Inside Scoop: Why the Upcoming Google Update Could Shake the Entire SEO World

Ever feel like SEO is just a giant merry-go-round, where every new trick we discover to game Google’s system is met with an equally clever countermeasure? I’ve been around the block long enough to see this dizzying cycle play out time and time again — crafty SEOs (and now GEOs) unearthing ways to hijack rankings, only for Google and AI giants to slam the door shut, leaving businesses caught in the aftermath. It’s kind of like watching a cat-and-mouse game unfold live, with the stakes being your site’s visibility and, let’s face it, your bottom line. After helping numerous companies recover from the fallout — sometimes years of lost traffic and revenue — I’ve made it my mission to sound the alarm early, because no one deserves to be blindsided by tactics sold as “growth hacks” that Google deems black hat. If you think you’ve seen this cycle before, buckle up — here’s why it feels like we’re on the brink of another seismic shuffle in the SEO landscape. LEARN MORE.

If you work in SEO long enough, you start to notice that things tend to move in cycles. First: SEOs (and now GEOs) find a way to influence the organic or AI results or exploit Google’s ranking systems to gain visibility. Their tactics become popularized, shared widely, and duplicated all over the world. Then the search engine (and now AI companies) build systems to stop those tactics from working.

I’ve presented on this – what I call the cycle of SEO – many times, because I’ve made it my mission to warn companies to help them avoid making the same mistakes as the businesses that come to me after they’ve been burned by Google. Once you’ve worked with enough affected companies and seen firsthand the devastation that these updates can cause, warning people starts to feel like a personal responsibility. Nobody should have to go through years of lost visibility and revenue because of a tactic someone sold them as a growth hack – especially companies that don’t even know that the tactics they (or their SEO agencies) are using are against Google’s guidelines.

There have been very few popular SEO exploits that Google didn’t eventually smack down – or at least try to. Google’s crackdowns aren’t perfect, and some loopholes always slip through. But some of the biggest updates in Google’s history – Florida, Panda, Penguin, the 2018 Medic update, the Helpful Content Update, and the March 2024 core update – all taught the same lesson: you do NOT want to be on the wrong side when Google finally decides to take action.

These updates can be brutal and far-reaching. In my years working on website recovery, I’ve seen dozens of sites that only dipped a toe into “gray area” tactics get hit almost as hard as pure spam sites. With whatever SEO (and now GEO) trend is currently working to trick Google’s systems, it’s usually not a question of if Google will respond, but when.

If you’ve experienced this cycle before, it should be pretty clear where in it we are right now. In this post, I’ll explain why I and several other people who focus on algorithm updates are predicting that another huge update is coming.

The TL;DR

• In my experience, Google updates its documentation with clues before launching major updates.
• Google rewrote its guidance on AI content this week. It now says it’s “critical” to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content before publishing, including titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and alt text.
• Google added new language to its helpful content guidelines defining “main content” and the four things quality raters look for: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy. Mass-producing AI content without oversight is now named as an example of little to no effort. (This also happens to be the single biggest culprit behind sites I’ve seen get hit by algorithm updates this year.)
• Google now calls fake authors a form of deception. AI-generated headshots, made-up names, and false credentials are named explicitly as a signal of a low-quality page.
• Google’s own people are saying it out loud. At Search Central Live in Barcelona this week, Gary Illyes said scaled content is becoming more of a problem than link spam.
• According to my research, Google appears to have already started reducing the efficacy of publishing self-promotional listicles in AI Overviews.
• Multiple companies are openly selling paid mentions and listicle placements to influence AI answers, usually with no mention of nofollow, sponsored labels, or disclosure. When those placements include links that pass ranking credit, that’s a violation of Google’s link spam policy, and Google has already said seeking inauthentic mentions isn’t as helpful as it might seem.
• Google has released four spam updates in 2026 (March, June, August, and September), compared to just one in all of 2025. The time between them keeps shrinking.
• Other people who study algorithm updates are seeing the same thing, including Glenn Gabe, Marie Haynes, and Cyrus Shepard.
• I’ve spent this year working with companies that were already hit by Google in 2026, both algorithmically and with manual actions, and the patterns are clear.

