The February 2026 core update - whenever it arrives - will create winners and losers. Businesses that prepare now position themselves among the winners whilst competitors scramble to recover after rankings drop.
If Google's historical patterns hold true, we're approximately 2-4 weeks away from the next major core algorithm update.
Google typically releases 2-4 broad core updates annually, with recent years showing consistent patterns in timing. The December 2025 core update completed rollout before the holiday period. Based on Google's established rhythm, a February or early March 2026 update appears increasingly likely.
For UK businesses still recovering from December's ranking volatility or those who escaped impact but want to avoid future disruption, understanding what's likely coming and how to prepare provides significant advantage over competitors who'll react only after rankings drop.
Whilst Google never pre-announces core updates with specific dates, analysing recent update patterns, Google's stated quality priorities and emerging algorithm trends allows informed preparation. Sites strengthening quality signals now position themselves well regardless of exact timing, whilst those waiting until announcements confirm updates will implement changes under pressure rather than from strength.
This guide explains what UK businesses should expect from Google's next core update based on established patterns, which site characteristics likely face scrutiny, and practical steps to prepare your website before the update arrives rather than scrambling to recover afterwards.
Understanding Core Update Patterns
Google's core updates follow observable patterns despite the company's reluctance to provide specifics before releases.
Historical Timing Suggests February-March Window
Examining the past three years reveals Google's preference for early-quarter core updates. Major updates frequently arrive in March, with occasional February releases when testing completes ahead of schedule. Mid-winter timing allows Google to roll out changes before spring when many businesses increase marketing activity and seasonal traffic patterns peak.
The December 2025 update completed rollout before Christmas, providing sufficient gap for a February-March follow-up without overwhelming the ecosystem with excessive simultaneous change. Google typically spaces major core updates 2-4 months apart, making late January through early March the most probable window.
What "Core Update" Actually Means
Core updates represent broad, fundamental changes to how Google's algorithms evaluate content quality, relevance and user satisfaction. Unlike targeted updates addressing specific issues like spam or product reviews, core updates re-evaluate ranking criteria across Google's entire index.
These updates don't introduce new ranking factors or penalise previously acceptable practices. Instead, they refine how existing factors are weighted and interpreted. Content that performed well under previous criteria might rank lower if competitor content better satisfies evolved quality standards, whilst previously overlooked quality content may gain visibility as improved algorithms recognise its value.
This distinction matters enormously for response strategies. Core update declines don't indicate you violated guidelines or employed manipulative tactics - they signal other content now better satisfies Google's quality criteria for your target queries.
Rollout Duration and Volatility Patterns
Modern core updates typically roll out over 7-21 days, though Google occasionally extends particularly complex updates beyond three weeks. During rollout, rankings exhibit high volatility as Google's systems progressively re-evaluate content against updated criteria.
Expect dramatic daily ranking swings during the first week of rollout. A page ranking 5th might jump to 2nd, then drop to 12th, before settling at 7th once the update completes. This volatility represents Google's algorithms testing different result compositions whilst progressively implementing the update across their distributed infrastructure.
Rankings typically stabilise within days after rollout completion, though subtle adjustments continue for weeks as algorithms observe user behaviour with the new rankings and make minor refinements.
What Google Will Likely Emphasise
Whilst specific update details remain unknown until Google announces them, recent algorithm evolution and Google's public statements about quality reveal likely focal points.
E-E-A-T Signal Refinement
Google's focus on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness intensified throughout 2025, with the December update demonstrating particularly aggressive evaluation of these signals. The February update will almost certainly continue refining E-E-A-T detection.
Expect increased scrutiny of author credentials, particularly for health, finance, legal and other "Your Money or Your Life" topics. Sites lacking clear author attribution, professional qualifications or demonstrated expertise face potential ranking pressure as Google's algorithms become more sophisticated at identifying genuine expertise versus superficial content.
