Google’s September 2026 spam update does not arrive with a stated target, but it does arrive with a longer clock. That is the theme in this SEO Pulse: more Google data splits and more responsibility land on your own records.
The spam update gets two weeks
Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on September 24 at 9:15 a.m. PDT. It applies globally and across all languages, and Google’s Search Status Dashboard gives it a rollout window of up to two weeks.
That matters because Google gave the three earlier spam updates this year a short “few days” window, and none took longer than 2 days and 16 hours. This time the first few days of movement may not tell the whole story. Compare ranking and traffic changes in Search Console against the rollout dates before you conclude you have been hit.
Search Console adds image-search visibility
Google is rolling out a multimodal filter in the Performance report for searches that start with an image. It covers Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome’s right-click “Search this image” option. It sits under the Web search type globally.
Query-level detail is absent because these searches “mostly use images rather than text,” according to Google’s dimensions help page. But you can still see page-level performance by country and device. For product pages and image-heavy content, that is a practical way to find visual search winners. Google says multimodal reporting is also coming to the generative AI performance report.
Mueller’s advice: catch broken pages before Googlebot
John Mueller responded to a Reddit report where pages left the index while an unrelated casino page was treated as their canonical. Another Redditor described the same issue and suspected Googlebot had crawled a generic JavaScript error page. Mueller said that could be an option, and pointed to Search Console’s live URL test.
His practical advice was to run automated tests before pushing a site live and to fetch critical pages on a schedule so you can fix them before search engines pick up a stable problem. Monitoring is not an afterthought.
Two traffic benchmarks to compare
Chartbeat’s 2026 Publisher Playbook says Google Search fell 40.2% year over year from July 2025 to July 2026 across its publisher network, after a 21.9% decline the year before. Discover’s decline grew from 6.6% to 34.3%. The playbook does not specify whether the figures measure pageviews or share of pageviews, and the network skews toward news publishers.
A separate field experiment from University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University forced 1,100 U.S. participants into Google’s AI Mode after a three-day baseline. Those in AI Mode clicked through to other websites 18.8 percentage points less often than people using regular Google Search, and they reported lower trust and satisfaction. Baseline AI Mode use was only 0.6%, so this is a full-adoption scenario, not a site-level forecast.
What to check this week
- Overlay any ranking or traffic changes with the spam update’s rollout dates, not just day one.
- Pull the new GSC image filter by country and device to spot visual search pages.
- Schedule fetches for pages that drive revenue or authority, then fix errors before Googlebot settles.
- Benchmark your July-to-July Search and Discover trend next to Chartbeat’s network, not instead of it.
Google is splitting traffic into more views: image searches, generative AI, spam update windows. The records you keep are now the part of the data you control.
Source: Search Engine Journal
