Google’s last core update finished on June 2. More than three months later, another rollout in September would hardly be surprising. But as of September 10, Google has announced no September core update and provided no launch date for the next one.

For publishers waiting to recover lost rankings, that leaves an uncomfortable gap between what could happen and what there is evidence for. I understand the impatience after 20 years running publishing websites. A possible update matters when your business depends on search traffic.

September also has a history. Google has launched updates during the month, carried August rollouts into it, and changed different ranking systems from one year to the next. The dates are worth examining before treating this September as a repeat.

Google says it releases core updates several times a year. Its recent record shows how uneven that timing can be: the March 2026 core update began on March 27, followed by another on May 21, less than two months later. In 2025, the June 30 and December 11 core launches were more than five months apart. Google’s ranking history

That makes September a plausible window. It gives us little basis for predicting a particular week, or declaring that Google is overdue.

There has been a more recent confirmed update, too. The August 2026 spam update ran from August 18 to August 21. We subsequently covered complaints from French SEOs about losses during that rollout. Those reports concern the August event; their publication in September does not establish a new update.

The distinction becomes clearer when you look at previous years.

Dates follow Google’s official incident records in US/Pacific time.

Last September did have a substantial, global spam rollout running through most of the month. Its official name was the August 2025 spam update. Google did not announce a separate September 2025 core update.

In 2024, September caught the end of an August core rollout. In 2023, Google launched its helpful content update halfway through September. In 2022, there was a core update actually named for the month.

These examples explain why September attracts attention. They also show why grouping everything under “the September update” can obscure what happened. Different systems changed, and some rollouts were already underway when the month began.

Our current checks do not provide a clear early warning of another broad rollout.

On September 10, we directly inspected Semrush Sensor and DataForSEO’s volatility index, using US desktop Google results across all categories. Semrush’s September 9 reading was 0.6 out of 10, labelled Low. DataForSEO’s latest dated point, September 8, was 5.82 out of 10.

Both matched our earlier check that day. Against our September 6 baseline, Semrush was unchanged; DataForSEO’s earlier dated observation was 5.98 for September 4. We did not see an unusual rise across both providers.

Those numbers belong to separate measurement systems. Semrush also displays a recalibration notice, so its current scores need care when compared with older readings. Neither provider can tell us when Google will announce an update, and these samples do not rule out movement on individual sites.

Reddit adds leads, but the dates matter more than the number of worried comments.

One report we examined places an initial fall in clicks on August 2–3, followed by another decline on August 13. A post published September 10 describes clicks increasing while impressions and “positions” were going down, without giving an onset date or supporting figures.

These are unverified owner accounts. Our review of r/SEO, r/bigseo, r/TechSEO and r/juststart has not established a consistent cluster of fresh, dated ranking changes corroborated by both tools. Cross-posting one complaint in two communities does not make it two independent cases.

There are also concrete reasons to check what a falling chart is measuring.

On September 2, we reported Google Analytics data missing for September 1, including a zero-user reading in our own account. Separately, John Mueller confirmed on September 9 that a brief Search Console indexing-reporting problem had been resolved. His statement did not give an exact onset time.

Neither issue establishes a new core update. And, as we covered in Mueller’s explanation of AI Overview reporting, position data now reflects search features that do not map neatly onto a simple list of ten links.

For European businesses, the changes to Google’s EU search results we reported this week provide another reason to examine the country and type of result involved before attributing a change to a global core rollout.

My assessment is that September remains a realistic possibility. The evidence available today does not justify a launch prediction or a percentage chance.

An official announcement would settle the question. Before then, fresh movement across unrelated sites, beginning around the same dates and supported by unusual changes in multiple tracking tools, would give us a reason to investigate further. We would label that evidence unconfirmed.

We will keep this page updated as the evidence changes. If your site has gained or lost visibility, the useful details are the first affected date, the pages and queries involved, the country and device, and whether the change is in clicks, impressions, rankings or Discover. Those details will tell us more than another countdown to an unannounced update.

The post Could Google’s next core update arrive in September 2026? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

Google Ads has rejected promotional credits for businesses that had already spent thousands of dollars trying to qualify, according to PPC consultant David Melamed.

In a LinkedIn post, Melamed said two client accounts had promotions invalidated after spending money and waiting more than a month. His complaint concerned an offer requiring advertisers to spend $3,200 to receive a matching amount in ad credit.

Melamed said the clients likely would not have spent the initial $3,200 without the promotion. He attributed one rejection to using his agency’s billing profile when initially setting up a new client’s account. He said he did not know why the other promotion was rejected.

Google Ads liaison Ginny Marvin said she had passed the complaint to the team, according to Search Engine Roundtable, which reported the issue. The response quoted in that report did not explain the rejections or say whether the credits would be restored.

Google’s promotional offers require advertisers to meet spending or other conditions before receiving credit for additional advertising. According to Google’s documentation, an eligibility check begins once the offer’s requirements are met and can take up to 35 days.

Meeting the spending threshold therefore does not mean the credit has been approved.

Google’s promotion status guide distinguishes between an offer that is still being reviewed and one that is available to use. “Processing” means the spending requirement has been met but eligibility is still being checked. “Active” means the reward has been granted. An offer can be marked “Invalidated” if its requirements have not been met.

