Google September 2026 Spam Update: The Most Important SEO Changes

Have you noticed your website rankings fluctuating over the past few days? If so, you are not alone. Google has officially launched the September 2026 Spam Update, and this time, things are rolling out more slowly than ever before.

But that is not all. Over the past week, a series of important developments took place: Search Console added image search data, John Mueller addressed a strange casino-related de-indexing incident, and a new study suggests that AI Mode can significantly reduce website clicks.

Join me, SilverZ, as we review each event and analyze the practical implications for your SEO work.

September 2026 Spam Update: The Longest Rollout of the Year

Google began rolling out the September 2026 Spam Update on September 24 at 9:15 AM PDT. According to the announcement on the Search Status Dashboard, this update applies globally and across all languages, with a rollout duration of up to two weeks.

Notably, this is the fourth spam update of 2026, following rollouts in March, June, and August. However, while the previous three updates had rollout durations of "a few days" and none lasted longer than 2 days and 16 hours, Google has given this one a much longer timeframe.

Google has not disclosed specific targets for this update. That means if you notice fluctuations in rankings or traffic over the next few days, do not rush to conclusions. Check the dates of those changes in Search Console and cross-reference them with the rollout schedule. Data from the first few days may not fully reflect the impact.

Google recommends that affected sites review their spam policies. And here is the most important part: if your site violates these policies, recovery can take months, not days. Google made it clear that changes "can help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies."

Search Console Adds Image Search Filter

In a long-awaited move, Google has officially rolled out multimodal filters in the Search Console Performance report. This filter allows you to view data from searches that use images, including:

• Google Lens – searching by taking or uploading a photo.
• Circle to Search on Android – circling a portion of the screen to search.
• Uploading images to Google Search – using an image as a search query.
• "Search this image" feature in Chrome – right-clicking an image to search.

This filter sits beneath the Web search type and is rolling out globally. However, there is an important limitation: query data is not available for multimodal searches because, according to Google, these searches "primarily use images instead of text."

What does this mean for you? If you own an online store or a website with many product images, you can now see at the page level what users access when they search using images. You can compare traffic from image search versus text search by country and device.

Google stated that the multimodal report is also rolling out for the generative AI performance report. This is a crucial step toward transparency in how your content is discovered through new search channels.

John Mueller Addresses Casino-Related De-indexing Incident

A strange story caught the SEO community's attention this past week. A website owner reported that their pages suddenly disappeared from Google's index, while an unrelated casino gambling page appeared as their canonical.

Another Redditor experienced a similar situation on their site. They discovered a third-party canonical indexed under a generic JavaScript error title and suspected that Googlebot had crawled an error page.

Google's John Mueller responded that it was a possibility and instructed users to utilize the live URL inspection tool in Search Console. In a second response, he noted that each potential result leads to the page "not showing up in search for normal content."

Mueller's advice was clear: detect broken pages before Googlebot does. He runs automated tests before pushing his site live and suggests fetching important pages on a recurring schedule "so you can fix them before they become a stability issue for search engines."

Chartbeat: Google Search Traffic Drops Sharply for Publishers

A new report from Chartbeat brings concerning numbers for the publishing industry. According to the 2026 Publisher Playbook, the decline in traffic from Google Search and Discover has worsened for the second consecutive year.

Specifically, traffic from Google Search dropped 40.2% year-over-year from July 2025 to July 2026, following a 21.9% decline the previous year. For Discover, the drop increased from 6.6% to 34.3%.

Notably, the report does not clarify whether these numbers measure pageviews or pageview market share for each channel, and the network tends to skew toward news and media publishers. However, the trend is clear: channels like direct, internal, and dark social have increased their pageview market share over the past two years—channels where media companies have "greater control."

You can place your own July-to-July Search and Discover trends side-by-side with these figures for comparison, but keep in mind that Chartbeat's network leans heavily toward news.

Field Experiment: AI Mode Reduces Website Clicks

A preprint study from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University has provided thought-provoking findings on the impact of AI Mode on user behavior.

Researchers used a browser extension to track 1,100 participants in the US across three baseline days and seven intervention days. The results were striking:

• Participants shifted to AI Mode clicked on other websites 18.8 percentage points less than those using standard Google Search.
• They also gave lower ratings for trust in information on Google and satisfaction with search.

Important to note: participants only used AI Mode for 0.6% of searches during the baseline period, so the authors describe this setup as an "imposed, total adoption" scenario. The results measure a different case from normal usage and are not a forecast for any specific site.

Still, this finding is worth pondering. In August 2025, Google's Liz Reid wrote that organic click volume from Search to websites remained "relatively stable" compared to the previous year. This experiment measured a different scenario—where searches were routed to AI Mode—and showed a drop in clicks within that sample.

Takeaway of the Week: Testing Rests on Your Shoulders

Every story this week shifts a portion of the workload back to your own data.

The spam update has no published targets, so any rank or traffic changes in Search Console must be cross-referenced with the rollout dates. The multimodal filter displays pages without queries, and Mueller's response to a de-indexing incident points back to self-testing and monitoring your pages.

Chartbeat's network and the AI Mode experiment sample are not your site, so neither tells you what happened to your own traffic. As Search Console divides traffic into more viewing modes, the remaining explanation lies within the records you keep yourself.

When Data Is the Only Weapon You Control

This past week served as a reminder that in the SEO world, you cannot control Google's algorithm, user behavior, or platform changes. But you can control how you react and what you measure.

The September 2026 Spam Update is underway. If you see volatility, stay calm, take notes, and cross-reference with the rollout dates. If you own a site with many images, take advantage of the new multimodal filter to better understand image search traffic. And if you are a publisher, start building channels that you truly control.

A long rollout period means you have extra time to observe. Use it wisely.

Have you noticed any ranking volatility since the September 2026 Spam Update began? Have you tried using the new multimodal filter in Search Console to analyze image search traffic, and were the results surprising to you? If AI Mode truly reduces website clicks as this study indicates, how will you adjust your content strategy to adapt? Share your perspective below, because in this SEO game, data and adaptability are the only weapons you truly hold!