We measured the August spam update across 946 of our own keywords: 7 out of 8 projects had a normal week

On 25 August I wrote here that I would not publish conclusions about this update until I had data, and that the date was today. Here it is. It does not say what I expected.

The industry finally has its first analysis with a sample

Yesterday, 27 August, the first one worthy of the name came out. SE Ranking measured 100,000 keywords across 20 industries in the US market and found that 16.71% of the URLs sitting in the top 10 fell beyond position 100 between 17 and 22 August, against 9.2% in a July window with no confirmed update. An 82% increase in disappearances. It is exactly the data point that had been missing since the 18th.

Google's status dashboard, meanwhile, still shows nothing new after 18 August, even though unconfirmed volatility spikes are being reported around the 26th.

How I measured the update across my own portfolio

Before reading anyone else's analysis, I measured mine. Eight projects with weekly rank tracking, 1,357 tracked keywords and eight different sectors, Spanish market, desktop results.

All eight are checked on the same day of the week, and that gives me something you cannot buy: two seven-day windows that are exactly comparable. The update window, 14 to 21 August, which contains the entire rollout. And a control window, 7 to 14 August, the previous week with no confirmed update. Same sample, same tracker, same weekday. The only thing that changes between them is that one had an update in it.

What did not change

The general churn was the same: 61.8% of keywords moved during the update and 64.1% during the control week. Median movement was one position in both windows.

And disappearances, keywords that drop out of the range I track, came in at 6.7% against 6.5%. That difference means nothing.

That is the figure that surprised me most, because it runs straight against the day's headline. My metric is stricter than SE Ranking's: they measure falls beyond position 100 and I track down to 30, so a fall from position 5 to 60 counts as a disappearance for me and not for them. Measured with the more sensitive of the two yardsticks, it did not move.

What did change

One single thing: losing the top 10 doubled. 10.8% of the keywords sitting in the top 10 lost it during the update, against 5.6% the week before. With 640 and 627 keywords as the base, that difference holds up.

It is a different phenomenon from the one in the headline. There were no collapses in my portfolio: there were first-page losses with the keyword still visible.

And now the uncomfortable part: it is not the market, it is one sector

That 10.8% is not spread out. Broken down by project, one alone, the events one, went from 9.3% to 33.7% in top 10 losses. The rest did not:

• Legal: 4.3%, with 186 keywords in the top 10.
• Automotive: 4.1%, with 97.
• B2B logistics: 9.1%, with 44.
• Pharmacy: 6.2%, and it lost fewer top 10 spots during the update than the week before, when it was 13.3%.

If I take the events project out of the sample, the aggregate difference disappears: 7.4% against 5.1%, inside the noise. The effect I see across my portfolio is not general. It is one sector.

What I take from this

That "the update hit hard" and "nothing happened to your site" can both be true at once, and usually are. A sample of 100,000 keywords tells you how the aggregate behaved; it does not tell you whether your Tuesday drop is this update.

With seven of my eight projects indistinguishable from any ordinary week, the recommendation I gave on 25 August does not change: when you drop, audit against the current spam policies before assuming the update is to blame. It is still far more likely that the cause is on the site than on the calendar.

We are reviewing the events project now, and there the question is not whether it was the update. It is what those URLs had that made them vulnerable to stricter enforcement of rules that have not changed. When I know, I will write it here.

Methodology: Ahrefs Rank Tracker across 8 projects in 8 sectors, 1,357 tracked keywords, Spanish market, desktop results. 946 keywords held a position inside the tracked range in the update window and 950 in the control window. Weekly checks on the same weekday in both windows: 14 and 21 August 2026 for the update, 7 and 14 for the control. Differences assessed with a two-tailed test of proportions. We do not include identifiable client data: projects are grouped by sector.

Google declared the August 2026 spam update closed on 21 August at 01:49 Pacific time. It began on the 18th, so the rollout lasted 2 days and 16 hours: the longest of the three spam updates released this year. A few days ago I pointed out it was too early to assess who it was hitting and, four days after the close, that has not changed.

What Google has confirmed (and the 4 profiles in the crosshairs)

Google has provided no further detail since the close: no post on the official blog, no new policies, no extra guidance. The status dashboard update simply confirms the rollout is finished. The same premise applies as on day one: these are the spam policies already published, enforced more harshly.

What can be stated with certainty, based on Google's official rules rather than speculation, is which profiles have long been in the crosshairs:

• Mass-produced content: automated or bulk generation of low quality.
• Doorway pages: URLs created solely to funnel users to other destinations.
• Expired domains: purchases of old domains aimed at exploiting their prior authority.
• AI content to win citations: a practice tied directly to June's spam update, where Google equated mentions bought in AI summaries with paid links.

