Google began rolling out its second core update of 2026 on April 22 and finished propagation on April 27. We tracked rank movement across 80+ Ottawa-area domains and 1,200+ commercial keywords. This is what we saw — and what to do about it before the next update.
Personal-injury legal saw the biggest swings (±18% positions on average). Family medicine clinics shifted moderately (±9%). Local trades (HVAC, plumbing, roofing) were largely flat at the Map Pack level but moved on classic organic. E-commerce lost the least, gaining slightly on commercial-investigation queries.
Pages with depth, primary research, and clear author E-E-A-T (named expert, credentials, real bio links) gained. Pages with FAQPage schema and answer-first paragraphs gained additional impressions in AI Overviews — a notable second-order effect we're now seeing alongside core updates.
Thin AI-generated content with shallow structure dropped notably — especially on commercial-investigation queries. Sites with broken internal linking after recent CMS migrations also lost. Pure citation-farm pages (NAP-only directory clones) kept losing the share they've been losing for two years.
(1) Audit your top 20 commercial pages for clear authorship and E-E-A-T signals. (2) Add FAQPage schema to any service page that doesn't have it. (3) Check Search Console for impression drops on April 24-27 windows; flag any 30%+ drops for immediate review. (4) Don't make sweeping content changes for 14 days — let Google's index settle.
April 2026 core update finished propagation April 27.
Ottawa personal-injury legal saw the biggest swings; trades were largely flat at the Map Pack level.
Editorial depth + author E-E-A-T + FAQPage schema were rewarded.
Thin AI-generated content and broken internal linking lost the most.