Honestly, I wasn't going to write about this. Nobody loves admitting they lost a ranking. But if I'm being honest, that's the whole point of this blog. Pretending it didn't happen would be worse.
A few weeks ago, boringproj.com was sitting on page 1 for "AI SEO San Antonio." Within days, we'd fallen to page 10. Same site. Same content. No penalty notice, no manual action, nothing we could point to and say "that's the problem." Just gone.
If you've felt that same whiplash with your own site this summer, you're not losing your mind. Here's what actually happened, and what we're doing about it.
It probably wasn't just us
Google ran a broad core update through late May and early June this year, one of the more volatile rollouts SEOs have flagged in 2026. On top of that, there was a spam focused update in late June, plus reports of unconfirmed movement in the weeks between. Stack those together and you get exactly the kind of chaos we saw. A page that ranked well one week, buried the next, for no reason visible from the outside.
Core updates aren't punishments. Google reassesses what "helpful" and "trustworthy" mean across the entire web, then re ranks accordingly. Nobody gets a personal explanation. You just see the number move.
That's the uncomfortable truth about chasing any single keyword, even one as good as "AI SEO San Antonio." A ranking built fast on one page, around one term, is exactly the kind of ranking that moves fast when the ground shifts. Really though, it's not just us. It's every small business in San Antonio riding on a handful of pages instead of a real footprint.
Why one great page isn't enough
Here's the mistake we made, and honestly the same one we see constantly with clients before they come to us: one strong page, targeting one strong keyword, treated as "done."
That works right up until an update reshuffles the deck. A single page has no depth behind it. No supporting content, no topical authority, nothing else on the site telling Google "we actually know this subject cold." When the algorithm re weighs what counts as trustworthy, a thin footprint has nothing to fall back on.
Real ranking durability comes from all of this working together:
None of that guarantees you're immune to a core update. But it means when one hits, you've got roots deep enough to hold instead of a single page that gets swept away.
What we're doing about it, for us and for you
We're rebuilding around "AI SEO San Antonio" the right way this time. Not one page chasing the term, but a cluster of content around it: what AI SEO actually means, how it's different from traditional SEO, what it looks like for a San Antonio service business specifically, and real examples instead of just claims. That's the work happening on this blog over the next several weeks.
If you're a client with us, this is exactly what your monthly work already includes. New pages, fresh posts, and a Search Console check every month specifically to catch this kind of movement early instead of finding out three months later that you disappeared.
If you're not a client yet and you just watched your own rankings do something similar this summer, it's worth a look before you assume it's something you did wrong. Most of the time, it isn't.
The honest timeline
We're not going to tell you we'll be back on page 1 next week. Core update volatility typically needs a full rollout cycle plus a week or two of stable data before you can trust what you're seeing in Search Console. Realistically, we're looking at 30 to 60 days of consistent publishing before we see where the ranking actually settles.
What we will do is show our own work, same as we'd show yours. If it moves, you'll see it. If it doesn't yet, you'll see that too. No guessing, no fluff.