May 2026 may prove to be one of the most important months for search marketing in recent years.
Between Google's latest Core Update, major changes to AI Search experiences, growing evidence of AI-driven traffic performance, and continued shifts in indexing behaviour, the search landscape is evolving at a pace few businesses can afford to ignore.
At Saigon Digital, it is our job to monitor search performance and visibility trends across a diverse portfolio of client websites. Throughout May, our team analysed performance data from managed accounts, technical audits, Search Console reporting and GA4 analytics and has gathered some very insightful findings.
Let's break down what happened and what businesses should be doing about it.
Key Takeaways
- Google's May Core Update is penalising thin, generic content. Original expertise now wins
- AI-referred traffic converts 42% better than regular search traffic, a record high in 2026
- Ranking #1 on Google no longer guarantees AI visibility, they are now two separate games
- FAQ schema is worth keeping even though FAQ rich results are gone, it helps AI Overviews
- June 15 deadline: Check your AdSense settings to avoid a back-button hijacking penalty
- Getting cited in AI Overviews earns your site +35% more organic clicks and +91% more paid clicks
Google's May 2026 Core Update: Expertise Continues to Win
Google officially launched its May 2026 Core Update on 21 May, marking the second broad core update of the year.
Although core updates always create short-term volatility, our team quickly noticed a recurring pattern across managed accounts: Businesses producing original, insightful content generally remained stable or improved.
This aligns closely with findings later published by independent SEO researchers, including analyses from Amsive and SEO-Kreativ.
Who Got Hit the Hardest?
With this new core update, content that proves to be thin or not up to par on the quality department will suffer the most. Content such as:
- Generic affiliate and comparison pages with no original insight
- Job listing portals
- Travel aggregator sites
- Websites that pull information from other sources without adding real value
- Even YouTube took a visibility hit, which suggests Google is actively selecting text-based expert sources over video content on a growing range of queries.
What is Winning?
Two traits are consistent across the sites gaining visibility:
- A specific, defensible point of view: content that could not have been written by just anyone. Content that are unique and filled with expertise and experience, that provide useful insights and helpful directions
- Named authors with real credentials: websites that include a bio page, a professional profile, verifiable expertise
What to Do Now: Review Your Expertise Signals
Log into Google Search Console and check your traffic trends from May 21 onwards. If you see a dip, look at which pages lost traffic. If those pages mostly summarise information available elsewhere, they need to be rewritten with genuine original perspective or consolidated into stronger pieces.
Take a critical look at your website and ask yourself a simple question: would a first-time visitor immediately understand why your business is qualified to talk about this topic?
Start by reviewing your most important service and content pages. Ensure they clearly demonstrate industry experience, practical knowledge, client success stories, case studies, certifications, accreditations, or specialist expertise where appropriate.
Next, review your author profiles. If your content is published under generic company names or anonymous bylines, consider introducing named authors with relevant professional backgrounds. Google's systems increasingly look for signals that content is created by people with genuine expertise rather than simply generated for rankings.
Finally, identify your highest-performing content and update it with fresh examples, unique insights, and first-hand perspectives. In our experience, businesses that combine strong expertise signals with genuinely useful content are far more resilient during major algorithm updates.
The rollout is still completing as of early June, so avoid making major decisions based on rank-tracking tools until positions settle.
Pages Are Being De-Indexed by Google
One of the strongest trends we have tracked since April is a rise in indexation challenges.
Across multiple technical audits completed during May, we consistently encountered increasing numbers of URLs classified as:
- Crawled – currently not indexed
- Discovered – currently not indexed
This means that Google has discovered and even crawled the URL/content, however, those content are not being shown to users on Google search results. This trend appears across multiple industries and website sizes.
While Google representatives such as John Mueller and Barry Schwartz have publicly suggested that nothing unusual is happening, many SEO professionals believe the surge in AI-generated content is forcing Google to become more selective about what it includes within its index.
What to do now: Open your site’s Google Search Console and navigate to the Coverage or Page Indexing report. Pay particular attention to URLs classified as "Crawled – currently not indexed" and "Discovered – currently not indexed".
If these categories have grown over the past few months, don't treat them as technical issues alone. Instead, look for patterns.
Are those pages thin? Are they targeting very similar keywords? Do they offer genuinely useful information? Are they answering questions better than competing pages already ranking?
Rather than publishing more content, many businesses will achieve better results by improving or even removing underperforming pages.
