Google's September 2026 spam update is its longest rollout of the year at up to two weeks, leaving sites unable to diagnose ranking moves until the middle of October. Search Console also added image and multimodal search data but withholds the query terms behind it.
The Take: Google made your rankings harder to diagnose and your search data thinner in the same week, and it is calling one of them transparency. The September spam update will take up to two weeks to finish, the longest rollout of the year, so any Australian business watching traffic slide has no clean read until the middle of October.
What changed: Google began its September 2026 spam update on 24 September with a rollout window of up to two weeks, the longest spam rollout of the year. For comparison, its March, June and August updates each finished inside two days and 16 hours. Google has not said what this one targets.
The mechanics: In the same window Google added a multimodal filter to the Search Console performance report covering Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads and Chrome's search-this-image feature. You can now see that someone found you through a picture. You cannot see what they were looking for, because the query data on multimodal search is withheld.
The catch: A two-week rollout means a fortnight where a ranking drop could be the update still landing or a real fault on your own site, with no way to tell which. This is not more visibility. It is a longer blackout dressed up as a feature. For a small operator with no SEO retainer to lean on, that fortnight of guessing is the whole game. The wrong reaction to it can bury a site that was fine.
The longest Google spam update rollout of 2026, against under three days for every prior update this year
Australia leans on this harder than most. Search advertising alone is growing about 9.1% and holds roughly 23% of the country's ad revenue, and organic search sits right beside it as the cheapest demand most Australian businesses have.
For Australian operators: Do not touch your site in a panic during the rollout. Wait for Google to confirm the update is complete before you read anything into a ranking move. Log your current positions today so you have a clean before-and-after. Treat the new image-search data as a discovery signal rather than a keyword report, and make sure your product images are labelled and structured for visual search, not only for text.