Has anyone else noticed changes in their rankings or organic traffic after Google's latest spam update?
Google rolled out the August 2026 spam update globally, and the rollout was completed on August 21.
I'm particularly interested in what people are seeing with sites that use:
- AI-assisted content
- Guest posts and sponsored content
- Expired domains
- Scaled content
- Programmatic SEO pages
- Aggressive internal linking
- Third-party content published on established domains
- Large numbers of low-value pages
I'm also curious about site reputation abuse. Google recently clarified its policy around third-party content being published on established websites primarily to take advantage of the site's reputation and improve rankings.
For those monitoring sites after the update, have you noticed any particular patterns in Search Console or rankings?
Did you make any changes after seeing the drop, or are you waiting to see whether things stabilize before changing your SEO strategy?
Would be interested to hear what others are seeing rather than just the usual "Google update = traffic drop" discussions.