Charting 10 Years of The Google Algorithm
Edited by Emilie Martin
If you pay close attention to Google, it might feel like you wake up to a new change every day. In reality, it’s more like thirteen changes. Google reported an astonishing 4,725 “launches” in 2022, up dramatically from 350 — 400 in 2009.
Since 2009, when Matt Cutts first discussed this data publicly, Google has made over 30,000 changes and has run millions of search quality tests. While many of these changes are small or isolated to a single market, the pace of change is undeniable, and it can be overwhelming for search marketers. How can we hope to disentangle it all?
The algorithm is heating up (2014 — 2023)
Thanks to our MozCast research project, we now have an entire decade of daily Google algorithm flux to compare. The chart below is a bird’s-eye view of those ten years, with “hotter” days representing more day-over-day fluctuations in page-one rankings: