Google has announced a May 2026 core update, confirming it began rolling out on 21 May and could take up to two weeks to complete. It is the second core update of the year, following the March 2026 core update and a separate March spam update.
There is plenty of industry commentary circulating, so rather than simply report the news, here is what we think is worth paying attention to.
1. It Landed Right After Google I/O
Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference, held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. It covers everything from the Android OS and Pixel hardware to, most relevantly for us, what is coming down the track for Search. This year’s event gave us a clear picture of the direction Google is heading, and the timing of this core update alongside it is no coincidence.
Intelligent Search Box
For the first time in 25 years, Google has upgraded the search box itself. It now responds dynamically to queries, presenting an adaptive interface as it leans more heavily on its Gemini 3.5 model in an “agentic” capacity. It has been built to handle complex, multi-part queries and to act on a user’s behalf: booking flights, comparing products or services, that kind of thing.
That is the front end. The back end, affected directly by this core update, is what feeds that interface. Providing a new way to search requires corresponding changes to how sites are crawled, indexed, and evaluated by Google’s AI-powered systems.
Generative UI and Dynamic Layouts
The days of ten blue links are long gone, but what is replacing them is evolving fast. Google has confirmed it can now build tables, charts, and whatever layout best serves a given query, rendered directly within the search interface.
For that to work on the fly, Google will only pull in websites that are fast, well-structured, and technically sound. Schema markup, Core Web Vitals, and accessibility are all likely to be factors here. If your site is not already performing well on these measures, this update is a prompt to address that.
The Universal Cart
Google also announced a Universal Cart feature, which matters most to e-commerce businesses. With agentic search increasingly handling the shopping journey end to end, vendors need to meet a higher bar. As we have seen across search generally, trust signals and technical quality become the entry ticket. We will be watching this space closely and will share more as we understand the implications for our e-commerce clients.
2. Official AI Optimisation Guidance
The week before Google I/O, Google published its first-ever official guidance on AI optimisation, and it raised a few eyebrows across the industry. In summary, Google stated the following practices are unnecessary:
- LLMs.txt: they say it is not needed for Google Search.
- Chunking: structuring copy specifically to be digested by AI systems.
- Rewriting content for AI: reworking existing pages with AI synthesis in mind.
- Inauthentic mentions: seeking unnatural links or brand mentions, which has always been against guidelines.
- Overemphasis on structured data: do not over-invest in schema markup purely for AI visibility.
Google also put a line through GEO and AEO as distinct disciplines: their position is that it is all still SEO.
Our take: solid, well-executed SEO remains the foundation of everything we do for clients, and these guidelines are broadly consistent with that. That said, we would not dismiss every item on that list outright. Google can, and sometimes does, operate differently from what it publicly recommends. The well-documented leak of a couple of years back was instructive on that point.
LLMs.txt may not be relevant to Google, but it could be useful for other AI systems such as Claude. Chunking, if you strip away the jargon, is really just good copywriting – appropriately concise sentences and paragraphs. And structured data, despite Google deprecating FAQ schema for most websites recently, still sends meaningful signals across the semantic web. We will continue using it where it is warranted.
What to Expect From This Update
Core updates of this nature typically produce noticeable movement across rankings over the two-week rollout window. Winners and losers will emerge, and the patterns will inform the next phase of SEO strategy.
The clearer picture coming into focus is one where quality, trust, technical performance, and genuine expertise determine visibility, both in traditional results and in the new AI-driven formats.
If you would like to talk through what this update means for your website, or if you have noticed any movement in your rankings already, get in touch with the team at 22i.