The Last Time This Happened

I remember the night before the March 2024 core update well. Marie Haynes – who has specialized in algorithm updates, manual actions, and website recovery even longer than I have – and I were sitting at a bar in Vegas before our talks that week at Pubcon. My presentation would be about the tactics I saw sites using that I predicted were likely to get hit hard by the next Google update.

I told Marie I was confident Google would eventually do something, but I was also surprised it was taking so long to go after what seemed like such obvious examples of spam in its results. She told me she had a feeling Google was going to drop something really big, really soon.

She wasn’t wrong. The next day, Google announced the March 2024 core update – which ended up being one of the biggest updates in Google’s history, and at 45 days, the longest core update rollout Google has on record – along with three new spam policies: site reputation abuse, scaled content abuse, and expired domain abuse. I spent the evening rewriting my slides. These tactics were no longer just “likely” to put a site at risk – Google had named specific policies targeting the same tactics I was about to present in my talk.

Looking back, the warning signs were everywhere:

• Google told us to “buckle up.” At BrightonSEO San Diego in November 2023, Google’s Search Liaison at the time, Danny Sullivan, said there were so many ranking improvements coming that he didn’t want to say “buckle up,” because people would freak out (recording via Search Engine Roundtable). The phrase stuck anyway, and Google repeated the message in January and again in February.
• The Search Liaison account kept hinting at something big. Danny replied to people on X for months, implying that the specific spam problems they flagged were being worked on.
• Google quietly changed its stance on AI content. With the September 2023 Helpful Content Update, Google removed the words “written by people” from its guidance and replaced them with “helpful content created for people.” From what I saw, many people interpreted this as a green light for scaling AI content. Six months later came the scaled content abuse policy.
• It was not a secret that Google’s SEO spam problem was out of control. In November 2023, The Verge published “The people who ruined the internet,” a long feature blaming SEOs for the state of search. (I was interviewed and quoted in this article in the months leading up to its publication, right around the time of the Helpful Content Update.)

When Google finally took action, it came in the form of a massive core update, along with three new spam policies that led to manual actions against companies of all sizes. Google said the update reduced low-quality, unoriginal content in its results by 45%.

Google Often Gives Us Clues Before It Takes Action

The warning signs before the March 2024 update weren’t unusual. Many of Google’s biggest crackdowns were preceded by public warnings that were not always taken seriously. And from what I have observed, Google often updates its documentation or quality rater guidelines shortly before – or right alongside – major updates. If you know where to look, the clues are usually there in writing.

• January 2011: Matt Cutts wrote that spam had increased and that people were asking for stronger action on content farms. What followed: the Panda update, February 2011.
• March 2012: Matt Cutts said at SXSW that Google was working on a penalty for “over-optimized” sites. What followed: the Penguin update, April 2012.
• July 20, 2018: The quality rater guidelines added new emphasis on the reputation of a site and its content creators. What followed: the “Medic” core update on August 1, 2018 – 12 days later.
• September to November 2023: Google removed “written by people” from its helpful content guidance, and Danny Sullivan said, “buckle up.” What followed: the September 2023 Helpful Content Update, then the March 2024 core update and 3 new spam policies.
• January 23, 2025: The quality rater guidelines rewrote the Lowest and Low quality sections to match the spam policies, adding scaled content abuse and AI content published without human review. What followed: the March 2025 core update on March 13 – seven weeks later.
• May 15, 2026: Google clarified that its spam policies apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and published a new guide on optimizing for AI features. What followed: the May 2026 core update on May 21 – six days later – followed by the June 2026 spam update the next month.
• September to October 2026: Google rewrote its AI content, main content, and authorship guidance, and Google speakers said scaled content is a bigger problem than link spam. I think by this point, it’s fair to assume from these recent communications that something big is on the horizon.

The gap between the warning and the update has ranged from a few weeks to a few months. In some cases, the timeline can be much shorter: Google even announced the Helpful Content Update a week before it started rolling out in August 2022.

The Warning Signs This Time

1. Google Rewrote Its AI Content Guidance

On October 1, Google updated its guidance on using generative AI content. It now reads:

“It is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.”

The same review applies to titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt text. As Barry Schwartz pointed out, “critical” is a word Google rarely uses in its documentation. The page also now points readers to the sections of the quality rater guidelines on scaled content abuse and on content made with little to no effort or originality.

