What Happened
The March 2026 Google core update drove significantly higher ranking volatility than the December 2025 core update, according to SE Ranking data shared exclusively with Search Engine Land. Nearly 80% of top-three results shifted position, and almost one in four top-10 pages fell out of the top 100 entirely.
The data paints a clear picture: Google is raising the bar for what ranks, and intermediaries are paying the price.
Key Takeaways
- 79.5% of top-3 URLs changed positions — up from 66.8% in December. In the top 10, 90.7% shifted compared to 83.1%.
- Stability cratered. Only 20.5% of top-3 URLs held their exact position (down from 33.1%). In the top 10, that dropped to 9.3% from 16.9%.
- Churn intensified. 24.1% of pages ranking in the top 10 fell out of the top 100 entirely — versus 14.7% after December.
- Winners: official sites, established brands, specialist platforms, and dominant platforms. Government domains like Census.gov and BLS.gov gained on fact-driven queries. Employer sites like USAJobs and Amazon.jobs surged while job aggregators like ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor lost ground.
- Losers: aggregators, directories, and comparison-driven sites. Broad consumer health sites declined while clinical and research-driven sources gained. Travel and real estate visibility shifted away from discovery platforms toward primary brands.
- One exception: YouTube had the largest visibility loss in the dataset analyzed by Aleyda Solis using Sistrix data.
The ONmetrics Take
This isn't incremental. When nearly four out of five top-3 results move, that's a fundamental shift in what Google considers authoritative.
What this means for London, Ontario businesses:
1. Brand authority now matters more than content volume. Google is rewarding owned data, direct query value, and established presence over intermediary coverage. If your SEO strategy relies on thin aggregator-style pages, it's exposed.
2. Wait 2-3 weeks before making changes. Core updates roll out over 1-2 weeks and rankings stabilize after. Check your analytics first — look for actual traffic and conversion impact, not just ranking movement. Reactive changes mid-rollout often make things worse.
3. Audit what gained and lost. If you saw volatility, compare your pages against the winners and losers patterns above. Did you gain because you're a specialist? Did you lose because you look like an aggregator? That tells you what to fix.
4. Local businesses have an advantage here. The "official and institutional" bias favors businesses with real local presence, physical addresses, and genuine expertise over thin directory listings. Your Google Business Profile, localized content, and structured data just became more valuable.
We're monitoring this update for all clients. If your traffic shifted, reach out — we'll run a full impact assessment.