche publishers gained ground as Google looked to reward those with speciality knowledge
• Aggregator sites and “listicles” lost a lot of ground

As mentioned, the March Core update came hot on the heels of the March 2026 Spam update. Interestingly, when compared to the August 2025 Spam update, the March spam update was incredibly sedate.

Having been witness to Google updates for years now, the best correlation that we can draw is that we tend to see a mild update followed by a very bumpy one – which is exactly what we saw here. The March 2026 Core Update was extremely disruptive with 90.7% of top-10 results shifting throughout the update with only 20.5% of top-3 URLs holding their spot from before the update. According to recap data, 24.1% of previously top-10 pages fell out of the top 100 entirely – which is quite staggering. It means that almost a quarter of sites that were on page one before the March 2026 update were not even in the top 100 by the end of it.