The timing also affects advertising costs during the review. Google says credits apply only to spending after they are added to an account. They cannot cover the initial qualifying spend or other advertising costs incurred before the credit was applied.

A business that keeps its campaigns running while waiting for approval must therefore pay for that advertising itself, even if Google later approves the promotion.

Melamed also questioned why account information that could disqualify a business was not checked before it spent money pursuing the offer.

The public complaint does not clearly establish that Google removed credits that had already been approved and used. It describes businesses spending in expectation of credits that were subsequently rejected. The number of affected accounts beyond the reported cases is unknown.

Advertisers can check an offer’s status under Billing → Promotions. Google advises contacting support if a qualifying credit has not appeared after 35 days.

The post Businesses say Google encouraged them to spend, then denied the reward appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

Google is introducing a metric that estimates how many conversions advertisers recover by improving their customer data setup, giving businesses another way to assess changes in their Google Ads results.

The Data Strength Uplift Metric measures additional conversions captured through an advertiser’s first-party data setup. Google announced it on September 10 alongside an expansion of Data Manager into Google Analytics and Display & Video 360.

For advertisers, the practical distinction is straightforward: a sale can happen before the advertising platform has enough information to count it. Fixing that gap can improve the campaign’s reported results without adding another sale to the business’s books.

Consider a hypothetical retailer that spends $10,000 on ads. Its reporting initially captures 100 purchases, putting the reported cost per purchase at $100. Better tracking identifies another 20 purchases that already happened. The dashboard now shows roughly $83 per purchase, even though spending and actual orders have stayed the same.

That is a useful correction. But a team comparing the figures before and after the tracking change could mistake it for an improvement in campaign performance.

The new metric gives advertisers more information about that recovery. Google also says it is adding diagnostics to Data Manager to identify and address data problems, while extending enhanced conversions into Analytics and Display & Video 360.

Google’s existing figures show why the distinction matters. It says advertisers adopting Google tag gateway observed an average 14% uplift in conversions. The gateway routes measurement through the advertiser’s own website infrastructure to improve the resilience of tracking. That figure concerns observed conversions; it should not be read as a promise of 14% more customer purchases.

Recovering missing data can still help advertising work better. More complete conversion information can inform bidding decisions and give advertisers a clearer account of customer activity. But establishing whether ads caused additional purchases requires a different measurement approach.

Google makes that distinction in its own documentation. Standard conversion reporting assigns credit according to tracking settings and attribution rules. Its separate Conversion Lift studies compare outcomes for groups exposed to ads and groups held back from seeing them, estimating the additional conversions caused by advertising.

The post Google Ads adds a new way to measure sales missing from your reports appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

Google DeepMind researchers are exploring whether one AI model could find and rank search results, replacing a process often split between two systems.

The approach, called Autoregressive Ranking, generates identifiers for documents to produce a ranking. The team developed a training method called SToICaL to teach it which results should appear higher. The paper explains the approach.

A similar two-stage workflow is already used in Google Cloud’s developer tools. Applications first retrieve likely matches, then send those documents to a separate ranking API. Google says this second step assesses how well each document answers the query, beyond the similarity checks used for initial matching. The API can also select content for an AI model to use when generating an answer.

Tests on WordNet, a database of word relationships, showed performance comparable to a more computationally expensive ranking model.

The shopping results were mixed. One version improved the overall ranking score from 95.23 to 97.21 out of 100, while accuracy at selecting the top result fell from 95.16% to 70.32%.

That comparison covered 310 evaluation examples. The target rankings were generated using another model’s similarity scores, so the results measure agreement with that benchmark.

The experiments supplied the model with candidate documents in its prompt; they did not demonstrate a replacement for Google’s full web-search infrastructure.

The paper, coauthored with researchers at UMass Amherst and UT Austin, was first submitted in January and last revised in February. It does not announce a rollout in Google Search.

The post Google researchers improved AI search and made the top result worse appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

Google seems to be bringing its AI Mode upload menu to the Search results page, replacing the usual magnifying-glass icon when users focus an existing query.

The change affects the search box on the results page.

When you click inside an existing search query, the box normally shows a magnifying-glass icon on the left. In the version we spotted, Google has replaced it with a + button.

Clicking the button opens a menu with Add images, Add files, and Create images. It also offers Gemini 3 Fast and Gemini 3 Pro.

The change brings AI Mode’s input options into the regular Search results page. The existing query stays in the search box, while the + button gives users options to add images or files or use other AI features.

This isn’t the first time Google has used a + button in Search. Google previously added one to the homepage search bar, where it offered options to upload an image or file for use with AI Mode.

The difference this time is where the button appears. Instead of appearing on the Google homepage, the + button shows up when an existing query is focused on the Search results page, taking the place of the search icon normally shown there.

We spotted the change in Firefox, although it did not appear in our tests with other browsers. This suggests Google may be testing the feature with a limited set of users rather than rolling it out broadly.

Google has not announced this specific change to the Search results page, so it may not be available to everyone.

The post Google tests AI Mode upload menu in Search results appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com