The first stage of the Google September 2026 Spam update seems to have been felt in a big way starting Friday, September 25th, with even more movement on Saturday, September 26th and then ending on Sunday, September 27th. There is more to come, since we are only five days into the two-week rollout.
The volatility may be calming today, a bit, but it was a pretty heated weekend after the announcement of this September 2026 spam update. It does feel like these spam updates are having more of an impact that the older spam updates from years ago.
What exactly this update is targeting is not fully known yet, but I do suspect we will see lots of tactics that get hit by this update - not just one specific tactic...
As a reminder, this spam update was announced Thursday, September 24th at about 12 pm ET. Google told us it would take about two weeks to roll out. So far, it has only been less than five days since the rollout began.
Here are what the tools are showing - look at the Saturday volatility in these tools:
Google Volatility Chart
Wireboard - this report shows the aggregate of the tools above and plots them on one chart:
AWR:
There are a number of comments about the impact of this update in my original post.
Glenn Gabe shared some early data on Friday but I assume he will share more today - I'll update this post with those charts when they are out:
'Spam Update Notes' cont'd: The next interesting finding was about our favorite AI-generated site, Grokipedia. I have covered the crazy surges and drops over time, but it's very interesting to see it drop even more with the mid-September volatility. So whatever Google pushed out… pic.twitter.com/hH0Yj64F53
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2026
Update with more from Glenn:
Google Morning Google Land! This is the 9/28 edition of "Spam Update Notes". I shared on Friday about the update starting to show itself, but this weekend it *really* showed itself. I'm seeing big drops across a number of sites. And that's across verticals and countries (which… pic.twitter.com/WW5Q7fAX1a
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 28, 2026
"Spam Update Notes" cont'd: I couldn't post this update without mentioning "Mt. AI" again. Yep, I'm seeing several examples of that while analyzing the September spam update. And again, you can use "Mt. Programmatic" as well. Same deal... Or like I shared in my post about the… pic.twitter.com/HuZnsu4WuZ
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 28, 2026
Has this update hit you over the weekend? If so, how badly and what did it specifically target on your site?
Forum discussion at X.
