Google September 2026 spam update done rolling out

Google has confirmed the September 2026 spam update, which was released on Thursday, September 24th at around 12:00 pm ET, is now done rolling out. The update finished rolling out on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 am ET and thus took almost 14 days to fully roll out.

Google’s announcement. Google posted about the update on its incident dashboard and wrote:

• “Released the September 2026 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.”
• “The rollout was complete as of October 8, 2026.”

You can learn more about Google spam updates in this Google help document.

Volatility. We saw volatility with this spam update a day after it was announced, on Friday, September 25th, through that weekend. Then we saw another blip in volatility around September 30th. The final volatility was between October 4th and 7th.

Google did say this is a “normal spam” update and that there is nothing specifically new with this update, outside of Google running it again. But this update took two full weeks to roll out, unlike the previous few spam updates that only took two days to roll out.

Why we care. This is the foruth Google spam update announced in 2026, the last one was the August 2026 spam update and before that was the June 2026 spam update. If your site was not impacted, then you are good to go – at least for now.

There will always be cases of sites not spamming Google that get hit by a spam update but hopefully that won’t be one of your sites.