September 2026 Spam Update: What To Do

If your rankings or traffic have jumped around this week, you're not imagining it. Google began rolling out its September 2026 spam update on 24 September, and it's still going.

What we know so far

Google said the rollout could take up to two weeks. It's the fourth spam update of the year, and it landed hard. Search Engine Roundtable's recap for 28 September says it had a big impact over the weekend, and the forums have been busy with people comparing notes. Search Engine Journal has a good round-up if you want to see what others are reporting.

We don't know yet who has gained and who has lost, because the rollout isn't finished. Anyone who tells you exactly what this update targets, this early, is guessing.

Don't change anything yet

The temptation is to do something. Rewrite the pages that dropped, delete old posts, disavow a pile of links. Please don't, at least not this week.

Rankings move around while an update rolls out, and some of that movement settles back on its own. If you change ten things now and your position recovers next Tuesday, you'll never know whether your changes helped or the update simply finished.

Write down what you see today

Note your main keywords and where they sit right now. It takes ten minutes, and it gives you a starting point to compare against once things calm down.

How to tell if it touched you

Start with the size of the move. A handful of keywords wobbling by a place or two is normal, and it happens in any week. A sharp fall across most of your keywords, starting around 24 September, is worth a closer look.

Then check the shape of it. Did one page lose ground, or did the whole site? A single page usually points to something about that page. A whole-site drop is a different conversation.

Open Search Console and compare clicks and impressions for the same days of the week before and after 24 September. Search Console's figures lag by a couple of days, so don't judge the last few days on the chart. Google's spam policies list what it considers spam, and reading them once is a reasonable use of ten minutes. Most sites that do honest work will find nothing there that applies.

Falling out of the top 30

A keyword that was on page two and has vanished is a bigger signal than one that slipped from 4 to 6. In our reports we mark a keyword that has dropped out of the top 30, so it doesn't hide inside an average. If you track rankings another way, look for the same thing.

A new filter for image search

Separately, Search Console added multimodal search filters to its performance reports this week. That gives you a way to see traffic from image-based searches, which was hard to separate before. Search Engine Roundtable covered the change.

It's useful right now for a plain reason. If your clicks dipped, you can check whether the dip is in ordinary web results or in image search, and you'll know which one to look at.

AI Overviews are still growing

The other story worth knowing about is AI Overviews. Comscore data shows them appearing in 39.4% of US desktop searches in June 2026, up from 25.8% a year earlier. A round-up of studies puts the share of US Google searches that end without a click at 68%. Ignite Visibility summarises the figures.

Those numbers are about the US, and they're a different story from the spam update. But they matter for how you read your own charts. Your position can hold steady while your clicks fall, so watch both, and don't treat every dip as a penalty.

What to do while it settles

Wait for the rollout to finish. Google's Search Status Dashboard shows when it's done, and give it a week after that before you judge anything.

Keep checking your rankings on the same day each week, so the comparisons are fair. Keep a note of anything you change and when. And if you spot something clearly wrong on your site, fix it, because that was worth doing before the update too.

Where we fit in

Every Monday our reports check where your keywords sit on Google, down to the top 30 on desktop and mobile. Clicks and impressions from Search Console sit beside them, so a rankings change and a traffic change show up in the same place. You can see how that looks on the features page.

If you'd like to have that history in place before the next update, you can start a free trial and add your keywords.