Google's latest spam update has finished rolling out after nearly two weeks, taking longer than any of the three spam updates it ran this year.

Google’s September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on Oct. 8, nearly 14 days after it began.

The Google Search Status Dashboard lists the update as ending at 1:00 a.m. PDT, with a note stating, “The rollout was complete as of October 8, 2026.”

I reported the launch on Sept. 24, when Google said the update applies globally and to all languages.

Google said at launch that the September spam update’s rollout “may take up to two weeks to complete,” and it used nearly all of that time. Google’s ranking update history lists it at 13 days and 16 hours.

This year’s three earlier spam updates took 19 hours and 30 minutes in March, 2 days and 1 hour in June, and 2 days and 16 hours in August.

The August 2025 spam update ran longer, from Aug. 26 to Sept. 22, 2025, or about 27 days.

Google’s spam updates documentation describes a spam update as a notable improvement to its automated systems for detecting spam. As of publication, neither that page nor the update’s two dashboard notes say what the September rollout addressed or why it took longer than this year’s earlier spam updates.

On Sept. 29, Diib published early data on the rollout from 32,569 websites with connected Google Analytics. It compared each site’s share of visits from unpaid Google search on Sept.

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