1. Another Google spam update is complete

Another month, another Google update.

Google rolled out its August 2026 spam update between August 18th and August 21st.

Google didn’t give us a huge amount of detail about exactly what changed, other than confirming that it was a global spam update targeting sites violating its existing spam policies.

Some of the usual suspects include:

• Scaled content abuse
• Link spam
• Keyword stuffing
• Cloaking
• Doorway pages
• Site reputation abuse
• Expired domain abuse

So what should you do?

Well, if you haven’t been trying to manipulate Google, probably nothing.

If you saw a significant decline around August 18th–21st though, it’s definitely worth investigating rather than immediately blaming your latest title tag change.

2. ChatGPT is officially a search engine… sort of

This was probably my favourite headline from the last few days.

On August 31st, the European Commission officially designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act.

So yes, according to the EU, ChatGPT is officially a search engine.

Kind of.

This doesn’t mean OpenAI suddenly flicked a switch and turned ChatGPT into Google overnight. ChatGPT Search has existed for quite some time.

Instead, this is a regulatory classification. ChatGPT reported around 159 million average monthly users within the EU, putting it well over the 45 million-user threshold required for the designation.

The bigger takeaway for SEO is probably what this represents.

People aren’t only finding information through traditional search engines anymore. ChatGPT is now large enough, and being used for search frequently enough, that regulators are treating it within the same category.

If you still think AI visibility has absolutely nothing to do with SEO, I think that argument is getting increasingly difficult to make.

3. We can finally see AI visibility in Google Search Console

Speaking of AI search…

Google has also finally rolled out dedicated AI performance reporting within Google Search Console.

The report shows how often your website appears across features including AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Great!

Unfortunately, the main metric we currently get is impressions.

Not so great.

There’s no query-level data and we still can’t properly understand how many people actually clicked through from those AI appearances.

Still, it’s a start.

I’d personally use this alongside Bing Webmaster Tools and third-party AI visibility tracking rather than treating the Google report as your complete picture of AI search performance.

4. Google changed how some manual actions work in Europe

This one needs a bit of clarification because the headline makes the change sound much broader than it actually is.

Google has not stopped applying manual actions within Europe.

The change specifically relates to manual actions for site reputation abuse.

Site reputation abuse is essentially where third-party content is placed on an established website primarily to take advantage of that site’s existing authority and rankings.

From August 30th, if one of these manual actions is applied:

• Outside the European Economic Area, the affected part of the website can still be directly impacted in search results.
• Within the EEA, the manual action itself won’t affect what users see.

However, Google may separate that section of the website within its systems and effectively make it earn rankings independently instead.

One important distinction for anyone reading this from here: the UK isn’t part of the EEA.

So this isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for UK parasite SEO.

5. Are PDFs disappearing from Google?

This is another interesting one.

During August, SEOs started noticing significant drops in Google visibility for PDFs.

Some fairly major organisations appeared to be affected too, including the IRS and New York State websites.

Google’s John Mueller acknowledged the reports and said he’d take a look.

Interestingly, some of the affected PDFs then started appearing again shortly afterwards.

So, is Google intentionally killing PDFs?

Probably a little early to say that.

For now I’d categorise this firmly as something to keep an eye on rather than something you need to immediately start changing your website over.

If your site relies heavily on PDFs for organic traffic though, I’d definitely have a quick look at Search Console and see if anything unusual happened during August.

6. Google Business Profile reviews can disappear after reinstatement

Here’s a fun one for local SEO.

Google has now added guidance acknowledging that reviews can sometimes disappear after a suspended Google Business Profile is reinstated.

So you could successfully get your profile back…

…only to discover the reviews have gone missing.

Google is aware of reports of this happening and its current guidance is pretty straightforward: if reviews disappear following reinstatement, contact Google Business Profile support.

Importantly, this doesn’t mean every suspended profile will lose its reviews.

It also doesn’t necessarily mean those reviews have been permanently deleted.

But considering how important reviews can be for both local visibility and, more importantly, whether somebody actually chooses your business, it’s definitely something I’d check immediately following a reinstatement.

7. And finally, Google briefly forgot what some brands looked like

During August, a number of websites suddenly lost their favicons within Google Search and were given Google’s generic globe icon instead.

Even LinkedIn was affected.

Naturally, this led to plenty of SEOs investigating favicon implementations only for Google to eventually confirm that the problem was actually on their side.

The issue appears to have largely been resolved.

Google also updated its favicon guidance shortly afterwards, so if yours is still missing, make sure it:

• Uses a square 1:1 ratio
• Is at least 8×8px
• Is preferably larger than 48×48px
• Can be crawled by Google
• Uses a stable URL

Otherwise, if it disappeared in August and came back by itself, you can probably stop blaming your developer.

That’s it for September… for now

Search is changing ridiculously quickly at the moment.

The thing I find most interesting from this batch of updates isn’t actually another spam update.

It’s that within the space of a few days we’ve had Google give SEOs dedicated AI visibility reporting and the European Commission officially classify ChatGPT as a search engine.

Traditional Google SEO obviously isn’t disappearing tomorrow.

But the definition of “search” is getting considerably bigger.