You can improve your content simply by offering more useful information and insight, giving your opinion and expertise on matters that your customers are interested in.
There are 2 methods you can go about refreshing your content:
Method #1: Go through your Google Search Console and check for queries that lead users to your website. Look over them and see whether your content is missing any of these keywords. Craft more content and information to contain these keywords and answers the queries people are asking
Method #2: Look through your competitors’ content and compare those to yours. If you notice an interesting section that they have but you don’t, update your content so it does contain those type of information
By updating your content constantly, you create trust with your users and signal to AI platforms that you are your industry’s expert and thought leader.
Publishing More Content Is No Longer a Winning Strategy
For many years, SEO strategies often relied on publishing large quantities of content to capture long-tail keyword opportunities. That approach is becoming less effective after the explosion of AI content on the Internet.
Now, as it has always been, Google cares about the quality of the content.
Businesses that continue publishing dozens of low-value articles each month may discover that a growing percentage of those pages never receive meaningful visibility.
This is why our SEO team has steadily shifted away from volume-based publishing recommendations. Instead, we focus on:
- Topical authority
- Content depth
- First-hand expertise
- Original insights
- Proprietary data
In today's search environment, ten exceptional articles often outperform one hundred average ones.
AI Citations Are Becoming the New Battleground for Digital Visibility
One of the most significant shifts we're observing across our client portfolio is the growing importance of AI citations.
For years, SEO success was largely measured by rankings. If your website appeared near the top of Google's search results, visibility naturally followed.
That relationship is beginning to change.
Today, users increasingly discover information through AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overviews. Rather than clicking through multiple search results, users are often receiving recommendations, summaries and answers directly from AI systems.
As a result, a new question is emerging:
Is your content being cited when AI systems generate answers?
Increasingly, that question may be just as important as where you rank.
The Quality of AI-Referred Traffic Continues to Impress
Since Q3 2025, our team has been tracking referral traffic from AI platforms across managed accounts.
While overall volumes remain smaller than traditional organic search, the quality of those visitors consistently stands out.
Across many client websites, users arriving from AI platforms are observed to:
- Spend more time on site
- View more pages per session
- Bounce less frequently
- Demonstrate stronger purchase or enquiry intent
Throughout May, several major industry studies reinforced what we had already been seeing in our own analytics.
Adobe's latest AI Traffic Report, which analysed more than one trillion website visits, found that AI-referred traffic converted 42% better than non-AI traffic. The report also found that AI visitors generated 48% longer session durations, 13% more pages per visit and 37% higher revenue per visit.
Additional research published by Shopify, Alhena AI and Digital Applied reached remarkably similar conclusions.
When multiple independent datasets align with what we're observing across client campaigns, the message becomes difficult to ignore: users referred by AI are often more qualified than traditional search users.
Why?
Because much of the research process has already happened before the click.
By the time users arrive on your website through an AI recommendation, they have often compared options, reviewed information and narrowed down their choices. In many cases, they are arriving with stronger intent and greater confidence.
Ranking and Citation Are No Longer the Same Thing
However, the real story isn't simply about AI traffic.
It's about how businesses earn that traffic in the first place.
One of the most important findings from recent industry research is that the overlap between traditional search rankings and AI citations is shrinking.
Research cited throughout May, such as one conducted by Search Engine Journal, suggests that the overlap between pages ranking in Google's top ten results and pages referenced within AI-generated answers has fallen significantly compared to 2025.
In practical terms, this means a business can rank highly and still be largely invisible within AI-generated experiences.
Conversely, a website may not hold the number one ranking position but still become a frequently cited source because its content is easier for AI systems to understand, extract and reference.
This is why we increasingly view ranking and citation as two separate optimisation challenges.
Businesses that focus exclusively on rankings risk missing a growing source of visibility.
Why Citation Readability Matters
As AI platforms become more influential, machine readability is becoming just as important as user readability.
AI systems need to quickly identify key facts, understand context and extract trustworthy information.
Content that performs well tends to share several characteristics:
- Clear structure and hierarchy
- Strong semantic organisation
- Logical use of headings
- Direct answers to important questions
- Demonstrable expertise
- Original insights and data
- Transparent authorship and credibility signals
This is one reason our team has started incorporating AI Readability and Citation Readiness assessments into technical audits and content reviews.
The goal is no longer simply to help pages rank.
The goal is to help content become a source that AI systems trust enough to reference.
