Two days is what a Google spam update normally takes. The one that finished yesterday morning took fourteen. If your traffic wobbled at the end of September, or again in the first week of October, you now have a name for it, and it is not something you broke.
Here is the rest of what moved this week.
Search and SEO
Google’s September spam update ran for fourteen days
Google confirmed early on Thursday that the September 2026 spam update had finished rolling out. It began on 24 September and completed on 8 October, about fourteen days from end to end. The March update took roughly a day. June took two. August took three. Google called this one a normal spam update in its announcement, which sits oddly beside a rollout several times longer than the last one.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable logged visible movement on 25 to 27 September, on 30 September, and again from 4 to 6 October. Several people said it felt more like a core update. Google published no figure for the share of queries affected, and the update does not target link spam.
Why this matters for your business: If your rankings moved inside either of those windows, stop hunting for a technical fault on your site. Open your Search Console performance report, set the range to 20 September through 8 October, and compare it with the four weeks before. If the drop lines up with those dates, you have your cause. Google says recovery from a spam update takes many months and arrives on a refresh rather than overnight. Read the spam policies, fix what genuinely breaks them, and be patient.
Manual penalties are being handed out again
Separately, consultants are reporting a rise in manual actions, which are penalties applied by a person at Google rather than by an algorithm. Marie Haynes said her requests for help with manual actions went from almost none to several a week. Daniel Foley Carter reported the same pattern over recent months and said some affected sites lost more than ninety percent of their traffic overnight. Schwartz found twelve recent threads in Google’s own help forum, mostly about spam in blog sections, thin content, and rejected reconsideration requests.
The sites involved are not obvious spam operations. Haynes described them as mostly legitimate businesses that have been around for years. The thread running through them is scaled content, meaning pages produced in volume with very little behind them.
Why this matters for your business: Open Search Console and look at the Manual actions report under Security and manual actions. It takes ten seconds and nobody checks it. Then, if you published a large batch of posts written by AI this year, go and read them properly. A page you would be embarrassed to show a customer is exactly the kind collecting penalties now.
Social media
Threads will not reward anything you crossposted
Threads has launched Gems, an automatic recognition for posts and replies that drive real conversation. A post that earns one gets a notification, a marker in the feed, and the option to share it. Meta picks them algorithmically on three tests, a fresh perspective, genuine back and forth, and originality. Anything crossposted from another app is excluded outright, and a reply counts only if it answers a post rather than another reply. United States only for now.
Why this matters for your business: The exclusion is the part to note, and it is not only Threads. YouTube cut the reach of Shorts that creators did not make themselves last week. Writing one post and firing it at five platforms through a scheduler keeps getting more expensive. Pick the one or two platforms where your customers actually spend time, and write for those properly.
Content and AI
LinkedIn now screens every post that leaves your network
LinkedIn’s engineering lead Tim Jurka set out this week how the platform handles what it calls AI slop, meaning generic repetitive posts that carry no real insight. Classifiers now run on every post distributed beyond the author’s immediate network, at what LinkedIn says is ninety four percent precision. The report button added to the feed in August drew more than a million users in under three weeks. LinkedIn had already reported a forty percent drop in views of this kind of content.
Why this matters for your business: If your LinkedIn reach has thinned this year while you have been posting thought leadership drafted by AI, that is a likelier explanation than bad luck. The answer is not to stop using AI. It is to put something in the post that only you could have written, such as a number from your own books, a client situation, or a decision that went badly. Use the AI to tidy the writing, never to supply the thinking.
On Tuesday OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 with what it calls Intelligent UI to every ChatGPT user worldwide, free accounts included from Wednesday. Answers now arrive as charts, buttons and small interactive tools instead of plain text. More than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week, and when the answer is a working tool, the reason to click through to any website drops again.
Automotive
Feeds that change too often may now be rejected instead of corrected
This is a Merchant Center change rather than a dealer announcement, but vehicle feeds are where it bites hardest. Google has quietly revised its documentation on automatic item updates, the system that reads your landing page and corrects your feed when the two disagree. The new wording says automations may not work for products whose price or availability changes more than once a day, and that where Google detects a mismatch the product may be disapproved instead of updated. If mismatches mount up, Google may stop updating that feed at all. The page changed on 27 September and was spotted this week.
Why this matters for your dealership: Stock is precisely the kind of product this describes. A vehicle sells, comes back, gets repriced for a weekend promotion, and for a few hours your feed and your vehicle detail page disagree. Until now Google corrected you. Now it may pull the listing instead, and a disapproved vehicle is invisible in Vehicle Ads and Shopping. Check your feed schedule this week. If your dealer management system pushes once a day while your website prices update live, that gap is your problem. Get them onto the same cycle, and put an alert on your Merchant Center diagnostics so a rising disapproval count reaches a person early.
What to do this week
- Check the Manual actions report in Search Console. Ten seconds, and almost nobody looks.
- Compare 20 September to 8 October against the four weeks before, and stop blaming your site if the dates line up.
- Read the last ten posts you published. Cut anything a customer would not finish.
- Dealers, match your feed update schedule to how often your website prices actually change.
- Choose two social platforms and write for them properly instead of crossposting to five.
If you would like someone to go through your Search Console and your product feeds with you, get in touch.
Sources
- Google September 2026 Spam Update Has Finished Rolling Out
- Google Search Issuing More Google Manual Action Penalties?
- Google Merchant Center May Disapprove Products That Change Frequently
- Threads recognizes top posts with Gems
- LinkedIn exec offers insight into the battle against AI slop
- GPT-6 and Intelligent UI for everyone