SEO in August and September 2026: Google splits search

Two months, two big trends. First, Google Search in the EU now looks different from the rest of the world, with different results pages and different spam rules. Second, the results page is turning into an answer page, one step at a time. On top of that came two spam updates, one of them still rolling out, and a handful of technical changes worth checking on your own site.

Google looks different in the EEA now

The background is the Digital Markets Act. In July, the European Commission fined Google 890 million euros, 460 million of it for self-preferencing in Search. Since then, Google has been rebuilding its results pages in the European Economic Area.

Since September 8, commercial searches for hotels, flights, long-distance trains and buses, and products show aggregators at the top: booking portals and price comparison sites in a block of their own. Direct suppliers such as hotels and airlines get a second block below. Sources disagree on whether local searches like restaurants are already affected. Google itself calls it the largest reduction in quality in the history of its Search and says earlier DMA changes cut free direct booking traffic by 30 percent. That figure comes from Google alone.

On September 17 and 18, free product listings and popular products carousels disappeared in the EEA. Trackers measure a drop of 90 to 100 percent in Germany. What remains for shops are Shopping ads, comparison shopping services and the classic organic results.

Since August 30, manual actions for site reputation abuse no longer apply to searchers in the EEA. For the first time, Google enforces a spam policy differently by region. Parasite SEO can rank again in Germany and Austria, but not in Switzerland, which is not part of the EEA. Google can still demote the affected sections algorithmically. Building a strategy on this means building on sand.

Sources: European Commission press release, Search Engine Journal on the new layout, Search Engine Roundtable on Google's statement, Search Engine Roundtable on product listings, PPC Land, Google Search Central Blog on the site reputation policy, Search Engine Journal on the same.

Two spam updates in six weeks

The August spam update ran from August 18 to 21. Google called it a normal spam update, but it hit much harder. SE Ranking analyzed 100,000 US keywords: 16.7 percent of the previous top 10 URLs dropped out of the top 100, against 9.2 percent without an update. Glenn Gabe went through case studies. Hit hardest were programmatically generated pages with AI text, especially on health and finance topics, thin Amazon affiliate sites and content produced at scale, sometimes across the whole site. Fittingly, John Mueller said on September 8 that many low-value pages cost trust in the entire site, and that recovery takes a long time.

The September spam update started on September 24 and, according to Google, may take up to two weeks, so until around October 8. The spam updates before it were done in one to three days. Google has not named a target. There has been no core update since May.

Our advice: Hold off on analyzing ranking losses from the last few days until the update is complete. And do not mistake mid-August for an update: from August 12 and 13, Search Console had a logging bug, and impressions and clicks dropped. Google backfilled the data by August 31. A dip in that window is not a real loss of visibility. How to narrow down a real loss step by step is covered in Lost rankings.

Sources: Google Search Status Dashboard, September spam update, Search Engine Land, SEO Südwest (German), Google Search Status Dashboard, August spam update, Search Engine Land on the impact, Glenn Gabe, case studies, SEO Südwest on Mueller (German), Search Engine Roundtable on the Search Console bug.

The results page becomes an answer page

AI Mode is gradually swallowing the classic results page:

• Since August 28, AI Overviews expand fully by default on some searches, including a box for follow-up questions. Organic results slide further down.
• Since September 22, Google has been testing links in AI Overviews that lead into AI Mode instead of to a website.
• People Also Ask is now 97 percent AI-generated according to AlsoAsked, up from 86 percent in August.
• From September 2 to 4, AI Mode running the new Gemini 3.8 Flash model showed almost no source links. Google calls it a bug, and it has been fixed. The lesson stands: a model switch can drop citations to zero overnight.
• In the US, AI Mode shows Shopping ads right inside the answer text, books hotels and has its own checkout for Shopify merchants. Custom pixels and client-side GA tracking do not work in that checkout.

