Thanksgiving 2025: Up to 40% of Sites Report Traffic Swings as SEOs Detect Signs of an Unconfirmed Google Update

Thanksgiving week in 2025 brought unusual turbulence across Google Search results. Many site owners and SEO professionals reported traffic swings between 20% and 40% even though Google did not confirm any algorithm update. The pattern has led analysts to believe that a silent recalibration period may have started.

Clear Indicators of Ranking Volatility

Multiple monitoring tools registered significant movement between November 24 and November 26, 2025.

• Some publishers saw traffic declines reaching 40 percent overnight.
  
• Semrush Sensor, Mozcast, Mangools and other platforms recorded sharp volatility spikes during the same period.
  
• Several site owners reported major keyword shifts and sudden drops in search referrals.
  

These signals resemble previous unannounced updates where Google tested adjustments to quality signals or AI driven ranking logic without issuing a formal statement.

Why This Matters for Businesses

Traffic instability affects both short term performance and long term strategic planning. A 30 to 40 percent decline in organic traffic can reduce sales and lead generation across e commerce, service, media and B2B sectors. When search ranking becomes unstable, websites with weak technical foundations experience the largest losses.

Issues such as slow loading pages, thin or unstructured content, missing metadata, and inconsistent schema markup make a site more vulnerable when the algorithm is recalibrating.

A Full Website Audit Is Now Essential

The most effective response is to understand the technical health of the website. Conducting a website audit for better AI visibility reveals the issues that may be amplifying ranking drops. An audit can uncover crawl barriers, technical errors, broken redirects, outdated structures, duplicate content and other weaknesses that limit a site’s ability to remain stable during ranking turbulence.

A strong technical foundation also improves performance in AI powered discovery, where clarity, structure and content quality have increasing influence.

Anatolii Ulitovskyi, CEO at UNmiss says: “Thanksgiving 2025 showed ranking swings as high as 40 percent across sectors. That is a clear signal that search systems are becoming more sensitive to technical quality. A complete website audit gives businesses the data they need to find weaknesses early and protect visibility during unpredictable periods.”