Google's September 2026 spam update: what you need to know

Google rolled out its fourth spam update of the year from September 24 to October 8, 2026, nearly two weeks (13 days and 16 hours according to its ranking updates history). It applies to every country and every language. Three waves of movement were seen: September 25 to 27, September 30, then October 4 to 6. Google has not said what it targeted, so a traffic drop during those two weeks is now something to check in Search Console, with the method described below. The movement seen from October 16 to 21 does not come from it: its rollout was over.

How the rollout unfolded, day by day

We followed the rollout day by day, from the announcement to the end. Times are Montreal time.

• Around September 13: on the WebmasterWorld forum, publishers report drops of 48 to 80% and Discover traffic down 70%. Those drops started before the announcement: nothing ties them to the update.
• September 24, 12:15 p.m.: Google announces the update on its status dashboard. It applies to every country and every language, and the rollout may take up to two weeks. John Mueller confirms it is likely to take longer than the previous ones. The same day, Search Engine Roundtable writes that it does not target link spam: that is its reading, not a statement from Google.
• September 25: a theory starts circulating. SAFE is a Google system described in a short research paper dated May 2026, which spots networks of AI-generated content. The paper only covers YouTube, and Google has not linked it to any search update. So far, it does not explain the September update.
• September 25 to 27: first wave. Tools that track ranking volatility (Semrush Sensor, Mozcast, Sistrix and AccuRanker, among others) all show a sharp rise, peaking on Saturday the 26th (Search Engine Roundtable sums it up on the 28th).
• September 28 and 29: movement calms down. Google still listed the update as ongoing.
• September 29: the first figures. Diib, a website analytics tool, compares 32,569 sites connected to Google Analytics. From September 24 to 26, the median share of their visits coming from Google's unpaid results falls from 34% to 31% compared with the same days a week earlier. The proportion of sites losing half of that share or more doubles (from 5% to 10%). Diib calls it "an early read, not a verdict": its data does not show which sites Google classified as spam (Search Engine Journal reported it on October 8).
• September 30: second wave. The trackers whose charts Search Engine Roundtable gathered (Mozcast, Semrush, AccuRanker and Sistrix, among others) again show a sharp rise. On WebmasterWorld, several publishers say their Discover and Google News traffic vanished again that day. Google has not confirmed this second phase: it is the reading of Search Engine Roundtable and consultant Glenn Gabe. It does fit a two-week rollout, which can act in several waves.
• October 1: Google still listed the update as ongoing. In his notes posted on X, Glenn Gabe says several site owners emailed him after a sharp drop on September 30. He also notes that Reddit's AI-translated pages are surging back in Italy, Germany, Brazil, France and other countries, even though they had dropped with the May core update and the June spam update. Glenn Gabe is not sure whether Google changed its mind or its systems are rewarding those translations.
• October 4 to 6: third wave. The trackers whose charts Search Engine Roundtable gathered (Semrush, Mozcast, AccuRanker and Sistrix, among others) show a fresh rise starting Saturday, October 4. On WebmasterWorld, reports are fewer: one publisher says search and Discover traffic plummeted, another complains about weaker results. Barry Schwartz believed this was the final phase, without ruling out another spike. Google confirmed none of the three waves and still listed the update as ongoing.
• October 8, 4:37 a.m.: Google announces the end of the rollout on its status dashboard, after 13 days and 16 hours according to its ranking updates history, almost the whole two-week window it had announced. The third wave was therefore the last. Google has not said what the update targeted or why it took longer than the previous three: Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable both note it the same day. Also that day, Search Engine Roundtable relays consultants (Marie Haynes and Daniel Foley Carter) who have been getting more requests for help with manual actions over the past few weeks, mostly for thin content, scaled content abuse and pure spam. Nothing ties those manual actions to the update: they come from human reviewers, not from SpamBrain, and Google has confirmed nothing.
• October 10: Nozzle, a rank tracking tool, publishes a study showing that Google has been serving distorted results to rank trackers since mid-September. Its figures, and what they change in how the three waves should be read, are in the section on tracking tools.
• October 16 to 21: new movement, a week after the spam update ended. Barry Schwartz notes a rise in volatility and chatter on October 16, then again on October 20 and 21. In the forums, publishers say their Discover traffic is collapsing or disappearing for a few days before coming back lower; others say they gained rankings. Barry Schwartz sees an unconfirmed ranking update and points out that a core update is expected. Google has announced nothing: as of October 21, the latest update on its dashboard is still the September one. A drop that starts after October 8 is therefore not explained by the spam update.

GGGlenn Gabe@glenngabeX

Good morning Google Land! This is the 10/1 edition of "Spam Update Notes". The update continues to roll out and I believe we saw a specific change on 9/30. I received emails from several site owners explaining they saw a huge drop right on 9/30... The update could take up to two weeks to fully roll out so it makes sense there would be various stages involved. Today's notes will be two separate tweets. First up, Reddit!

Reddit AI translations return! I have heavily covered how Reddit's AI translations surged like mad for a long time in Google, but then came crashing down with the May 2026 core update and June 2026 spam update. Reddit's luck there finally ran out. But, it looks like those AI translations are surging back again with the September 2026 spam update. I checked across countries and I'm seeing those AI translations surge again in Italy, Germany, Brazil, France, and other countries.

So did Reddit complain enough to Google or is this just Google's systems rewarding those translations?? Again, Google said it's fine to translate via AI *IF* the content is high quality. Not sure on this one... Stay tuned.