Impact analysis: why it pays to wait until 28 August

Four days after the close, there is still not a single rigorous analysis with data isolating this update's real impact. What circulates today amounts to lists of "sites at risk" that merely restate the spam rules that already existed before 18 August.

The criterion stands: a first reliable reading requires letting a week pass after the close, which puts the analysis on 28 August. Publishing conclusions ahead of time would just replicate the rushed volatility of the 24-hour reports.

Recommended steps while the data settles

If you suspect a negative impact, the useful work is not tracking volatility charts but auditing against the spam guidelines in force:

• If you spot questionable practices: the cause will be right there, with no need to wait for external reports.
• If the site complies with the policies: it is worth checking whether the drop responds to this update or to another factor that coincided in time.

Remember: Google tends to insist that recovery times after a spam action are always measured in months.

Google confirmed yesterday, 18 August at 9:27 Pacific time, the release of the August 2026 spam update. It applies globally and to all languages, and the notice itself says the rollout may take several days to complete. It is the third spam update Google has announced this year. I have spent since yesterday reading analyses of who it is hitting, and that is precisely the problem.

What exactly has Google said, and what has it not?

What is confirmed fits in three lines: the name, the global scope, and that it will take days. Nothing else. Google has announced no new spam policy, so the rules that apply are the ones already published, enforced through SpamBrain. It has not said which techniques it targets, which sectors it touches, or which signals carry weight.

And it is worth remembering something Google has always said about this kind of action: recovery, when it comes, is measured in months, not weeks.

How does it differ from the June spam update?

This one matters because I analyzed it here two months ago. The June 2026 spam update arrived with a stated target: it went after link spam, and Gary Illyes took the chance to confirm at Search Central Live Shanghai that buying mentions to surface in AI Overviews is spam, putting them on a par with paid links.

August's arrives with no stated target. That is a practical difference: in June you knew where to start looking the same day it was announced. Now you do not, and anyone telling you otherwise is making it up.

Why can nobody say yet who it affects?

Within 24 hours of the announcement I have already seen a specific figure circulating: that sites with good Core Web Vitals are gaining between 12% and 28% more traffic. That number is impossible. The rollout has not finished, Google warns it takes days, and nobody can isolate the effect of an ongoing update with one day of data and present it to two decimal places.

This is exactly the pattern I criticized in the Reddit guide: figures that sound authoritative and do not hold up once you check when they were measured.

What do I look at, and when?

The criterion I use is the same one I applied to the May 2026 core update: you analyze nothing until the rollout is done. With that one, the clean analysis window did not open until a week after it closed. With this one, which started on the 18th and will take days, that puts the first reliable reading at the end of August.

In the meantime, all I do is get the measurement ready: mark the start date on the projects, touch nothing that could later be mistaken for an effect of the update, and resist the temptation to explain every rise and fall of these days, which is rollout noise.

My take

A spam update with no new policy means Google has not changed the rules: it has raised the bar on enforcing the ones that already existed. If it hit you, the question is not what changed in the algorithm, but what you have been doing that already broke the rules before yesterday.

And if it did not hit you, the useful reading is not to celebrate, it is to wait: with a rollout of several days, it still can.

On 2 June Google declared the May 2026 core update done and, honestly, I had not seen a jolt like this in years. I felt it before reading any report: rankings shifting day to day on projects that had been flat for months. Then the numbers landed and confirmed the feeling, with volatility of 78/100 on Semrush, 65/100 on SISTRIX and 72/100 on Accuranker. One of the strongest updates in years.

What surprised me most was the cadence. This update arrived just 43 days after the March update, the fastest pace I can remember. Google no longer waits months between waves, so the idea of "I will wait for the next core to recover" falls short: by the time you react, you are already inside the next one.

I sat down with the SISTRIX data and the split is sharp. Of 8,887 domains analyzed, 5,039 gained and 3,845 lost, but among those that moved hard the ratio was 4 losers for every winner. Amazon shed 222 visibility points. And one pattern shouted above the rest: "AI slop", AI-generated content published without editing, collapsed across the board.

When I look at who fell, the profile repeats project after project: aggregators, comparators and job portals; ecommerce with manufacturer descriptions copied verbatim; affiliate reviews without a single real test of the product; multi-topic sites that touch everything in passing; and city landing pages cloned by swapping only the name. Recycling stopped working.

And who rose is just as clear: brands with their own content, first-party sources, sites with deep topical authority and verifiable authorship (real E-E-A-T, not a decorative author box). The 2026 pattern consolidates with every update, Google rewards those who create and penalizes those who aggregate. A practical note: the clean analysis window opens on 9 June, before that the data is too noisy to decide anything.