August 2026 Spam Update Rolling Out

[newcustomeroffer]

Announced on the GoogleSC X account: https://x.com/googlesearchc/status/2089752491499938186

It may just be a small update as it says a few days to roll out, we shall see. There's been loads of volatility the past week or so, so perhaps it's actually been in progress for a while now.

Any observations from anybody so far?

[fonzi1022]

I think they're going after sites that are all AI.

[universal4]

I think they're going after sites that are all AI.

That would be good if it actually works, and we all know how confident everyone is on what they do.

Rick
Universal4

[newcustomeroffer]

Now complete - it was indeed a very short update.

[allfreechips]

hmm did not see much change in the serps on this one

[newcustomeroffer]

hmm did not see much change in the serps on this one

No, me neither - i get the feeling that the volatility about a week or so before this was announced could have been the 'real' update and google are throwing us off the scent with these announcements.

[eenzoo]

Ton of movements. Majority of CIS TG channels where the main business brand sniping is, are on fire.
Huge cross brand promo networks with +500FTD a day gone zero.

Personally I lost 5 sites complete from 150/200 uniques (visits not FTD) a day to zero

[MMM]

i see also lots of movements. now completely not related results for kw we were ranking for. either not related sites or big sites that not relevant to the topic.

[zaqwe3]

18.08 my site just went from daily impressions 500, good spots in google to complete 0.

[Tchazz]

Same here, barely any movement on my end. The one odd thing I saw was a site that held its traffic almost exactly while losing 42% of its traffic value in three days, so it had shed its commercial keywords and kept the informational ones.

[rationalodds]

Crazy movements to my aff site, multilanguage.

[abidseo]

The split in this thread is the useful signal: some sites saw almost nothing, others went to zero, and Tchazz's example kept informational traffic while losing 42% of its traffic value in three days. That pattern points less at a single cause and more at which pages were carrying commercial intent.

For anyone hit hard, I would not start with a site-wide rewrite. First separate the loss in Search Console by page type, language and query intent, and check whether it was impressions, rankings or a manual action, because a drop to zero is a different problem from a ranking slide. Then look honestly at the pages that fell: are they near-duplicates across languages or brands, do they add anything beyond the operator's own offer page, and do they rely on the same brand terms and cross-promotion pattern across several sites?

That last point matters for the brand-sniping and cross-brand cases eenzoo described. When several sites push the same brands with very similar templates, Google can treat them as one scaled pattern rather than judging each page on its own. Rebuilding one strong, genuinely differentiated page per intent, with its own testing, terms and local detail, is usually safer than trying to revive five thin variants at once.