First-hand experience signals will matter more. Google's algorithms increasingly distinguish between content written by someone who's actually done what they're discussing versus generic advice compiled from other sources. Specific details, original examples and evidence of direct experience separate valuable content from mediocre alternatives.
AI-Generated Content Detection
Google's public position on AI content remains nuanced - AI-generated content isn't inherently problematic, but low-quality content created at scale purely to manipulate rankings violates guidelines regardless of generation method.
The February update may include improved detection of thin, generic AI content lacking originality, depth or genuine value. Sites publishing large volumes of AI-generated content without substantial human review, editing and value addition face potential scrutiny.
This doesn't mean avoiding AI tools entirely - many businesses successfully use AI to assist research, outline creation or initial drafting whilst maintaining human expertise, editing and quality control. The distinction lies in whether final published content demonstrates genuine expertise and provides unique value versus merely rephrasing information readily available elsewhere.
User Experience and Page Experience
Google's integration of Core Web Vitals and page experience signals continues deepening. The February update may increase the weight given to loading performance, interactivity and visual stability as ranking factors.
Sites with poor Core Web Vitals scores - particularly on mobile devices where most UK traffic originates - should prioritise speed optimisation before the update. Whilst page experience alone won't overcome poor content quality, it increasingly serves as differentiator when content quality between competing pages is comparable.
Mobile experience receives particular emphasis. With 70%+ of searches occurring on mobile devices, sites delivering substandard mobile experiences face algorithmic disadvantages that February's update may intensify.
Content Depth and Comprehensiveness
Thin content providing superficial treatment of topics continues losing ground to comprehensive resources that thoroughly address user needs. Google's algorithms increasingly prefer content that fully answers queries without requiring users to search elsewhere for additional information.
The February update will likely continue this trend. Pages offering brief, surface-level coverage struggle against competitors providing detailed, well-researched treatment including examples, data, multiple perspectives and practical application guidance.
This doesn't mean every page needs 3,000 words - appropriateness depends on query intent. Someone searching "capital of France" needs seconds to find their answer. Someone researching "best project management methodology for remote teams" benefits from comprehensive comparison and analysis. Match content depth to query complexity and user expectations.
How Core Updates Interact with Other Ranking Factors
A critical misconception causes businesses to misinterpret core update impacts: these updates don't operate in isolation but interact with Google's 200+ other ranking signals in increasingly sophisticated ways.
When the February 2026 update rolls out, it won't simply re-score your content quality in a vacuum. Instead, it refines how quality signals interact with topical relevance, user behaviour metrics, backlink authority and technical performance. A site with excellent content but poor Core Web Vitals might maintain position if competitors have similar technical issues. However, if even one competitor combines quality content with superior page experience, the updated algorithms may amplify that advantage more aggressively than previous versions.
This creates compounding effects most businesses overlook. Sites strengthening multiple ranking factors simultaneously - E-E-A-T signals plus mobile performance plus comprehensive content - benefit disproportionately compared to isolated improvements. The algorithm increasingly rewards holistic quality rather than single-factor optimisation. Conversely, sites with multiple weak signals face accelerated decline as algorithms become better at identifying and penalising systemic quality deficiencies rather than individual shortcomings.
Why this matters for preparation: Don't just fix your weakest area. The businesses that gain ground during core updates typically improve across multiple quality dimensions simultaneously. If you're enhancing content depth, also address technical performance. If you're adding expertise signals, simultaneously improve mobile experience. This multi-dimensional approach exploits how modern algorithms weight combinations of positive signals more heavily than the sum of individual improvements would suggest.
Sectors Most Likely to See Impact
Certain industries and site types typically experience more pronounced effects from core updates based on their content characteristics and competitive dynamics.
Health and Medical Content
Health information directly affects wellbeing, making it subject to intense algorithmic scrutiny. Sites providing medical advice, treatment information or health guidance without clear medical credentials face increased pressure.
