Google’s Core Update Settled. Now Look at What Your Out-of-Stock Pages Are Doing
Google’s May 2026 core update finished rolling out on June 2 after about 12 rough days, and search hasn’t settled since. Rankings are still volatile, and AI Overviews keep skimming clicks off the top of the page. So this is a good week to check something most Shopify stores never think about: collection pages stacked with products nobody can actually buy.
What happened
Search Engine Land has the timeline: it started on May 21 and wrapped on June 2. Trackers caught big ranking swings the whole way through, with the worst spikes on May 23, May 30, and in the final 24 hours before it closed. Google’s own description was about what you’d expect: “a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”
There’s a second story running underneath it. Search Engine Roundtable pointed to a fresh zero-click study showing Google sends less traffic to the open web every year, as AI Mode and AI Overviews answer more searches before anyone clicks anything. Google has also been spotted testing Shopping results that link straight to merchant sites.
Why it matters
Put those two together and the math gets uncomfortable. Rankings are harder to hold, and the ones you do hold are worth more, because fewer clicks make it past the AI answer at all. When every visit is that expensive, sending a shopper or Googlebot to a dead end is the last thing you want.
That’s the quiet problem with out-of-stock products sitting near the top of a collection. A shopper lands on something they can’t buy and leaves. A crawler burns its budget on pages that won’t convert. Thin engagement and pages that miss what someone came for are exactly the kind of thing a “people-first” update is tuned to catch.
What this means for Shopify merchants
You can’t schedule Google’s next core update, but you can decide what your best pages show first. A couple of things help when rankings are this jumpy.
Keep in-stock products at the top of every collection, so the first thing a shopper or a crawler sees is something they can buy today. And don’t try to fix it by deleting or redirecting out-of-stock product URLs. That throws away the links and ranking those pages already earned, and it tends to create soft 404s. Move the products instead of removing them.
Pushy does both on autopilot. It pushes out-of-stock items to the bottom of your collections, snaps them back up when they’re restocked, and leaves every URL in place, so you keep the SEO you’ve built. It’s about the lowest-risk thing you can do for your storefront, and it earns its keep most when rankings are bouncing around.
Google Search is sending less and less traffic to the open web as AI Mode and AI Overviews take a growing share of zero-click searches. — Search Engine Roundtable, June 2026
The bottom line
Core updates aren’t going to stop, and AI is only going to take a bigger cut of the clicks. The stores that ride it out are the ones whose pages reliably give people what they came for. Putting in-stock products first, while keeping your URLs intact, is one of the simplest ways to stay on the right side of that.