Read tracking tools with caution

Ranking trackers called for caution throughout the rollout. Google does not hand them its data: they query the search engine themselves, at very large scale, to record rankings. Google has been making that harder since the summer. Since late August, every link in the results goes through a google.com/goto redirect, which Google describes as a measure against abuse. To know which page holds which position, a tool now has to follow each link one by one.

The effects show in the data. On September 16, Sistrix announced that its collection was running at a reduced rate after further changes by Google. Around the same time, Nozzle (another tracking tool) said it had lost about 80% of the data it used to get from Google. Consultant Glenn Gabe compared the same site's recovery in three tools: Ahrefs showed it, Semrush showed it late and Sistrix did not show it yet (Search Engine Roundtable reports both). On September 26, in the middle of the rollout, Sistrix added that Google sometimes returns incomplete or distorted results: the tool is updating fewer keywords each day, and its charts move less than usual.

Since then, a study has put numbers on the problem. On October 10, Nozzle published its analysis of the results pages it collects for its clients, since updated through October 21: 56.1 million results pages in 53 countries, on desktop and mobile. It compares each page with the sites that usually hold the keyword's top 10. Before September 13, 0.17% of first results pages strayed far enough from the usual to count as distorted; since then, the figure is 8.7%. The peak came on September 30, the day of the second wave: 43.5% of the pages collected (first or second results page) were distorted. On a distorted page, the client's site falls out of the top 10 in 60.8% of cases, against 2.7% normally. The anomaly is short-lived: the usual sites return within three days on 67.9% of pages, and within two weeks on 92.5%.

The other tools have acknowledged it, with different measurements (Search Engine Roundtable gathers their statements). Semrush says the impact on its clients is limited. SE Ranking estimated on October 16 that about 2% of tracked rankings were still affected. Ahrefs wrote on October 22 that 5% to 20% of results are affected, depending on the data provider. AccuRanker, which measures differently, finds far fewer: 1.4% on September 29 (PPC Land compares the two methods). Google has said nothing. Barry Schwartz believes Google is mainly targeting the mass collection of its results by AI bots: that is his reading, not a statement from Google.

All three waves remain credible: every tool saw them, and several site owners wrote to Glenn Gabe that they saw the September 30 drop. Their exact size should be read with caution, however, since the peaks of distorted results fall on the same days. A drop a tool showed during those weeks may never have happened. For your own site, Search Console remains the reference: its figures come from Google itself and do not depend on any outside collection.

What Google announced

The announcement is two sentences long, posted on September 24 at 9:15 a.m. Pacific time on the Google Search Status Dashboard. The update applies globally and to all languages. The rollout could take up to two weeks.

The Google Search Central team added on LinkedIn that this is a "normal" spam update. No new policy came with it, and Google named no target and no type of content. John Mueller, Google's search advocate, only confirmed on Bluesky that it would take longer than the previous ones.

Google announced the end of the rollout on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 a.m. (Montreal time), after 13 days and 16 hours. Neither the dashboard nor its ranking updates history says what the update targeted or why it took nearly two weeks.

Nearly two weeks, against under three days this year

The length is the only clue Google has left. The three earlier spam updates of 2026 were quick:

• March: 19 hours and 30 minutes;
• June: 2 days and 1 hour;
• August: 2 days and 16 hours;
• September: 13 days and 16 hours.

For the first three, Google announced "a few days." September is the first update this year to have received a two-week window. It used almost all of it.

A longer rollout suggests Google changed its detection system more deeply. That is a hypothesis: Google has not confirmed it.

How Google spots spam

Google does not publish its signals, so that nobody can work around them. It does explain its method. Most of the work falls to SpamBrain, an artificial intelligence system in use since 2018: it learns from known examples of spam, then recognizes sites no human has flagged yet. In Google's vocabulary, a spam update is an improvement to that system.

Scale explains the choice. Google says it finds 40 billion spammy pages every day. In its report on 2022, it wrote that SpamBrain detected five times more spam sites than in 2021 and 200 times more than at launch.

People are involved too. When a Google reviewer decides a site breaks the rules, they issue a manual action. That is the only case where the owner is told, in the Manual Actions report in Search Console. A drop caused by SpamBrain sends no message.

What Google's policies target in 2026

Google's spam policies range from hidden text to sneaky redirects. Four of them matter most to businesses that publish a lot or hand their content and links to vendors:

• Scaled content abuse: many pages made mainly to manipulate rankings without helping the reader. The tool does not matter: a person, an AI or both.
• Site reputation: third-party content published on an established site, mainly to ride on its rankings.
• Expired domains: an old domain bought to host low-value content on the strength of its past.
• Back button hijacking: added to malicious practices in April 2026 and enforced since June 15. A third-party script or ad code can cause it without the site owner knowing.

After the August update, American consultant Glenn Gabe published an analysis of four affected sites: AI content at scale on health and money topics, a nearly empty Amazon affiliate site, a site with more than 1.5 million programmatic pages, and mass-produced pages with malicious redirects. These are his observations, not a confirmation from Google. They still show what recent spam updates have hit: volume without value.

Why the writing tool is not the issue is explained in Does Google penalize AI-generated content?

The full method for diagnosing a drop is in Google updates: how to diagnose a drop in SEO traffic. Paid links are covered in buying backlinks.

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