Two Google developments landed this week, and both deserve your attention today. Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on September 24. On the same day, Google announced multimodal search reporting in Search Console. One creates ranking volatility. The other creates a brand new measurement channel. Here is what changed, and exactly what you should do about it.
What is the September 2026 spam update?
Google’s Search Status Dashboard lists the September 2026 spam update as beginning September 24, 2026, with the rollout still in progress. Google says these rollouts can take up to two weeks to complete. The update applies globally, across all languages.
Search Engine Journal reports this is the fourth confirmed spam update of 2026, following updates in March, the June 2026 SEO update, and August. Google did not announce a specific spam tactic targeted by this release, so treat it as a broad spam systems refresh rather than a strike against one technique.
How should you respond while the rollout is running?
Do not panic, and do not rebuild your site mid-rollout. Your job this week is diagnostic discipline: observe carefully, segment the data, and avoid attributing every traffic dip to the update.
Run this checklist now:
Annotate September 24 everywhere. Mark the rollout start in GA4, Search Console exports, dashboards, and client reports. Future you will thank present you.
Compare like with like. Compare post-September 24 performance against the immediately preceding period and the same weekdays. Do not compare a Tuesday to a Sunday and call it a finding.
Segment before you conclude. Break changes down by directory, template, query intent, country, device, and search appearance. A localized issue, like scaled pages, syndicated sections, third-party content, or hacked URLs, looks very different from a domain-wide quality problem. Treat them differently.
Check Manual Actions separately. An algorithmic spam update will not appear under Manual Actions or Security Issues in Search Console. Check those screens anyway, because a real penalty and an algorithmic swing require completely different responses. Work through a structured technical SEO checklist before you assume the update hit you.
Hold major reversals. Do not push sitewide rewrites or roll back legitimate changes while the rollout is still moving. Wait for it to complete unless you find a clear policy violation or security issue.
One more rule: do not blame the update for declines that started before September 24. If traffic fell on September 20, that is a different investigation.
What is Search Console’s new multimodal search filter?
Google announced web multimodal search performance reporting in Search Console on September 24. A new filter under Web search separates text-based searches from multimodal ones. It joins the growing set of Search Console AI performance reports that SEOs now rely on.
Multimodal covers web results triggered when an image forms part of the search: Google Lens, Circle to Search, uploaded images, and Chrome’s “Search this image.” If a user points their camera at a product and lands on your page, that visit now shows up in its own bucket.
The important limitation: Google reports page-level performance but no query dimension. Google does not expose text queries for these searches because many of them start from an image, not typed words. You learn which pages get discovered through visual search, but not which image or object started the journey.
How do you use the multimodal report?
Export a baseline now, before you forget. Then compare:
- Multimodal clicks and impressions by landing page
- Multimodal versus text-based performance for product and category templates
- Device distribution, with special attention to mobile
- Country-level differences in visual search behavior
For ecommerce SEO, this report connects directly to product discovery. Google’s own guidance says product feeds, structured data, and crawlable product attributes increasingly determine whether AI systems can understand and recommend products. Use the multimodal data to check whether your best product imagery, alt text, and Product markup line up with the pages visual search actually surfaces. If you sell online, reconcile your Merchant Center feed against your rendered product pages this week.
What else changed this week?
Two smaller items worth knowing:
VideoObject markup gained a creator property. Google’s September 24 documentation update added creator to supported VideoObject markup, confirmed continued support for author, and clarified which interaction types interactionStatistic supports. Audit your reusable video schema markup components rather than editing pages one by one, and make sure creator entities match what visitors actually see on the page. This is a documentation update, not evidence that the property boosts rankings on its own.
Google clarified its llms.txt position. Google states that llms.txt is not needed for Google Search and has neither a positive nor a negative effect on Google Search visibility or rankings. Keep your crawl controls focused on robots.txt and the standard directives Google actually documents.
Your action plan for today
- Annotate September 24 in every report and dashboard you own.
- Open Search Console and check whether the multimodal filter is available in your properties.
- Export your first multimodal baseline for image-heavy pages.
- Do not attribute pre-September 24 declines to the spam update.
- Audit video schema templates for creator and author accuracy.
Search keeps moving toward visual and AI-driven discovery, and this week handed you both a volatility event and a new lens to measure it. As AI-shaped discovery grows, the way you track AI visibility matters as much as the way you track rankings, and your zero-click content strategy needs to account for journeys that never start with a typed query. If you want a second pair of eyes on your Search Console data during the rollout, get in touch.
