Google's September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on October 8 after roughly 13 days and 16 hours, according to the Google Search Status Dashboard.

The rollout began on September 24. Google's ranking update history puts the duration close to the "up to two weeks" timeframe Google initially signaled. The year's three previous spam updates each finished in under three days, which makes this rollout an outlier by a wide margin.

Why did this spam update run so long?

That question remains open. Rank-tracking platform SEOmonitor reported that from September 26 onward, industry-wide trackers saw sudden ranking shifts that human Google users did not see. The platform reads the gap as incomplete and inaccurate data flowing from Google to automated search tools, not a real search-results change.

For anyone analyzing impact, the September 24 to October 8 window sets the comparison period for Search Console performance before, during, and after the update. SEOmonitor notes that genuine spam-update movement usually shows up in consecutive-day Search Console figures. Late-September rank-tracker dips deserve that cross-check before anyone calls them update effects.

What timing ranges did Illyes share for crawling and recovery?

Google's Gary Illyes presented crawl, indexing, site-move, and core-update recovery ranges at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona on October 2. John Campbell of ROAST, a community speaker at the event, published a recap of the session.

For site moves, the recap lists one to three months as typical and six months to over a year at the slowest end. For core update recovery, it lists three to six months as typical and six months to a year at the slowest. The recap does not define "typical" or specify sample size or time period, which limits how much readers should lean on it.

A site move unresolved at the three-month mark sits at the upper end of the listed range.

How does Search Console handle multiple countries now?

Google Search Central announced on LinkedIn on October 6 that the Performance report filter now allows selecting multiple countries or devices and viewing their combined data at once. The Compare option still shows two devices, countries, search types, or appearances side by side. Filtering by multiple Search appearances remains unavailable.

Multi-market reporting teams can now pull one combined Search figure for a country group instead of comparing markets two at a time.

What does Google now say about fake author profiles?

Google's people-first content guidance now includes a new paragraph warning against fabricated creator profiles. The text follows the page's advice to add accurate authorship information. It names AI-generated headshots, invented names, and false credentials used to make content appear as if written by human experts. Any such deception is, in Google's wording, "a signal of a low-quality page."

Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines already list deliberately misleading creator information as a form of deception. Bylines and author pages are the right places to verify that a name, photo, or credential matches a real person.

What did Mueller say about AI crawlers and sitemaps?

On the October 1 episode of Google's Search Off the Record podcast with Martin Splitt, John Mueller said AI training crawlers usually give sites no way to submit a sitemap. He suggested a default name such as sitemap.xml or an RSS feed for sites that want those crawlers to find their content. He has seen AI crawlers access his own sitemap and RSS files in his server logs.

For valid sitemaps showing "Couldn't fetch," Mueller named two causes: host load and crawl demand. Crawl demand, he said, very often tracks a site's perceived quality. Search Console's Sitemaps report help page already lists low crawl demand among the reasons for the error.

A sitemap with an unusual name, no robots.txt entry, and a direct Google submission is harder for other systems to find. Both causes Mueller described sit outside the file itself, which changes where teams should look first.

What should search teams monitor next?

Two threads stand out for the coming weeks. First, spam-update comparison windows in Search Console for September 24 to October 8 will firm up as more data lands. Second, sites affected by the September update should watch whether their ranking volatility surfaces in Search Console impressions and clicks, not only in third-party rank trackers.

A throughline ran through each story this week: labels and numbers often say less than they appear to. A rank-tracker drop, a "typical" crawl window, a country total, or a byline can each mask what is actually happening underneath, and the next update cycle will test which of those labels hold up.