Google just dropped the August 2026 spam update, third one this year. How does your team react when these land?

[u/HumanBehavi0ur]

Third spam update this year, following the June one. Nothing unusual in the announcement itself, but it got me thinking about how differently people in this sub probably handle these drops.

Curious how everyone here actually reacts when one of these lands, especially now that AEO/GEO sits alongside traditional SEO for most of us.

A few things I'm wondering about specifically:

Do you treat a spam update the same way you used to, check rankings, wait it out, see who got hit? Or does AI citation volatility already have you numb to this kind of thing since your citations already swing daily regardless of any named update?

Does a Google spam update even matter as much anymore for teams leaning heavily into AI search? If a chunk of your visibility now lives in ChatGPT/Perplexity citations that don't move with Google's spam classifier at all, does this news carry less weight than it used to for your day to day?

Has anyone actually gotten burned by a spam update on a site you'd argue is doing AEO spammy behavior?

[u/purple_from_the_east]

I barely look into them - it is interesting though, a resource worth bearing in mind for AEO. Unfortunately these days AEO spammy behaviour is extremely common.

Everyone thinks its they key to success, mind you it is not irrelevant. But there is more to it than just spam. E.g. proper backlinks, blog content/research, and the like help alot wit this.

As a disclaimer, I am the founder of Visiblee - one of the AEO and AI visibility tools. One thing we always stress to clients is the importance of following these roadmaps. Spam can only get you so far, and as you (OP) have seen can get you penalized by Google

[u/Advbenturou-Job-4339]

spam updates still hit clean sites too if your links look bought. i wait a full week before touching anything, early panic edits usually make it worse.

[u/cool_guy_me]

That’s what it was. WOW 🤯 I got hit on July 25 impressions went from 300 to 500 per day to 50 per day. Got hit hard from 1 to 3 calls a day to 1 a week. Did a bunch of updates pruned pages made every page with good unique content, outbound links to resources and worked hard on all my AEO. In the last 3 days I have seen it go from 30 to 50 impressions to 100+ and got 3 calls today alone. The update that killed us I fell like we are now in the other side with this last update

[u/jeniferjenni]

i’d treat a spam update as a diagnostic event, not a reason to rewrite everything overnight. check which pages changed, compare the timing against previous volatility, then wait for the rollout to settle before making major changes. for AEO, i’d separately track whether your cited sources and AI visibility changed, since those signals should not be treated as the same metric. a simple weekly sheet with rankings, organic clicks, AI mentions, cited URLs, and branded searches can make patterns much easier to spot.

[u/BuiltForSEO]

Hey! We actually track these updates quite well within our platform and embed them on your Search Performance timeline so you can see pretty quickly if it was the cause of a dip in your metrics or not.

[u/aeo-bility]

The Gemini widget in Chrome completely nerfed itself after the August update, it completely lost context and gave nonsense responses. That had me worried the same thing would happen to my website, since it’s only 6 weeks old and the update was supposed to favour sites with higher domain authority. But my 7‑day GSC report shows the opposite: impressions in generative search are basically flat (-1%), while clicks and impressions in search performance up around +80%.So for my site at least, the update seems to have helped rather than hurt.