SEO

Week 41/2026: the spam update wraps up, fake authors and ads below ChatGPT answers

The September spam update ran for almost two weeks, longer than any earlier one this year. Some of the ranking swings during that period, though, were a tracking error rather than a change in Google.

Bartosz Bielawski

Bartosz Bielawski

· 4 min read
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Week 41/2026: the spam update wraps up, fake authors and ads below ChatGPT answers

The week in three sentences

Google finished the longest spam update of the year and warned against made-up authors. Meanwhile, rank trackers showed changes that never actually happened in Google. We also learned how ads in ChatGPT really work, and Google Ads now lets you preview AI-written text before you switch it on.

The September spam cleanup took longer than usual

Signal: 1 independent source this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-08-19.

The September spam update finished on 8 October, after almost two weeks. Earlier updates this year lasted anywhere from under a day to two and a half days.

Updates are also coming more often, and the gaps between them keep shrinking. Some in the industry suspect Google is laying the groundwork for a bigger algorithm change.

What to do: compare traffic from before 24 September with traffic after 8 October, because only now can you see the update's full effect.

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Google now calls made-up authors deception

New signal: one source so far.

Google added a warning about fake authorship to its people-first content guidelines. The examples it gives are AI-generated author photos, invented names and false credentials.

Fictional personas with polished bios were a popular shortcut to looking credible. Now Google openly calls them a sign of low quality.

What to do: review the author pages on your site and keep only real people with real experience.

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Some of the late September ranking swings were a tool error

New signal: one source so far.

Starting on 26 September, many rank trackers showed sudden ranking changes. According to SEOmonitor, these didn't reflect what was really happening in Google.

The cause was that Google returned incomplete and outdated results to automated queries. The tools saw a different picture than a normal user did, right in the middle of the spam update.

What to do: before you start fixing pages after a drop, check your positions and clicks in Search Console.

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AI rarely cites brands' own websites

Signal: 1 independent source this week, 7 in 30 days; tracked since 2025-11-17.

Only about one in ten AI citations points to a brand's own site (Foundation). For questions that don't mention the brand, that share drops to just a few percent.

Even so, few small businesses do anything about their visibility in AI assistants (Bluehost). AI relies more on what others say about a brand than on the brand's own website.

What to do: make sure your company gets written about on industry sites, not just on your own blog.

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ChatGPT ads sit below the answer, not inside it

Signal: 2 independent sources this week, 3 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-09-17.

An ad in ChatGPT appears as a separate block below the answer and is clearly labelled as an ad. It's shown to users on the free plan and on Go, the cheapest paid plan.

The key part of a campaign is the contextual hints - a description of the situations where your ad should appear. OpenAI decides exactly where the ad shows, and advertisers never see what users asked.

What to do: treat this channel as brand building and don't judge it on sales.

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Poles increasingly ask AI before they buy

Signal: 1 independent source this week, 6 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-07-21.

Over the past six months, more than 60 percent of Poles used AI when making a purchase decision. More than half used it to compare products and services.

Almost half asked AI directly about the downsides of an offer. Chatbots are becoming the place where customers look for reasons not to choose you.

What to do: ask a few AI chatbots about the downsides of your offer, check whether the answers are accurate, and if they aren't, fill the gaps on your site.

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Signal: 1 independent source this week, 2 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-07-21.

AI Max now offers a preview of AI-generated text. You can see up to 10 headlines and descriptions without turning the feature on.

AI Max isn't a new campaign type but an extra layer inside a regular Search campaign. On top of that, experiment results now include an AI panel with key findings and recommendations.

What to do: open the preview and judge whether the AI text fits your brand before you decide to enable it.

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Search Console can now add up traffic from several countries

Signal: 1 independent source this week, 2 in 30 days; tracked since 2026-07-08.

The Performance report in Search Console now lets you select several countries at once and shows their combined traffic.

Until now, if your site ran in several markets, you had to check each country separately or export the data. Comparing regions now takes a moment.

What to do: if you sell abroad, select all your markets in the filter and track them as one group.

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