The February update may intensify focus on medical expertise verification. Sites with board-certified doctors, medical researchers or qualified healthcare professionals as named authors typically maintain better stability during health-focused updates than sites with generic or unattributed health content.
Patient experience content serves different purposes than medical advice. First-person accounts of treatments, conditions or healthcare experiences demonstrate valuable experience even without medical credentials, particularly when clearly distinguished from medical guidance.
Financial Services and Advice
Financial content influences economic decisions, triggering similar algorithmic caution as health information. Sites offering investment advice, tax guidance or financial planning without demonstrated financial expertise may face scrutiny.
Regulated financial services often benefit from inherent expertise signals - FCA registration, professional qualifications, institutional affiliations. Sites providing financial content should prominently display relevant credentials whilst ensuring authors possess appropriate backgrounds.
E-Commerce and Product Content
Product pages with thin descriptions, duplicate manufacturer content or minimal unique value struggle increasingly against competitors providing detailed original content including usage guidance, comparison information and genuine customer insights.
E-commerce sites should audit product pages ensuring descriptions provide substantial unique value beyond manufacturer specifications. Original photography, detailed usage instructions, comparison guides and comprehensive customer reviews differentiate quality product pages from commodity listings.
News and Publishing
News publishers face unique challenges balancing timeliness against depth. Breaking news requires rapid publication potentially limiting research depth, yet Google's algorithms increasingly favour comprehensive, well-sourced journalism over brief announcements.
Publishers should ensure bylines credit qualified journalists, articles cite credible sources, corrections are transparent when errors occur, and editorial standards are clearly communicated. These signals help algorithms distinguish reputable journalism from low-quality content farms.
Local Service Businesses
Local businesses often compete within constrained geographic markets where ranking shifts dramatically impact lead generation. Core updates affecting local search algorithms can redistribute visibility significantly within city or regional markets.
Local businesses should ensure Google Business Profiles are comprehensively optimised, website content demonstrates local expertise and presence, and customer reviews are actively managed. Local signals help insulate businesses from broader algorithmic changes affecting national or international competitors.
Preparation Checklist: What to Do Now
Rather than waiting to react after the update, implement these improvements now to strengthen your position regardless of specific algorithmic changes.
Audit Current E-E-A-T Signals
Review every important page assessing how clearly it demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Does your content include named authors with visible credentials? Do "About Us" pages explain who operates the site and why visitors should trust them? Do individual articles cite sources and provide evidence supporting claims?
Add detailed author bios to key content, particularly for health, finance, legal or other expertise-dependent topics. Include professional qualifications, relevant experience, and links to author profiles or professional networks demonstrating credentials.
Strengthen "About Us" content explaining your business history, team expertise, mission and values. Transparency builds algorithmic and human trust - sites clearly explaining who they are and why they're qualified to provide information typically weather core updates better than anonymous operations.
Review and Improve Thin Content
Identify pages providing minimal value - brief articles offering superficial coverage, product pages with only manufacturer descriptions, service pages stating what you offer without explaining how you're different or why prospects should choose you.
Expand thin content substantially or consolidate it with related pages. A five-sentence article about "benefits of project management" adds little value and wastes crawl budget. Either develop it into comprehensive resource worthy of ranking or merge it with related content creating single authoritative page.
Delete genuinely valueless content serving no user need. Outdated blog posts, duplicate pages, auto-generated category pages with no unique content - these harm rather than help your site. Quality over quantity applies increasingly as algorithms become sophisticated at evaluating genuine value.
Address Technical Performance Issues
Poor Core Web Vitals increasingly affect rankings, particularly for mobile searches. Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to evaluate your most important pages, prioritising fixes for anything scoring "Poor" on mobile devices.
Focus on the three Core Web Vitals metrics specifically. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1. Pages exceeding these thresholds need optimisation before the update.
Comprehensive technical optimisation guidance helps identify and resolve performance issues systematically rather than attempting ad-hoc fixes that might miss critical problems.
