TL;DR Summary:
Spam Update Rolling: Google started the September 2026 spam update on September 24, and this slower rollout is expected to last about two weeks instead of finishing in a few days.New Search Insights: Search Console now separates image-driven traffic with a multimodal filter, making it easier to track Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, and Chrome’s image search.Ad Metrics Shift: Google also added experimental CrUX ad metrics for ad count, density, and weight, which are best treated as diagnostics rather than ranking signals.September 2026 Spam Update Brings a Slow-Rolling Ranking Shift | Week of September 27 2026
Yes, there was a confirmed algorithm update this week: Google began rolling out the September 2026 spam update on September 24 at 9:15 a.m. PDT. It is the fourth spam update of 2026, and unlike the prior three, which each finished within days, this one is expected to take roughly two weeks to complete. The rollout coincides with new Search Console reporting features and added CrUX ad metrics documentation, giving site owners several fronts to monitor at once.
September 2026 Spam Update: Slower Rollout, No Disclosed Target
Google’s Search Status Dashboard confirms the update started September 24 and applies globally, in all languages. Google has not said which spam tactics it targets, only confirming it does not target link spam and does not touch every spam policy. John Mueller confirmed the two-week timeline is intentional, not an error, a contrast to the August 2026 spam update, which wrapped in two days. Site owners seeing ranking swings over the next two weeks should check Search Console data first before attributing changes to this update, since the rollout window is long enough for unrelated fluctuations to overlap.
Search Console’s New Multimodal Filter Splits Out Image-Based Traffic
On September 24, Google added a multimodal filter to the Search Console Performance report. It isolates traffic from searches that used an image, including Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, direct image uploads, and Chrome’s “Search this image” right-click feature. One limitation: the queries dimension is not available for this traffic, since multimodal searches are image-driven rather than text-driven. This is the first time site owners get a dedicated view of visual-search traffic separate from standard text queries, useful for sites with strong product or image-heavy pages.
CrUX Ad Metrics Land in Page Experience Documentation
On September 22, Google added new Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) ad metrics to its page experience search help documentation. The metrics cover ad count, ad density, and ad weight, based on real Chrome user data. Google’s documentation and industry recaps, including Search Engine Roundtable, both describe these as experimental and explicitly not a confirmed ranking factor. For now, treat this as a diagnostic signal for ad-heavy pages rather than something to optimize toward for rankings.
Weekly Recap Adds Regulatory Context From the UK
Barry Schwartz’s weekly recap on Search Engine Roundtable ties this week’s stories together: the spam update rollout, the Search Console multimodal filter, and the CrUX ad metrics addition. The recap also notes the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will require Google to make it easier for users to switch default search providers on Android and Chrome. This is a regulatory development rather than an algorithm change, but it could affect default search traffic share on UK devices over time.
A Story Just Outside the Window: Discover’s “Dive Deeper” Feature
Google is reportedly testing a “Dive deeper” AI feature inside Discover that may reduce clicks to publisher sites. This was first disclosed September 18, which falls just outside the strict seven-day window from September 27, so it is not confirmed as this week’s news and is not verified here as active or rolled out. Publishers relying heavily on Discover traffic should watch for follow-up reporting confirming whether this feature is live, and to what extent, before making any traffic-forecasting decisions based on it.
What to do this week
Open Search Console’s Performance report and filter by search type to check whether a multimodal option appears for your property yet; if it does, compare image-driven traffic against your total impressions for the past 7 days.
Check the Search Status Dashboard entry for the September 2026 spam update rollout dates, and log your rankings for your top 10 pages daily through early October so you can separate update-related swings from unrelated changes. To make this daily tracking less tedious, a tool like Screpy’s rank tracking and technical audit dashboard can log keyword positions automatically and flag site health changes, helping you separate genuine spam-update impact from unrelated technical issues.
If your site runs display ads, review the CrUX ad metrics section of Google’s page experience documentation and note your ad density on your three highest-traffic pages, treating any findings as diagnostic only, not a ranking fix.
If you publish in the UK, monitor for CMA-related default search provider prompts appearing on Android or Chrome, and check whether your organic traffic share from these platforms shifts over the next month.
