Table of Contents
Google Just Cleared Out the Junk, and That's Good for You
The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces
"Everybody's talking about this spam update, but we didn't see our rankings move at all. Did we dodge something, or are we supposed to be doing something now?"
Epic Web Studios
Epic Insights
Edition 26  ·  Jun 30, 2026

The Google Update That's Actually Good News

Four words that usually put a knot in a business owner's stomach: Google ran an update. So breathe. This one's different. For most of you, June's spam update is the kind that works for you, not on you.
The Big Story

Google Just Cleared Out the Junk, and That's Good for You

Between June 24 and 26, Google rolled out its June 2026 spam update. A spam update is a different animal from a core update. Google isn't rewriting how ranking works; it's aiming its spam-catching system, SpamBrain, at sites that were already breaking the rules and turning up the heat.

The targets are the usual junk: pages mass-produced by AI to chase keywords, content scraped from other sites, cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text. The stuff that's been crowding you out of results you ought to own.

It's a bit like the city finally clearing the knockoff-watch guys off your block. Nothing about your shop changed. The fakes just stopped hogging the sidewalk, and all of a sudden the real thing is easy to find.

One 2026 wrinkle to keep in mind: back in May, Google expanded the same spam policy to cover gaming AI answers, the AI Overviews and AI Mode results. So the vendors selling "get quoted by AI" shortcuts are now playing a game Google has officially called spam. Lily Ray at Amsive has been tracking brands that scaled AI content hard, several now sitting at their lowest search visibility in five years.

If you've been doing the real work, real pages for real customers, this update is on your side. No new rules to learn. The trash is just getting taken out.
What this means for your site
A spam update only stings if your site leans on shortcuts. If your pages are built for real customers, this is one of the few Google updates that can actually lift you, because it pushes the junk that outranked you back down.

Your move: This week, search your main service and your city, then look at who's ranking now versus a month ago. If thin or copycat pages slipped while you held or climbed, the cleanup is working for you. Reply and we'll pull your before-and-after read.
Quick Hits

The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces
A WordPress Plugin Is Handing Out Live API Keys
Gravity SMTP, an email plugin on about 100,000 WordPress sites, has a flaw (CVE-2026-4020) that lets anyone pull live API keys and login tokens with a single web request, no password needed. Attackers are on it hard, with more than 17 million attempts logged.
Your move: Update Gravity SMTP to 2.1.5 or later today, then rotate any connected email keys. If Epic hosts your site, no worries, we got you.
AI Search Engines Can't Agree on Who to Trust
A new study of over 127,000 AI citations found the engines barely overlap: about 70% of sources were quoted by just one of them, and only 2.7% by all five. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia, Perplexity on Reddit, and Google's AI on YouTube.
Your move: Don't chase one "AI SEO" trick. Be genuinely useful, and visible in more than one place.
Google Business Profile Now Talks to Gemini
Google connected Business Profiles to its Gemini assistant this month, so it can draft review replies, write posts, and surface your insights using your real business data. Your profile's call and booking numbers now show up inside Google Analytics too.
Your move: Let it draft, but read every reply before it posts. Your profile reporting lives in your Client Center.
Ranking Yourself #1 Can Backfire
Lily Ray dug into "best [service] in town" listicles where a company crowns itself number one. When AI used that page, it recommended a competitor instead 69% of the time, and Google has been demoting these self-serving pages since January.
Your move: If your site has a "best of" page that just ranks you first, rewrite it to honestly compare options, or drop it.
Ask Epic

"Everybody's talking about this spam update, but we didn't see our rankings move at all. Did we dodge something, or are we supposed to be doing something now?"

No news is good news here. Breathe easy. A spam update is Google going after the sites breaking its rules: the scaled junk content, the scraped pages, the sneaky tricks. If your rankings didn't budge, that's the system looking you over and finding nothing to flag. A clean bill of health, not a near miss.

So no, there's nothing you need to scramble to do. But it's a fair moment for a quick gut-check, the same way a health inspector passing the restaurant next door makes you glance at your own kitchen. Is anything on your site there for Google instead of for customers? A pile of near-identical location pages, a "best in town" article that just names you first, blog posts clearly churned out to hit keywords. If the answer is no, you're right where you want to be. If you're not sure, that's a five-minute conversation we're glad to have.
What Epic's doing for you this week
This week the team is reading the post-spam-update data so we can tell the real shifts from the noise, and we're patching the WordPress plugin flaws making the rounds right now, including the Gravity SMTP leak. We're also giving client content a fresh once-over for anything that could read as spammy to Google, even by accident, and pulling clean before-and-after numbers into your reporting. Anything that needs your eyes, you'll hear from us directly. Otherwise, your latest reports are waiting in your Client Center.
Your 15-minute self-audit

The 15-Minute Spam-Proof Check

1. Pull up your three most important pages and read them out loud. Do they answer a real customer's question, or are they padded with the same phrase a dozen times? If you cringe, a customer does too.

2. Hunt for near-duplicates. If you have a stack of location or service pages that are basically the same text with the town name swapped, that's the "scaled content" Google is cleaning out.

3. Find any "best [your service]" page that just crowns you number one. Rewrite it to honestly compare options, or let it go.

Fifteen minutes here is cheap insurance. Want us to run the thorough version? Just ask.

Thanks for reading! Got questions? Ideas? I'm all ears. Share your thoughts with me and help shape future editions of Epic Insights.

— Kristy Freeman
Epic Web Studios
k.freeman@epicwebstudios.com
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