I see this as the biggest warning sign, because scaled AI content is also the biggest culprit behind the algorithmic demotions and penalties I’ve seen this year. This content is often full of hallucinations and inaccuracies. Not only does this create a poor experience for Google’s users, but it’s also a problem for Google’s own AI systems, which can pick up those errors and repeat them back to users as fact in products like AI Overviews and AI Mode. I wrote about this cycle in “The AI Slop Loop.”

2. Google Defined “Main Content” And What Makes It Good

This same week, Google added a new section to Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, the document I’ve long considered the clearest explanation of what Google’s systems are trying to reward. It says the quality of the main content is “one of the most critical factors” for assessing page quality, and lists 4 things raters are trained to look for: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy.

The definition of effort is the part that should worry anyone scaling content with AI:

“…using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort.“

The accuracy bar is also higher for YMYL topics, where content “must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus.”

If you use AI to create or help create content, especially at scale, I would take this as a serious warning from Google. In my experience, many companies assume their AI content is safe, or better than the content Google is warning about. But almost every company that has come to me after being hit by an algorithm update thought its content was better than Google ultimately decided it was.

3. Fake Authors Are Now Officially A Form Of Deception

Google also added this to the same page:

“Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception. Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page.”

The quality rater guidelines already told raters to treat fake author profiles as deception. This is something I’ve written, posted, and presented about for years, and it’s certainly not a new tactic. What’s new is that Google is now saying it directly to site owners, and connecting it to its automated systems rather than just to raters. Search Engine Journal found this paragraph wasn’t on the page in June.

This isn’t a theoretical problem – it’s already causing quality issues in Google’s results. Fake AI experts have been showing up everywhere – including an AI-generated “art therapist” who was quoted more than 30 times in the media before anyone noticed. I also observed this as a common tactic employed by sites hit by the Helpful Content Update and other recent core updates, including in 2026.

4. Google’s Own People Are Saying It Out Loud

At Search Central Live in Barcelona this week, according to John Campbell’s recap:

• Gary Illyes said scaled content is now becoming more of a problem than link spam (!!!)
• Duy Nguyen said there have been more spam updates recently because there is so much more new content, and that the team is now using AI to catch more of it.
• Duy also told the room to read the quality rater guidelines, and defined quality using the same 4 attributes from the new documentation: effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy.

Google said it updated its AI content documentation “to get our documentation in sync with our presentations we use at our developer events.” In other words, the message Google has been giving in person is now in writing.

From my perspective, Google puts this guidance in writing so that when an update hits and site owners are caught off guard, it can point back to the documentation and show that the warnings were there all along.

5. The GEO Tactics Look A Lot Like The Old SEO Tactics

Many of the most popular GEO tactics right now are old SEO spam tactics with a new label: mass-produced AI content, self-promotional listicles where a brand ranks itself No. 1, fake reviews and “inauthentic mentions” bought to influence what AI tools recommend, and automated Reddit posting.

While these approaches have undoubtedly worked well to influence AI responses and citations so far, some of this is already being cleaned up. In my research on self-promotional listicles cited in AI Overviews, the brand that ranked itself #1 was left out of the actual recommendation 69% of the time. I recently updated this data, looking at 100 “best B2B software” queries, and found that this trend has grown even stronger in September 2026:

Compared to June, Google’s AI Overviews now cite 38% fewer self-promotional “best of” listicles, and they leave the publishing brand out of the recommendation 83% of the time, up from 69% in June.

Also, in 70% of cases, the listicle is now helping competitors get recommended while the brand that published it is left out:

It’s not just Google that’s taking action against spam. In March, Reddit started labeling legitimate bot accounts and requiring some suspicious accounts to verify they’re human. In July, it said its automated systems were catching 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day, as it works to stop brands from planting posts meant to get them recommended by ChatGPT and Gemini. Reddit also recently banned four subreddits used in a GEO experiment that relied on automation bots for upvotes and comments.

