Google's May Core Update Pushed Forums to the Top. Here's Your Move.

If your Google rankings moved around over the last few weeks, you were not imagining it. On its Search Status Dashboard, Google confirmed that the May 2026 core update finished rolling out on 2 June 2026, after starting on 21 May. A core update is one of the broad, periodic changes Google makes to how it ranks every page on the web. It is not a penalty aimed at anyone, just a re-weighting of what Google decides to show first.

This one had a clear winner, and it was not small business websites. Reddit and other community forums climbed across almost every topic. According to an analysis by the SEO platform SE Ranking, reported by Search Engine Journal on 9 June 2026, Reddit expanded its top-three presence across all twenty categories the study tracked, and took the number one spot for 13,872 keywords, a 54 percent jump on March.

If you sell to Australians and rely on Google to be found, that shift is worth understanding, because it tells you exactly what Google is rewarding right now, and what to do about it.

What the numbers actually say

SE Ranking tracked 100,000 keywords through three core updates. After May, Reddit's share of top-three results rose to 10.24 percent, up from 8.56 percent in March. The gains were not even across the board. The biggest movers were pets, education, sport and exercise, and e-commerce, each gaining around three percentage points.

The categories that barely moved were the YMYL ones. YMYL is short for Your Money or Your Life: the health, finance, and legal topics where Google is most cautious about who it trusts. The pattern is hard to miss. Where a buyer wants lived experience, Google leaned harder on forums. Where a wrong answer could hurt someone, it did not.

Why Google is doing this

Google has spent years saying it wants to reward what it calls helpful content written by people with real, first-hand experience. Forums are full of exactly that: messy, specific, honest accounts from people who bought the thing, fixed the problem, or made the mistake. After a run of complaints that search had become a sea of samey, AI-spun articles, leaning on community discussion is Google's way of putting human experience back near the top.

The lesson of this update is not that you should go and post on Reddit. It is that Google is now openly rewarding first-hand experience, and most small businesses have far more of it than they ever put online.

That is the opportunity hiding in the bad news. A plumber, a florist, or a bookkeeper has years of real answers to real customer questions. Most of that knowledge never makes it onto a page, while a forum thread of strangers guessing at the same question ranks above you.

What to do about it

You cannot out-Reddit Reddit, and you should not try to game it with fake posts. That is against the rules and it gets found out. The durable move is to make your own content unmistakably first-hand, and to be genuinely present where your customers already talk.

• Rewrite your most important pages in the first person, with specifics only you would know: the exact question customers ask, what you tell them, the mistakes you see, the real numbers. Generic advice is what just got demoted.
• Add proof of real experience: your name, your photo, your qualifications, dated case studies, and honest before-and-afters. This is what Google calls experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and it is now doing real work.
• Be helpful where your customers actually gather, whether that is a local Facebook group, an industry forum, or Reddit. Answer as a real, named person, not as an ad. Useful presence earns the mentions Google and AI tools increasingly read.
• Stop publishing thin, AI-spun articles that say nothing a hundred other pages do not. After this update they are more likely to drag your site down than lift it.
• Do not panic-rebuild. Core updates settle over weeks and Google often refines them. Check your Search Console traffic, note which pages slipped, and fix those first.

The honest read on the May update is that Google is filtering for realness. The businesses that lost ground were mostly the ones whose pages could have been written by anyone, or by a machine. The ones that will recover are those that sound like a person who knows their trade. That is good news if you actually run the business, because the raw material is already in your head.

This is the work we do at NextAura. We dig the real expertise out of your business, turn it into pages that read as genuinely first-hand, and build the kind of presence that core updates and AI search now reward, so you are not left guessing every time Google changes the rules. If you would rather hand the optimising and the chasing to a team that tracks these updates daily, get in touch and we will take it from here while you get back to running the business.