Update Outdated Information
Content with stale information, outdated examples or references to obsolete products signals neglect. Google increasingly devalues content that hasn't been maintained, particularly for topics where currency matters.
Review your highest-traffic pages checking for outdated statistics, broken links, references to discontinued products, screenshots showing old interfaces, or examples from years past. Update comprehensively rather than changing only publication dates - substantive improvements matter whilst superficial date changes fool nobody.
Strengthen Mobile Experience
Test your site thoroughly on actual mobile devices, not just desktop browser simulation. Navigation should work smoothly on touchscreens, text should be readable without zooming, forms should be completable without frustration, and content should fit viewports without horizontal scrolling.
Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly evaluates your mobile site version. Desktop performance matters less than ensuring mobile users receive excellent experiences. Sites optimised primarily for desktop whilst offering mediocre mobile experiences face algorithmic disadvantages.
Build Quality Backlink Profile
Strong backlink profiles from reputable, relevant sites help insulate businesses from core update volatility. Sites with diverse, high-quality backlinks typically maintain more stable positions than those with weak link profiles regardless of content quality.
Focus on earning editorial links through genuinely valuable content, original research, useful tools, or contributions to industry knowledge. Avoid link schemes, paid links or manipulative tactics - these create vulnerabilities rather than strength.
What to Monitor During Rollout
When Google announces the update and rollout begins, systematic monitoring reveals impact and informs response strategies.
Track Rankings for Important Keywords
Monitor your most valuable keywords daily during rollout, though avoid overreacting to initial volatility. Rankings swing dramatically during early rollout phases before settling once the update completes.
Focus on trends rather than individual daily positions. A keyword dropping from 4 to 9 represents concerning change. Bouncing between 4 and 7 likely represents normal rollout volatility.
Analyse Traffic Patterns
Rankings matter less than the traffic and conversions they generate. Monitor organic traffic overall and for specific high-value landing pages. Traffic changes often appear before ranking tools fully capture position shifts.
Segment traffic by device type, geographic location and query category. Core updates sometimes affect mobile rankings differently than desktop, or impact informational queries whilst leaving transactional searches stable. Understanding these patterns reveals whether issues are broad or specific.
Review Google Search Console
Search Console's Performance report shows impression and click changes before third-party ranking tools reflect algorithmic shifts. Sudden impression drops indicate visibility loss even if rankings haven't updated yet in tracking tools.
The Page Indexing report identifies whether Google is accessing and indexing content properly. Core updates occasionally coincide with crawling changes that create misleading patterns - traffic drops might result from indexing issues rather than algorithmic re-evaluation.
Compare Against Competitors
Your rankings exist relative to competitors. Sometimes your site performs identically whilst competitors improve, causing your relative positions to decline. Other times you maintain position whilst competitors lose ground, indicating strength despite broader market volatility.
Analyse whether competitors gained the positions you lost. If specific sites consistently outrank you after the update, audit their content, technical performance and expertise signals identifying what Google now values that you're not providing.
If Your Rankings Drop
Core update declines require measured response rather than panic-driven changes.
Wait for Rollout Completion
Don't make drastic changes whilst the update is still rolling out. Rankings swing dramatically during active rollout periods, and changes you make during volatility might address temporary fluctuations rather than settled outcomes.
Google typically announces when rollout completes. Wait until completion confirmation before assessing final impact and implementing substantial changes.
Assess Decline Severity
Distinguish between meaningful declines requiring response versus normal fluctuation. Dropping from position 3 to 8 across multiple important keywords indicates real issues worth investigating. Dropping from 5 to 7 on a few terms whilst maintaining other positions might represent normal volatility.
Check whether declines are broad across many pages and keywords or concentrated on specific content types or topics. Broad declines suggest systematic quality issues. Narrow declines indicate specific content needs improvement.