The Businesses That Win Will Be the Ones Worth Citing
Perhaps the most important lesson from May is that AI visibility cannot be treated as a separate discipline from SEO.
Google's own guidance reinforces this point.
Strong AI visibility still depends on the same foundations that have always driven sustainable search performance:
- Genuine expertise
- Quality content
- Technical excellence
- Clear site architecture
- Structured data
- Trustworthy brand signals
What to Do Now: Audit Your Content Through the Lens of Citability
Most businesses still evaluate content based on rankings and traffic alone.
However, the next step is to assess whether your content is structured in a way that AI systems can easily understand and reference.
Start by reviewing your highest-value pages and ask:
- Does this content demonstrate genuine expertise?
- Does it contain original insights, examples or data?
- Are key points clearly structured beneath descriptive headings?
- Are important facts easy to identify and extract?
- Is authorship clearly visible and credible?
Next, identify content that relies heavily on summarising information already available elsewhere. These pages are often the most vulnerable to both declining rankings and declining AI visibility.
Finally, focus future content creation on insights your business is uniquely positioned to provide. Original research, industry expertise, customer experience and proprietary knowledge are becoming increasingly valuable because they are exactly the types of information AI systems need to cite.
Technical SEO Updates We're Paying Close Attention To
While much of the SEO conversation in May focused on AI, Google's Core Update and changing search behaviour, several important technical developments also caught our attention.
Individually, these updates may seem minor. However, together they reinforce a broader trend we're seeing across the search landscape: Google is becoming more focused on efficiency, quality and machine-readable content.
Here's what we're monitoring and how we're responding for clients.
1. Smarter Sitemap Structures Are Becoming More Important
One technical recommendation that gained attention in May came from Google's John Mueller, who clarified the benefits of organising XML sitemaps into logical content groups rather than maintaining a single, large sitemap.
For larger websites, this approach offers several advantages.
By separating content into categories, businesses can more easily identify which sections of a website are being indexed successfully and which areas may be experiencing visibility issues. It also helps search engines prioritise newer content more effectively and prevents sitemap files from becoming unnecessarily large and difficult to manage.
Across several client websites, we've already started implementing more structured sitemap frameworks, particularly for websites with large content libraries or ongoing indexation challenges.
As Google's index becomes increasingly selective, gaining clearer visibility into how different content sections perform can provide valuable insights for future optimisation efforts.
What to Do Now: If your website contains hundreds or thousands of pages, review how your XML sitemap is currently organised.
Rather than placing every URL into a single sitemap, consider grouping content by category, content type or language. This can make indexation trends much easier to monitor and help identify problems before they impact organic performance.
2. Not Every Search Console Issue Requires Immediate Action
On 21 May, the same day Google's Core Update launched, many SEO professionals noticed a sudden drop in backlink counts within Google Search Console's Links Report.
In some cases, reported links appeared to fall dramatically overnight.
Naturally, this caused concern.
However, Google later confirmed that the issue was caused by a reporting bug rather than an actual loss of backlinks. The problem has since been resolved, and no genuine link equity was lost.
Several clients contacted us after noticing unusual backlink fluctuations, and we were able to reassure them that the issue originated from Google's reporting systems rather than their websites.
This serves as an important reminder that not every alarming metric represents a genuine problem.
What to Do Now: Before making major SEO decisions based on a sudden data change, verify whether the issue is affecting the wider industry.
Compare data across multiple tools where possible and look for confirmation from Google or trusted industry sources. Acting too quickly on inaccurate data can lead to unnecessary audits, wasted resources and avoidable stress.
3. Google's Indexing API Restrictions Signal a Stronger Focus on Quality
Another notable development in May involved Google's Indexing API.
Google has tightened enforcement around how the API can be used after widespread misuse across the industry.
Importantly, the official guidance has not changed.
The Indexing API is intended primarily for:
- Job postings
- Livestream content
Using the API to force index general website content has never been Google's intended use case and often produces short-lived results. Pages submitted this way frequently disappear from the index shortly afterwards.
From our perspective, this update reflects Google's broader effort to ensure that content earns its place in the index through quality and relevance rather than technical shortcuts.
What to Do Now: If you're currently relying on automated indexing tools or working with an agency that promotes rapid indexing tactics, it's worth reviewing those practices carefully.
Sustainable SEO performance comes from creating content that Google wants to index, not from trying to force content into the index through technical workarounds.
Focus on content quality, internal linking, crawlability and site architecture instead.
