I believe we are seeing the final phase of the Google September 2026 Spam update rolling out between October 4th and October 6th, today. The update should be done any day now, so there may be another spike in volatility, but I suspect this is it - we are pretty much done with this spam update.
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
Google has updated the Google Maps and Business Profiles Prohibited & restricted content policy's advertising and solicitation section to list what merchants and business owners cannot post on their listings and posts.
Google has added information to the Search generative AI control page in Search Console about when a child property overrides the parent setting for AI controls.
Google Ads is testing displaying the advertiser's name within the click to call phone number call asset on the sponsored listings. Normally, Google will just show the phone number but in this test, Google is also adding the advertiser's name.
Google now lets you check off multiple countries within the Google Search Console country filter in the performance reports. This lets you group countries together, to see how your search performance is doing for multiple countries at once, instead of one country at a time.
Google's John Mueller was asked why Google continues to crawl tons of pages on a large website but indexes only four of them, and why the home page isn't indexed. John categorized the site as a "large product aggregator."
Around the same time Google updated its helpful content search documentation with defining main content and the new EOT/SA sections, Google also posted a warning to "avoid using deceptive authorship information."