Sharp falls in Google search traffic were more than four times as common during Google’s September 2026 spam update as in weeks with no update at all, according to data published by Diib on 9 October.
The update ran from 24 September to 8 October, Google’s Search Status Dashboard shows. Google said it “applies globally and to all languages”, so it covered Australian sites as well as everyone else’s.
What Diib Measured
Diib compared each site’s average daily visits from unpaid Google search in the 14 days before each 2026 update with the 14 days after it finished. For September, the “after” period was the rollout itself, from 24 September to 6 October.
It then counted the sites that lost half or more of their search visits while their other traffic held within 25% of normal.
During the September spam update, 5.8% of 34,597 sites fell into that group. Around Google’s other 2026 updates the figure was between 1.0% and 1.5%, and in weeks with no update it was 1.3%, Diib reported.
Diib said six of the seven 2026 updates looked like an ordinary couple of weeks in its data.
An Earlier Read on a Different Measure
Diib had published a first look on 29 September, and it measured something else.
That study covered 32,569 sites and compared 24 to 26 September with the same days a week earlier. It looked at the share of each site’s visits that came from unpaid Google search. The median site’s share fell from 34% to 31%, and 10% of sites saw that share fall by half or more, against 5% the week before, according to Diib.
“Three days into a rollout that could last two weeks, this is an early read, not a verdict,” Diib said at the time.
The 29 September numbers track a share of visits, while the 9 October numbers count sharp drops in search visits, so the two sets stand apart.
Rank Trackers and What Searchers Saw
Not all of the movement in rank trackers matched what searchers saw, according to SEOmonitor. “Since September, rank trackers across the industry have shown sudden ranking changes that people searching in Google weren’t seeing,” SEOmonitor said.
From 24 September, according to SEOmonitor, Google began sending back incomplete and incorrect results to automated searches. Those showed up in rank trackers as sudden drops or spikes, and SEOmonitor reprocessed the affected keywords between 25 and 28 September.
A second phase followed, the company said. Between 9 and 13 October some incorrect results were recorded in its platform, affecting about 10% of tracked keywords, and those keywords were reprocessed on 13 October.
SEOmonitor said the spam update’s own ranking changes were genuine. “These changes are real,” it said of them. According to SEOmonitor, real changes from the update usually hold across consecutive days and show up as matching changes in Search Console impressions and clicks.
Search Engine Journal said the 24 September to 8 October window gives a fixed period for comparing Search Console performance before, during and after the update. A dip inside that window does not automatically mean the update caused it, the outlet added.
What Google Tells Affected Sites
“Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those,” Google’s documentation says.
Those policies list practices including cloaking, expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse, according to Google Search Central. Google detects violations through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action.
Months, Not Days
On recovery, Google’s documentation talks in months. “Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies,” its documentation says.
For link spam updates, Google says making changes might not bring an improvement, because ranking benefit from spammy links is lost and “cannot be regained”.
Diib attached its own caveats to the 9 October figures. Timing alone cannot prove the update caused every drop, it said, and the data cannot show which sites Google flagged for spam.
Buzzline’s other reporting for business owners is in the Business section.
Sources: Diib, “Of Google’s Seven 2026 Updates, Only September’s Spam Update Stands Out in the Data”, 9 October 2026 (https://diib.com/start/insights/google-2026-updates-search-traffic-impact/); Diib, “Google’s September 2026 Spam Update: What Diib’s Early Data Shows”, 29 September 2026 (https://diib.com/start/insights/google-september-2026-spam-update-early-data/); SEOmonitor, “Google’s changes to how it serves search results and impact on SEOmonitor” (https://help.seomonitor.com/en/articles/17299790-what-s-behind-the-ranking-changes-since-september-26); Google Search Central, “Google Search spam updates and your site” (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/spam-updates); Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search” (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies); Google Search Status Dashboard, “September 2026 spam update” (https://status.search.google.com/incidents/XhUDXP7A67iHCD2kmbVu); Search Engine Journal, “Google Completes September 2026 Spam Update After Nearly 14 Days”, 8 October 2026 (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-september-2026-spam-update-complete/592283/)
Illustration: this image was generated by AI and is not a photograph of any real business or website data.
Illustration: AI-generated for Buzzline Press Release.
An AI-made picture of an empty small-business office in an inner-Melbourne terrace at first light. It shows no real business and no real website data.
