May 22, 2026 • Search Engine Journal
Google is reshaping search on two fronts at once. According to Search Engine Journal, the company began rolling out its May 2026 Core Update — the second core update of the year — while using its I/O event to redesign Search around AI, publish its first AI Mode usage data, and send mixed signals on the proposed llms.txt standard. Taken together, the moves point to a search experience that is being rebuilt around AI, even as the classic ranking system keeps shifting under site owners' feet.
Key takeaways
- Google began rolling out its May 2026 Core Update, the second core update of the year, expected to take up to two weeks with meaningful ranking movement.
- After 25 years, the Search box was redesigned around AI, adding multimodal input meant to handle richer, more complex queries.
- Google released its first usage data for AI Mode, reporting strong engagement growth and a shift toward longer, more conversational searches.
The core update
The headline event is a familiar one for anyone who tracks Google: a broad core update. Search Engine Journal reports that Google started rolling out its May 2026 Core Update, the second such update this year, with a rollout window expected to run up to two weeks. Core updates are not penalties aimed at specific sites; they are broad recalibrations of how Google assesses relevance and quality across the web. That is why rankings can rise or fall during the rollout without a site changing anything, and why the fundamentals of technical SEO and content quality matter more than any quick fix.
Alongside the ranking changes, Google used its I/O event to reframe what search looks like. The Search box — largely unchanged for 25 years — was redesigned around AI, with multimodal input that lets people combine text, images, and other formats in a single query. The intent is to handle longer, more complex questions directly in the interface rather than sending people off to sift through ten blue links.
AI Mode moves from experiment to data
For the first time, Google shared usage data for AI Mode, its conversational search experience. According to Search Engine Journal, the data points to substantial growth in engagement and a clear shift in the kinds of queries people bring to it: longer, more conversational, and closer to how someone would describe a problem out loud than to the clipped keywords search trained us to type. That shift matters because it changes what "ranking" even means. When an AI answer summarizes several sources, being one of the pages that informs that answer is a different game than holding a blue-link position — the ground ONmetrics covers when helping businesses with AI-search visibility alongside traditional rankings.
Mixed signals on llms.txt
Google also sent mixed signals on llms.txt, a proposed file some in the industry have floated as a way to tell AI systems how to use a site's content — a rough parallel to what robots.txt does for crawlers. Google's non-committal stance leaves the standard unsettled, so site owners should treat llms.txt as an open question rather than a required task for now, and avoid building strategy around a format Google has not endorsed.
What it means for small businesses
For small and local businesses, the combined message is straightforward: search is being rebuilt around AI, and the fundamentals still decide who benefits. A core update rewards content that genuinely helps the reader and demonstrates real expertise, and those are the same signals that make a page useful to an AI answer. If your visibility dips during the rollout, the fix is rarely a quick trick — it is closing the gap between what your pages claim and what they actually prove. And as more queries move into AI Mode, being clear, structured, and credible is what gets your business cited in an answer instead of skipped.
The ONmetrics Take
Every big Google moment tends to arrive as two stories braided together: a ranking shake-up that feels urgent, and a slower change in how search actually works. This is one of those moments — a core update on one hand, a search box rebuilt around AI on the other — and the temptation is to react to the loud half while missing the quiet one.
For London, Ontario businesses, a few things are worth acting on. First, don't react mid-rollout: core updates take up to two weeks to settle, so track your rankings and conversions but hold off on sweeping changes until the dust clears. Second, write for humans and AI at the same time — the content that survives a core update is helpful, specific, and genuinely expert, which is exactly what AI Mode is likely to cite. Third, expect longer, conversational queries and structure your pages to answer real questions in plain language, not just to match short keywords. And leave llms.txt on the shelf for now; Google has not committed to it.
None of this requires chasing every headline. It requires knowing whether a dip is the update, a measurement gap, or a real quality problem — and that is exactly what an honest audit of your rankings, content, and tracking surfaces. Get a free digital marketing audit and we will show you where your rankings and AI-search visibility can be shored up before the next update lands.
Source
Original reporting: Search Engine Journal — "Google Launches Core Update Amid I/O AI Search Overhaul – SEO Pulse." https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-pulse-google-launches-core-update-amid-i-o-ai-search-overhaul/575676/