6. Paid Mentions (Inauthentic Mentions) Are The New Paid Links

Paid brand mentions – which are basically the 2026 version of paid link building, but focused on generative AI responses – deserve their own warning. A growing number of companies now openly sell placements on other people’s sites, pitched as a way to get recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. Here’s what’s being sold right now:

• Placements in third-party “best X” and “top X” listicles, sold per placement and priced by the site’s Domain Rating or Domain Authority, often starting around $135 to $250 each.
• Packages of “AI brand mentions” added to existing listicles, reviews, and buying guides, such as five mentions for $1,500.
• Listicle placements that guarantee a dofollow link.
• Agency playbooks that say that if outreach doesn’t work, “many of these sites accept paid placements” – sometimes for a one-time payment of $100 or $200.
• Fully managed “offsite” services from AI visibility platforms that handle publisher outreach, content, negotiation, and payment to land mentions on third-party sites.
• Integrations that send the sites AI tools cite to a placement network, which automatically handles outreach, drafting, negotiations, and payment, offering either fixed-price placements or “reverse mentions.”

When these placements include links that pass ranking credit, this is link buying with a new name. Google’s link spam policy lists “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” as a violation. Paid links are only allowed when they’re qualified with rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow,” and the FTC generally requires paid relationships behind endorsements to be clearly disclosed – something these sales pages rarely mention. Google has also addressed paid mentions directly: its guide to generative AI features says “seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem,” and its spam policies now cover “attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search.” At a Search Central Live event in May, Gary Illyes reportedly compared buying mentions to buying links.

7. Spam Updates Are Coming Faster

Google has released 4 spam updates in 2026: March (24-25), June (24-26), August (18-21), and September (started on the 24th). In all of 2025, there was only one. The time between them keeps shrinking: 92 days from March to June, 55 from June to August, and 37 from August to September.

The September spam update is also different from previous spam updates. The first three were each expected to take “a few days,” and each finished within 3 days. September’s was given “up to two weeks” – the same window Google uses for core updates. Search Engine Roundtable saw big movement from September 25 through 27, and the early signs I saw were that it was hitting sites with highly templated, programmatic, (likely) AI-generated pages, like one page for every phone number or area code. As of this writing, Google has not marked the September update complete.

Google has also been tightening its spam rules all year, according to its documentation:

• April 13: a new spam policy against “back button hijacking.”
• April 14: Google said it may now use spam reports to take manual action.
• May 15: Google clarified that its spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Search, meaning AI Overviews and AI Mode.

And Google potentially has new tools to enforce them. In September, Search Engine Journal reported on a Google paper describing SAFE, a system built to detect AI-generated spam, which the paper says is already in early deployment (although it appears to be focused on video content, for now).

Don’t Just Take My Word For It

I’m not the only one who sees the warning signs. Other industry experts who have spent years tracking algorithm updates, manual actions, and site recoveries have been saying the same things, often and loudly.

Glenn Gabe

If you follow Glenn Gabe, you’ve probably noticed that his warnings to site owners have ramped up in recent weeks. For one, he and Barry Schwartz spent minutes 8-10 in this “SEO for Paws” charity webinar talking about the likelihood of a big update coming soon:

Glenn has been posting “Spam Update Notes” throughout the September spam update, and has documented the August 2026 spam update hitting scaled, programmatic, AI-generated, and thin affiliate content. After Google’s documentation changes this week, he wrote:

“For those still wanting to scale via AI or programmatic content, Google is clearly trying to tell you something.”

The next day, he added:

“…with all of the doc updates, and Google presentations from the past year, I feel like we are going to see a very big update from Google.”

He also pointed people to the new deceptive authorship language, with one word: “BEWARE.”

Marie Haynes

Marie has been studying Google’s algorithms since 2008 and calls the helpful content documentation her favorite piece of Google’s guidance. In her breakdown of the changes, she wrote:

“If you focus on the advice in the helpful content documentation, you are much more likely to align with what Google’s ranking systems aim to reward!”

She connects the timing to Google’s new Gemini 4 Argon model, noting that big jumps in model capability have often been followed by big ranking changes. Her conclusion: “I predict we will soon have a significant core update!”

Earlier this year, she also wrote about the rise in pages stuck in “crawled – currently not indexed,” noting that in almost every case she examined, the pages had quality issues.

Cyrus Shepard

Cyrus just finished surveying more than 130 SEO experts on what drives rankings in Google search and Google’s AI features. Content quality – defined as originality, accuracy, and freshness – was one of the top three ranking factors, and original research and first-party data ranked highest within it. On what earns visibility in AI search, his write-up is blunt: “saying the same thing as everyone else using common facts isn’t a great way to get noticed by AI.” What works instead, as one expert quoted in the write-up put it, is “original data, a test somebody actually ran, a firsthand observation.”

