Google’s February 2026 Silent Update? Traffic Up for Some, Dead for Others — What Are You Seeing?

Over the last 10–14 days I’ve noticed something strange across multiple properties:

• One niche site up +38% (no new backlinks)
• One authority site down -22% (same content strategy)
• Fresh pages indexing faster than usual
• Old pages randomly losing featured snippets

No official announcement. No confirmed core update.

Search Console impressions are shifting, but rankings aren’t moving in the usual pattern.

Is anyone else seeing:

• Increased volatility in mid-competition keywords?
  
  
• AI Overviews replacing more transactional queries?
  
  
• Homepage rankings dropping while inner pages rise?
  
  
• Higher crawl rate but lower indexation?
  

This doesn’t feel like a classic core update. It feels more like:

Entity re-evaluation
Topical authority reshuffling
Or Google testing AI-heavy SERPs quietly

Drop your data:

• Niche
  
  
• % up or down
  
  
• Info vs affiliate vs local
  
  
• DR / site age (roughly)
  

Let’s crowdsource this and see if there’s a pattern forming.

If this turns out to be another “unconfirmed update,” it wouldn’t be the first time something major rolled out quietly — similar to how discussions exploded during past core update tracking threads.

Curious if this ends up being bigger than the December 2025 Core Update - tracking the impact thread