The end of the single ranking
Google ranking volatility is making a single reported position less useful as a measure of search visibility. In a study discussed by Joy Hawkins, Mark Cabana analyzed more than 8 million search results and found that 48.7% became more volatile beginning around Google's May core update, with elevated movement continuing through the period discussed. The implication is not that rankings no longer matter, but that marketers may need to evaluate visibility across a wider range of searches and time periods instead of treating 'position one' as a stable state.
The effect was especially pronounced for explicit local queries such as “Denver plumber” and “Dallas electrician” searches that had previously produced relatively stable organic grid patterns. Instead, the same grid could alternate between showing and not showing a business from one scan to another. Hawkins’s conclusion is deliberately narrower than “SEO is dead”: static position reporting is what has become misleading.
Measurement now has to reflect uncertainty
That uncertainty changes what a credible rank report should look like. Hawkins says one scan can produce a false alarm: a business may appear absent in one search and visible in the next. Her suggested safeguard for local research is repeated scanning, roughly a few dozen searches, with 40 or 50 searches offering a more meaningful basis for judging which businesses repeatedly appear in the top three.
Rankings still have a role, but Hawkins treats them as diagnostic evidence rather than the final outcome. She uses them to test tactics, identify dominant competitors, and estimate the current ceiling in a market. If a ranking improvement cannot be connected to more traffic, however, she questions how much weight the ranking report deserves.
The useful unit is the customer, not the position
For local businesses, the path from search to revenue often bypasses the website. A person may find a business profile, read reviews or photos, and call directly. That makes website traffic an incomplete measure, while rankings alone are even more remote from the commercial result. Hawkins therefore puts search data alongside call tracking, lead sources, and the number and quality of closed sales.
The distinction is not theoretical in her example. One optimized page showed zero clicks in Search Console, while calls from the business profile nearly doubled. The business was receiving leads connected to the service being targeted, but users were apparently reaching it through the local profile rather than clicking the organic page. Hawkins’s point is that an SEO program can look unsuccessful if the reporting stops at the page view.
Why scalable shortcuts look increasingly brittle
The podcast’s second argument is about durability. Hawkins describes businesses that expanded rapidly through large volumes of templated or scaled content, including one law firm that published hundreds of accident-related pages and was later wiped out of search results after the May update. She says several affected sites had deleted large portions of their content without recovering by the time of the discussion, leaving the outcome uncertain.
Her warning is not that every use of AI or every large site is inherently unacceptable. The distinction she draws is whether pages contribute something genuinely useful and specific, or merely repeat a scalable pattern. She contrasts thin, mass-produced pages with content based on firsthand client experience, proprietary information, and detailed descriptions of real work, material that gives a page a reason to exist beyond targeting another keyword variation.
A more grounded SEO playbook
Hawkins’s proposed response is less dramatic than the volatility itself: strengthen the assets that search systems can interpret and customers can trust. She emphasizes a business’s website, reviews, real photographs, social presence, relevant local links, and detailed accounts of customer work. She also says reviews remain important for traditional local results, while AI-powered local results may draw more heavily on the substance of review text and other contextual signals.
The underlying editorial lesson is to judge SEO as a chain rather than a snapshot: visibility should lead to traffic or direct actions, those actions should lead to qualified leads, and leads should be assessed by whether they become business. Rankings remain useful within that chain, especially when measured repeatedly, but they no longer provide a complete or stable verdict on performance.