After this week’s documentation changes, Cyrus called the updates “significant,” pointing to the new section on effort, originality, talent or skill, and accuracy, and to a new section on how content was created, where “Google seemingly wants you to disclose when AI automation is used.” When Marie replied asking whether Google wrote this “to prepare us for the aftermath of an upcoming update,” Cyrus answered: “As Hamlet would say, ‘that is the question.’”

Three SEO experts with different methods and different client bases, all landing on the same conclusion: Google is giving us ample clues about what its systems are looking to reward, and what they’re about to start demoting.

What I’ve Seen In My Own Work This Year

I’ve spent much of 2026 working with companies that have already been hit – some algorithmically, some with manual actions. I’ve also spent the majority of the year reverse-engineering the patterns among hundreds of other companies hit by Google’s spam, core, and unconfirmed updates. The sites are different, but the patterns are strikingly similar.

• Content published at a scale that human teams are unlikely to be able to produce. This could be hundreds or thousands of pages added in a short window, often across topics the site has no real experience in. The scale often followed prior periods of relatively low publishing frequency.
• Templated, programmatic pages. One page per city, per phone number, per product comparison, with only a few words changed between them. This is a version of doorway pages, and it’s been a common pattern among impacted sites for at least 15 years.
• “Human in the loop” wasn’t enough. Several sites claimed to have human editors reviewing the AI drafts. Google devalued them anyway, because the problem wasn’t the quality of individual sentences – it was the overall pattern and quality of what the site was publishing.
• Authors who don’t exist, or who didn’t write the content. I’ve found multiple examples of companies using made-up authors and AI-generated headshots – even when publishing on YMYL (your money, your life) topics.
• Self-promotional content aimed at AI search. Listicles ranking the brand #1, and comparison pages written mainly to be cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews. Many companies hit by Google’s January 2026 unconfirmed update published hundreds, or even thousands, of such pages.
• The damage didn’t stay in Google’s organic results. When these sites lost organic visibility, their citations in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and often ChatGPT dropped too.

This is why I’ve moved most of my clients to a “less is more” content strategy, focused much more on content quality and originality than on scale.

What To Do Before The Next Update

Nobody outside Google knows when the next big update will land or exactly what it will target, and everything in this article is meant to be an informed opinion based on years of observing these patterns. But Google has told us, in writing, what it considers low quality. If any of these describe your site, now is the time to fix them:

1. Look at what you’ve published at scale. If you added large amounts of AI-generated or templated content, ask honestly whether each page offers anything that isn’t already available elsewhere. The most aggressive way to prepare is to remove a substantial amount of this content if it’s not performing well. Otherwise, heavily edit and improve it, or find opportunities to scale it down or consolidate the content.
2. Audit your author pages. Every author should be a real person, with a real photo, and credentials that are true. Replace invented personas with real people or an honest team byline. If your site uses a generic name to publish on behalf of the company, provide more detail about your editorial approach and policies.
3. Consider disclosing whether and how you use AI. It isn’t required, but Google suggests adding AI or automation disclosures where readers would reasonably expect them. Being upfront about how your content was made also helps build trust with readers.
4. If you’re going to use AI to create content, make sure a person fact-checks and reviews all of it. That includes the main content, titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and alt text, which Google now names explicitly.
5. Reconsider the self-promotional tactics aimed at manipulating AI search responses, especially when done at scale. Listicles ranking yourself No. 1, paid mentions, and automated Reddit posting are exactly the kind of thing spam updates exist to catch. While they’ve worked as a loophole for a while, many companies have already been hit hard for abusing these tactics this year.
6. Read the source material yourself. Google’s helpful content guidance, AI content guidance, spam policies, and the quality rater guidelines.

The timing of when this update might happen is uncertain, but I do believe it’s a matter of when, not if. Every time I’ve seen this many warning signs line up – more spam updates, rewritten guidelines, Google employees repeating the same message on stage – a big update has followed. And in my experience, it’s much easier to clean things up before the update than to spend a year recovering after it.

More Resources:

This post was originally published on Lily Ray NYC Substack.

Featured Image: Igor Link/Shutterstock