Former Googler Pedro Dias recently asked on X whether others had noticed Google de-indexing URLs at a higher rate since early April. A lot of people had.

I’ve now seen this for at least one client, and the timing lined up almost exactly with the full rollout of the March 2026 Core Update. The pages that got de-indexed had been performing well in organic search and showing up in AI citations. But they all had two technical issues in common: redirects and sitemap exclusion.

Some URLs had one redirect, many had two, and one even had three! And the final URLs were not in the sitemap (the redirected versions were). None of this was new, these URLs had been that way for a while. But it seems like after this most recent core update Google is less willing to tolerate the extra work they caused.

My theory: Google is looking for any excuse to de-bloat the index and preserve crawl efficiency as the internet gets flooded with scaled AI slop.

My takeaway going forward: don’t let “minor” technical SEO issues sit around. Redirect chains, sitemap inconsistencies & crawl inefficiencies might not be hurting anything for now, but when Google decides to tighten the screws weaknesses like this will break.