Note the steady climb until Q3 (July) of 2023, with a precipitous drop into Q4 of 2023, followed by another, faster climb to current highs. Summer of 2023 was a period of historically high ranking flux, culminating in an August Core Update, September Helpful Content Update, and October Spam Update. It’s difficult to separate signal from noise, but it is possible that Google pushed back against aggressive content creation that was driving increasing churn.

It’s also worth noting that the end of 2022 saw the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and kicked off the content generation arms race. It’s very difficult to separate the push and pull of AI content generation and Google fighting back against AI content generation just by looking at rankings, so we’re left to speculate.

Regardless of the cause, content churn immediately began to increase again after this late-2023 drop, reaching a new peak within a year.