Google’s last spam update was finished in three days. This one arrived with a warning attached that it may take two weeks, and it started running on Thursday.
That is the most important thing on your desk this morning. If your rankings move over the next fortnight, you have a dated reason to check before anyone blames the ad account.
SEO and search
Google’s September spam update has a two week window on it
Google released the September 2026 spam update on Thursday 24 September. The wording on its status dashboard is plain. The update applies globally and to all languages, and the rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.
The length is the part worth noticing. This is the fourth spam update of the year. March finished in under twenty hours, June took just over two days and August took under three. September has been given a window four times longer than any of them, and John Mueller confirmed the estimate was not a typing error.
Google will not say what share of queries it affects or exactly what it targets. It has said the update does not go after link spam, and it has repeated its usual line that there may be collateral damage. Recovery, where it happens, takes months rather than weeks.
One complication. Tracking tools also spiked on 23 September, a day before the announcement, and that earlier movement remains unconfirmed. So this week has two separate causes of ranking movement running at once.
Why this matters for your business: Export your Search Console data and your rank tracking today, before the rollout muddies the comparison. If you have thin service area pages, mass produced product copy or links you paid for at some point, look at those first. Then hold your nerve on any single day’s movement, because with a rollout this long Monday’s picture will not be the final one.
Search Console now shows you camera searches for the first time
Google split the Web search type in Search Console into two on Wednesday. One half covers ordinary typed queries. The other, labelled multimodal, covers results triggered by an image, a photo or a screenshot.
That opens up four routes you could never see before. Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and the Chrome option to search an image from the right click menu. Mueller confirmed this is genuinely new data rather than a relabelling of numbers already sitting in your reports.
One catch. The queries dimension is switched off for multimodal, so you get impressions, clicks, pages and devices, but no keywords at all. Google has also not said whether the overall Web figure now adds both types together, which matters if you compare against last year.
Why this matters for your business: If you sell anything people photograph, and that covers décor, food, plants, parts, fashion and tourism, you may have had visibility you never knew about. Pull the new filter before your next monthly report, and check what the Web line on your client dashboard actually counts now, because the definition may have shifted underneath you.
Social
Instagram’s boss says posting more is what holds brands back
Adam Mosseri published a short video series this week explaining how Instagram ranks content, and one line in it is worth more than all the rest. Without ranking, he said, the feed gets overrun by whoever posts most, and businesses and brands post a great deal more than creators and ordinary people do.
He named four things that drive ranking. Originality, recency, breaking content, and how many people the system thinks might want to see a post. He also confirmed Instagram shows small accounts’ public posts to people who do not follow them, to see how they respond.
Worth saying plainly, most of the series is fairly general, and it arrives while Australian regulators push platforms to offer people a way to switch ranking off. Read it as positioning as well as advice.
Why this matters for your business: The head of the platform has said on record that volume is the thing ranking works against. Cut your posting frequency and put the saved effort into making each post worth engaging with. Judge yourself on engagement rate per post rather than on how many you shipped this month.
Content marketing
Shoppers rank discount codes first and targeted ads last
Sprout Social surveyed 2,286 social media users across the United States, United Kingdom and Australia in August, asking what actually drives a festive purchase. A promo code from a brand or an influencer came first at 30 percent. Targeted social ads came last of six options at 18 percent.
Social media and physical stores tied at 46 percent as the top place people discover gifts, rising to 54 percent among Gen Z shoppers. Half of respondents want brands to be more authentic and a quarter want them to be less salesy.
No South African respondents were included, and it measures intent rather than behaviour. Read the ranking, not the percentages.
Why this matters for your business: With Black Friday coming and household budgets tightening, a trackable discount code handed to three or four local creators will probably do more than the same rand boosted behind a post. You also get attribution that a boosted post will never give you.
Automotive
The repo rate went up today and your payment calculator is now wrong
The Reserve Bank raised the repo rate by 25 basis points to 7.25 percent, taking prime to 10.75 percent with effect from today, 25 September. The Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously. It is the second hike of 2026.
The arithmetic looks small by the month and large across a term. On a loan over six years with no deposit at prime, the rise adds roughly R64 a month on R500,000, which works out at about R4,583 more interest across the full term. August inflation came in at 4.4 percent, and the Bank framed the move as imported cost pressure rather than strong local demand.
Why this matters for your dealership: Every from R x per month badge on your vehicle detail pages, every instalment filter on your used stock listings and every finance calculator on your site is running on yesterday’s prime rate unless somebody changed it this morning. A stale figure costs you test drive enquiries and it is an advertising accuracy exposure you do not need. Fix the rate input today, because a buyer shopping to a monthly budget just lost a little room.
What to do this week
- Export your Search Console data and rank tracking today so you hold a clean baseline before the spam update finishes rolling out.
- Add the multimodal filter to your next monthly report and confirm what your Web total now counts.
- Update the prime rate in every finance calculator and monthly instalment filter on your site.
- Cut your Instagram posting frequency and start measuring engagement rate per post instead of volume.
- Brief three or four local creators with a trackable discount code before the festive rush begins.
If you would like us to run the baseline export or check your instalment figures, get in touch.
Sources
- Search Engine Roundtable on the September 2026 spam update
- Google Search Status Dashboard incident
- Search Engine Journal on the rollout window
- Search Engine Roundtable on the 23 September volatility
- Search Engine Roundtable on the Search Console multimodal filter
- Google Search Console performance report documentation
- Social Media Today on Adam Mosseri’s ranking series
- Net Influencer on the Sprout Social festive survey
- Sprout Social Q3 2026 Pulse Survey
- IOL Business on the repo rate rise and vehicle repayments