4. FAQ Rich Results Have Disappeared — But FAQ Schema Still Matters
One of the more misunderstood changes in May was Google's decision to remove FAQ Rich Results from search results.
For many businesses, FAQ sections no longer generate the visual enhancements they once did in Google Search.
At first glance, this might suggest that FAQ schema is no longer valuable.
However, that would be the wrong conclusion.
Although Google has retired the visible FAQ Rich Result feature, it continues to use FAQ structured data to better understand page content. More importantly, recent studies suggest that pages implementing FAQPage schema are significantly more likely to appear within AI-generated search experiences.
In fact, some research indicates these pages may be over three times more likely to be referenced within AI Overviews.
As AI-powered search becomes increasingly important, structured data remains one of the clearest ways to help machines interpret your content accurately.
The visual benefit may have disappeared, but the underlying SEO value remains.
What to Do Now: If your website already uses FAQ schema, leave it in place.
Removing it simply because the rich result no longer appears could mean losing valuable context that helps search engines and AI systems understand your content.
If you haven't implemented structured data yet, now is an excellent opportunity to review your schema strategy. As AI search continues to evolve, machine-readable content will likely become even more important for visibility and citation opportunities.
What We're Doing for Clients
Based on everything we've observed throughout May, our SEO and AI strategy teams continue to focus on several priority areas. These include:
1. Strengthening Expertise Signals
Helping businesses demonstrate credibility through authorship, expertise and trust-building content.
2. Improving Technical Foundations
Ensuring websites remain easily crawlable, indexable and understandable to both search engines and AI systems.
3. Optimising for AI Visibility
Creating content structures that improve citation opportunities across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI experiences.
4. Enhancing Structured Data
Implementing schema and knowledge graph signals that improve machine understanding.
5. Measuring AI Performance
Tracking AI referral traffic, AI visibility and AI citation opportunities alongside traditional SEO metrics.
Our Outlook for the Rest of 2026
If we had to summarise the direction of search in a single sentence, it would be this: The future belongs to businesses that create content worth citing.
Everything we observed throughout May points towards that conclusion. Google is becoming more selective. AI platforms are becoming more influential. Users are increasingly receiving answers before they click.
As a result, authority, expertise and trust have never been more valuable.
The businesses that adapt early and invest in building themselves into valuable and insightful hubs of information will have a significant competitive advantage in 2026.
Is Your Business Ready for the Future of Search?
Search visibility is no longer just about rankings. Today, businesses need to think about indexation, authority, AI citations, technical performance, structured data, and how easily their content can be understood by both people and machines.
At Saigon Digital, we help ambitious brands stay ahead of these changes. From technical SEO and content strategy to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), AI visibility, and workflow automation, we help businesses build sustainable digital growth strategies that work both today and in the AI-powered future of search.
As search continues evolving, businesses need partners who understand both traditional SEO and the future of AI-driven discovery.
That's exactly where Saigon Digital helps brands stay ahead.
Get in touch with us today and see how we help your business thrive in the era of AI!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Does my business need a completely new SEO strategy because of AI Search?
No. Google has officially confirmed that optimising for AI Search is the same as SEO. The fundamentals, such as original content, clean structure, genuine expertise, still apply. What is changing is that you now also need to ensure your content is structurally readable by AI systems, not just by humans.
2. My traffic dropped around May 21. Is it the Core Update or the GSC bug?
Possibly both, but for different reasons. The GSC Links Report showed a visual bug on May 21 that made link counts appear to drop, this has been fixed and no real links were lost. A genuine traffic drop around May 21 is more likely related to the Core Update. Check your actual traffic in the Performance Report (not the Links Report) to assess the real impact.
3. Should I remove FAQ schema from my website now that FAQ rich results are gone?
No, keep it. FAQPage schema is no longer used to create visual FAQ boxes in search results, but it still helps Google understand your content and makes your pages significantly more likely to appear in AI Overviews.
4. What kind of content is most at risk from AI Search eating clicks?
Pages that answer simple, factual questions, such as opening hours, return policies, basic definitions, conversion calculators. These are the types of queries AI Overviews answer directly, with no click required. Content based on original data, first-hand experience, and genuine expertise is far more resilient because AI is forced to cite it rather than summarise it away.
5. How do I get my website cited in Google AI Overviews?
There is no direct submission process. The factors that increase your chances: clear page structure with proper headings, semantic HTML, named authors with credentials, original content that takes a distinct position, and FAQPage schema where relevant.