Identify What Changed
Compare pages that declined against those maintaining or improving positions. What distinguishes successful content from underperforming pages? Better expertise signals? More comprehensive coverage? Stronger technical performance? Original research or data?
Similarly, analyse competitor content that outranks you after the update. What are they doing differently? Better credentials? More detailed content? Fresher information? Superior user experience?
Implement Quality Improvements
Recovery from core update declines requires genuine quality improvements, not quick technical tricks. Google explicitly states that pages experiencing core update declines haven't necessarily violated guidelines - they simply don't meet current quality standards as well as alternatives.
Focus improvements on comprehensive content enhancement, strengthened expertise signals, better user experience and demonstrated first-hand knowledge. Surface-level changes like adding word count or inserting keywords rarely drive recovery. Fundamental quality improvements require time but deliver sustainable results.
Monitor Recovery Timeline
Improvements often require weeks or months before algorithms recognise enhanced quality and adjust rankings accordingly. Google's systems need time to recrawl updated content, re-evaluate quality signals and observe user behaviour with changes.
Substantial improvements implemented after a core update might not show impact until the subsequent core update, potentially months later. This frustrates businesses wanting immediate recovery, but algorithms prioritise accuracy over speed.
Maintaining Stability Through Updates
Long-term algorithmic resilience requires sustained focus on quality fundamentals rather than reactive optimisation.
Focus on User Needs First
Create content serving genuine user needs rather than primarily targeting search engines. When content genuinely helps users solve problems, answer questions or make decisions, it naturally satisfies many algorithmic criteria simultaneously.
Ask whether each piece of content would provide value if search engines didn't exist. If the answer is no - if content exists purely to rank rather than serve users - it's vulnerable to algorithmic devaluation regardless of current performance.
Build Genuine Expertise
Demonstrate real knowledge through specific details, original examples, first-hand experience and depth of treatment. Generic content rephrasing widely available information struggles increasingly as algorithms improve at identifying genuine expertise versus superficial coverage.
This matters especially for professional services, consultancies and advice-based businesses. Your content should reflect expertise clients pay for, not just competent internet research.
Maintain Content Regularly
Treat your website as living resource requiring ongoing maintenance rather than static brochure published once and forgotten. Regular updates, content refreshes, outdated information correction and continuous improvement signal active quality commitment.
Establish sustainable content maintenance schedules aligned with available resources. Monthly reviews for highest-value pages, quarterly audits of broader content, annual comprehensive reviews - find rhythms maintainable long-term rather than sporadic intense efforts.
Diversify Traffic Sources
Over-dependence on organic search creates vulnerability when core updates shift rankings unpredictably. Build diverse traffic acquisition including email marketing, social media presence, referral partnerships and paid advertising where appropriate.
This doesn't mean abandoning SEO - it means ensuring your business survives temporary ranking fluctuations whilst implementing improvements for long-term organic recovery. Balanced marketing across multiple channels provides stability when any single channel experiences disruption.
If you're reading this after the update and experienced declines, see our Recovery Blueprint for support and guidance.
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Professional Support for Algorithm Changes
Navigating core updates whilst operating your business creates significant demands on time and expertise.
At Harri Digital, we help UK businesses prepare for, respond to and recover from Google's algorithm updates through sustainable SEO strategies prioritising long-term quality over tactical manipulation.
We monitor algorithm developments continuously, assess impacts on client sites and implement appropriate responses maintaining performance through ongoing refinement. Whether preparing your site before the February update arrives, recovering from previous ranking declines, or building foundations resistant to future changes, we provide expert guidance grounded in current algorithmic realities.
Understanding how Google's continuous updates work alongside preparing for specific major updates creates comprehensive approach to algorithmic resilience that sustains performance regardless of which changes arrive next.
The February 2026 core update - whenever it arrives - will create winners and losers. Businesses that prepare now position themselves among the winners whilst competitors scramble to recover after rankings drop.
