Update (September 28, 2026): On September 24, Google confirmed a September 2026 spam update, with a rollout expected to take up to two weeks. The volatility that began September 15 has still not been officially confirmed. The advice below applies to both: document, watch for patterns, and hold off on changes until the dust settles.

If your rankings looked different this morning than they did last week, you are not alone. On September 15, the SEO community started reporting big swings in Google’s search results, and nearly every ranking volatility tracker we watch lit up at the same time. Semrush Sensor, Mozcast, Sistrix, AccuRanker, Algoroo, Wincher, the whole set. When that many independent tools spike together, it is not a fluke. Something is moving inside Google.

Google has not confirmed anything yet, and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who has tracked these things for two decades, does not expect them to confirm it quickly. That is normal. Google rarely announces an update the day it starts, and sometimes it never announces one at all. So we wanted to write this for our clients and anyone else watching their traffic with a slightly elevated heart rate today.

What a Google update actually looks like from your side

You usually will not get an email. You will notice it in one of three places. Your Google Analytics organic traffic line will dip or jump for no obvious reason. Your Search Console clicks and impressions will shift, often for specific pages rather than the whole site. Or a keyword you have owned for years will suddenly show a completely different set of results, with pages you have never seen ranking above you.

That third one is what people in the forums are describing right now. One site owner put it plainly: many of the terms they used to rank for dropped, and entirely different pages took their place. Others are reporting spammy results creeping onto page one and AI Overviews that do not match the query. UK results got called out first, but the movement is not limited to one country.

This also is not coming out of nowhere. There was a stretch of instability between September 4 and 12, and what started on the 15th looks like a bigger wave building on top of it. So if the last two weeks have felt bumpy, you were reading it correctly.

Why you should not touch anything yet

This is the part I say to every client, and I will say it again here. Do not make changes to your site in the middle of a rollout.

Google updates roll out over days, sometimes weeks. Rankings during a rollout are not final. Pages bounce, settle, bounce again, and then land somewhere. If you rewrite your homepage on day two because you dropped three spots, you are reacting to a snapshot that will not exist by day ten. Worse, you now have no clean way to know whether your recovery came from the update settling or from the change you made. You have muddied your own data.

It is very easy to panic-edit your way out of a ranking you would have gotten back on your own. The pages that hold up best through an update are almost always the ones that were already doing the right things: real expertise, content written for actual customers, clean technical foundations, and a site that has earned mentions from other credible sources. Those do not need an emergency rewrite.

What to do this week instead

Write down the date. Seriously. Open a note and record September 15, 2026 as the day you first noticed movement. When you look back at your analytics in November trying to figure out what happened, you will be glad you did.

Then go into Search Console and take a baseline. Look at the last 28 days of clicks and impressions by page and by query, and export it. This is your “before” picture. In two or three weeks, when the update has finished rolling out, you compare against it and see what really changed, not what felt like it changed on a bad Tuesday.

While you wait, pay attention to which pages moved rather than how far. If your service pages are steady and only your blog posts wobbled, that tells you something different than if your homepage disappeared. If a competitor jumped past you, look at their page honestly. Sometimes they earned it. Sometimes they are riding a wave that will recede.

And if you see obviously spammy sites outranking you for your own name or your core service in your own city, note it but do not chase it. Those tend to get cleaned up as the update finishes, and Google’s spam systems usually catch up within a couple of weeks.

When it is actually time to act

Once the movement stops, and the trackers go quiet for a few days in a row, that is when the real work starts. Pull your “after” report and compare it to your baseline. Look for patterns. Did pages with thin content drop? Did pages that answer a specific question in the first paragraph gain? Did anything with outdated information slide?

Google’s updates over the past two years have consistently rewarded the same things: content that shows first-hand experience, pages that get to the point, sites that are clearly run by real people with real credentials, and businesses that show up in other places online beyond their own website. If a page lost ground, the fix is rarely a keyword tweak. It is usually making the page more useful, more specific, and more obviously written by someone who knows the subject.

That is also the moment to check the boring stuff. Page speed, broken links, pages that should be indexed but are not, duplicate content from an old redesign. Updates have a way of exposing technical debt that was quietly costing you before anyone noticed.

What we are telling clients right now

Breathe. Take your baseline. Keep publishing on your normal schedule. Do not fire anyone, hire anyone, or rebuild anything based on this week’s numbers. Give it until the end of the month, then let’s look at the data together and make decisions based on what actually settled.

If you would like a second set of eyes on your Search Console before and after this update, or you are seeing something on your site that does not make sense, reach out to us. We have been reading Google’s mood swings since 1998, and this one is not the scariest we have seen. It just needs patience and a plan.