Google ran two spam updates in five weeks. The August 2026 spam update began on August 18 and ran 2 days 16 hours, according to Google's Search Status Dashboard. SE Ranking data shared with Search Engine Land found that 16.71% of top-10 URLs fell beyond position 100 during that window, against 9.2% in a July comparison period. A second spam update began on September 24 and, as of November 6, 2026, the dashboard listed it at 13 days 16 hours. Google ran no core update in the quarter, and the latest core update on the dashboard is still May 21, 2026. Counting the June 24 spam update, Google ran three spam updates in about three months. A spam update is a ranking change aimed at spam, and a core update is Google's broader kind of ranking change.
ChatGPT's sources changed too. GPT-5.6 became ChatGPT's default model on August 8, 2026. Tracking vendors reported that Reddit's share of ChatGPT's search citations fell by roughly three quarters or more within a week, with help-center and documentation pages gaining. Those vendors sell citation tracking, so treat the percentages loosely.
We tested it ourselves on September 27, 2026 by sending three buyer questions through OpenAI's API with web search on. "Best project management software for remote teams" cited 8 domains, "best CRM for a small business" cited 10, and "best email marketing platform for a SaaS startup" cited 6. Reddit was not among them in any answer. Every cited domain was a vendor site, a help center, a review site or a publication.
Google also rolled out the Search Console generative AI report to every site on August 31. Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners. If your traffic moved in late August or late September, line it up against the August 18 and September 24 update windows before you blame AI Overviews, the AI-written answer boxes above Google's results.
The test was three questions on one day, so it is small. RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform, tracks this quarter by quarter. RankControl's AI visibility tracker tracks citations across 7 AI engines. The full quarter, in order of importance for a B2B marketer, is in the full write-up on Medium.