Google rolls out its fourth spam update of the year

On September 24, Google started rolling out its September 2026 spam update. It's the fourth of the year, after March, June and August, and it comes with one notable difference: Google says it may take up to two weeks to complete, while the previous ones wrapped up in a day or two.

What happened

Google announced the update on its official Search status dashboard, without a blog post or any detail about which kind of spam it targets. What it did confirm:

• It applies worldwide and in all languages.
• It's a spam update, not a core update. It doesn't change how Google judges quality in general, but how it detects practices that break its policies.
• The rollout may take up to two weeks. As of this writing (October 5), the dashboard hadn't marked it complete.

During the rollout it's normal to see rankings move up and down for many sites, including ones doing nothing wrong, because results get reshuffled as other pages drop.

What it means for your business

If your site follows good practices, this update shouldn't hurt you, and it may even help if you were competing with low-quality pages. The risk lies in a few tactics that have become common and that Google's policies explicitly penalize:

• Scaled low-quality content: publishing dozens of automatically generated pages (with or without AI) just to rank, with no value for the reader.
• Near-identical pages per city or service ("plumber in city A", "plumber in city B") that only swap the place name.
• Bought or traded links to climb the rankings.
• Renting out sections of your domain to third parties for content that has nothing to do with your business.

Using AI to write isn't a problem in itself. Google doesn't single it out as a target; what it penalizes is content mass-produced to manipulate results.

What we recommend

1. Don't make big changes while the rollout is underway. The swings these days aren't final, and overhauling your site blindly can make things worse.
2. Once it's done, compare in Search Console the clicks and impressions for the two weeks after September 24 against the two weeks before.
3. If you've clearly lost traffic, review your site against Google's spam policies and remove or improve the problem pages. Recovery isn't immediate: it can take months for Google to recognize the changes.
4. If nothing changed, carry on. Useful content written for your customers is still the best protection against these updates.

In short

It's a routine spam update, just longer than usual. Wait for it to finish before drawing conclusions and, if your traffic drops, check your site against Google's policies instead of improvising. If you'd like us to analyze the impact on your site, let's talk.