Google says major changes coming to search rankings

Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has reportedly said that major changes are coming to Google’s search rankings in the future. This comes from a talk Sullivan gave at an event last Friday, where he was quoted as saying that these “major changes” are coming and that some may need to “buckle up.”

Danny Sullivan after this story was published replied on X saying, “I was talking about various things people have raised where they want to see our results improve, or where they think “sure, you fixed this but what about….” And that these things all correspond to improvements we have in the works. That there’s so much coming that I don’t want to say buckle up, because those who are making good, people-first content should be fine. But that said, there’s a lot of improvements on the way.”

Quotes. Here are the two sources I found quoting Sullivan as saying, “buckle-up there are major changes coming to search ranking signals…”

Here is some more clarification:

His exact words were…"There's so much coming on and i don't want to say buckle up because that makes you freak out because if you're doing good stuff, it's not going to be an issue to you."

— Andy Simpson 🇬🇧 (@ndyjsimpson) November 13, 2023

Busy year of algorithm updates. It has been a wild and very volatile year for SEOs with a ton of Google search ranking algorithm updates. Just this past few weeks we had the November 2023 reviews update, November 2023 core update, October 2023 spam update, and the October 2023 Core Update.

Why we care. Are there more big changes coming to Google’s core ranking algorithms in the near term? What will be so “major” that some of us need to “buckle up” and get ready for? How much will these future algorithm updates be even more impactful than the ones we are currently experiencing?

Or maybe these quotes were taken out of context and we don’t need to stress too much about these changes.