Epic Insights

Edition 34  ·  Aug 25, 2026

The Big Story

Google released the August 2026 spam update on Tuesday the 18th and marked it complete early Friday morning. Two days and sixteen hours, global, every language. That was roughly the whole announcement. Google added only that it was a normal spam update and pointed at a spam policy page it hasn't changed since December.

Here's why the label matters. A core update is Google rethinking what counts as a good result for everybody. A spam update is narrower. It re-runs the filters that catch sites breaking rules Google has already published, and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reported that this one left link spam and the site reputation abuse policy alone. If you aren't doing the things on that list, most of what you saw last week was other sites shuffling around you.

It's weeding, not relandscaping. A few things get pulled, everyone else gets a little more room. And it runs both ways. Along with the usual complaints last week, people posted screenshots of traffic coming back after months away, apparently sites the filters had caught by mistake.

Worth knowing how these work underneath. Spam updates demote, they don't promote. Any lift you saw last week is other sites falling rather than a reward for something you did. Which cuts the other way too. If nothing on your site breaks Google's spam rules, there's nothing here for you to recover from.

Glenn Gabe, who tracks these closely, said he's hoping this one thins out the pages written purely to get quoted by AI answers. Google's spam policies do now cover attempts to manipulate AI responses. Whether it landed there is still being counted, so treat that as his read and not a Google statement.

Quick Hits

Ask Epic

Careful with that one. Reddit's share of citations in ChatGPT Search fell from roughly 3.83% in late July to 0.52% by mid-August, an 86% drop in about a week, and nobody has a confirmed explanation for it yet. Lily Ray at Amsive expects swings like this to settle and to keep pointing back at plain content quality.

Building a plan on a number that can fall off a cliff without warning is like renting a billboard on a road the county might close. The billboard is fine. The road is the problem.

None of which means stay away. If your customers genuinely ask questions in a forum, a Facebook group, or a trade board, being useful there is worth doing on its own terms, and it was worth doing before anyone counted citations. What we'd skip is paying someone to seed mentions because a dashboard rewarded it last quarter. Those tactics age badly, and the platforms notice.

The steady bet is the boring one. Be the business people describe accurately when they're already talking about you. Not glamorous. Still the thing that works.

What Epic's doing for you this week

This week the team is in Search Console for managed clients with the dates split at August 18, going page by page instead of site-wide. An update wobble and a genuinely broken page look identical until you zoom in, so we're zooming in. We're also reading through Google Business Profile Q&A sections, because anyone can answer a question on your profile and those answers sit there in public whether you've seen them or not. Security patching continues on the handful of WordPress sites we maintain. Anything worth your attention shows up in your Client Center.