For Germany, there are now solid numbers on the consequences. According to SISTRIX, about 20 percent of German keywords show an AI Overview, and click-through rate on position 1 then falls from 27 to 11 percent. Seokratie analyzed 69 German-language websites: total traffic held steady, but Google's share fell from 41 to 22 percent. And a field experiment with 1,100 users shows causally for the first time: when AI Mode is set as the default, clicks to external sites drop by 18.8 percentage points. The sample, however, skews young and highly educated.

Sources: Search Engine Roundtable on expanded AI Overviews, on links into AI Mode, on People Also Ask, on Gemini 3.8 Flash, PPC Land on ads in AI Mode, Search Engine Land on the checkout, TechCrunch on travel features, SISTRIX (German), Seokratie (German), field experiment on arXiv, Search Engine Land on the study.

AI visibility can be measured now, but only halfway

Since August 31, Search Console has had dedicated generative AI reports worldwide. They show impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover, broken down by page, country and device. They do not show clicks. Watch out in the regular performance report: AI Mode follow-ups like "yes go on" show up there as queries of their own. Filter them out before you analyze queries.

At the same time, there is a real opt-out, the "Search generative AI control" setting. According to Google, sites that use it get no impressions and no traffic from the AI features, while regular ranking stays unaffected. That goes further than blocking Google-Extended. Whether opting out pays off is a strategic question: being cited in AI Overviews brings few clicks, but it does bring visibility. More in Google's AI Overviews.

Since August 18, ChatGPT ads are available in Germany and Austria too, along with 29 other European markets. Billing is by impressions, by clicks or with conversion optimization, and for now booking runs through partners and OpenAI's sales team. That makes ChatGPT a paid channel in the German-speaking market as well.

On how ChatGPT picks its sources, Search Engine Journal ran a small analysis of about 60 conversations: brands that ChatGPT writes into the search query before it even searches appear in the answer 68.9 percent of the time. Brands that only come in through the search results appear 2.1 percent of the time. Here, brand awareness beats optimizing the individual page. What ChatGPT's index actually reads from a page is summarized in ChatGPT reads your whole title.

Sources: Search Engine Land on the AI reports and the opt-out, OpenAI on ChatGPT ads in Europe, Search Engine Journal on source selection.

Technical: what to check on your site

Cloudflare and Googlebot. Cloudflare announced that from September 15, multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot and Bingbot get the strictest matching rule. If you block AI training there, you may be locking out Googlebot as well. Whether the change is live everywhere is not confirmed. A look at the settings takes five minutes. Which AI crawlers you can block and which you better not is covered in Controlling AI crawlers.

Structured data. Since August 21, Google decodes HTML entities in JSON-LD only once. Double-encoded characters like & then come through wrong. This tends to happen in CMS templates for Drupal, WordPress or shop systems. Look at the source of a page with special characters in its title.

Firewall rules. Besides GET, Google's crawlers also send HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests, mostly during rendering. That is less than 1.5 percent of requests, but a web application firewall still should not block them.

New filter in Search Console. Since September 24, the performance report has a "Multimodal" filter for searches via Google Lens, Circle to Search and image upload. These are new impressions. If your web numbers suddenly rise from late September, this may be why.

Rank tracking gets more expensive. Since August 26, Google has routed links in search results through encoded redirects via google.com/goto. Google says this is meant to prevent abuse. Rank trackers now need many times more requests per search, which is likely to show up in tool pricing. Whether the referrer in GA4 changes is still open.

Sources: Search Engine Journal on Cloudflare, Search Engine Roundtable on JSON-LD, on HTTP methods, Google Search Central Blog on the multimodal filter, Search Engine Roundtable on google.com/goto, PPC Land on the same.

In brief: legal

Since August 2, the labeling obligations of Article 50 of the EU AI Act apply. Deepfakes must be labeled. AI-generated text on matters of public interest only needs a label if there was no editorial control. This mainly affects agencies producing content with AI. In addition, the Munich I Regional Court holds Google liable for false statements in AI Overviews, since they are Google's own content. The June ruling is not yet final.

Sources: BDZV on the AI Act (German), Tagesspiegel on the ruling (German).

This week's checklist

• Assess ranking losses since September 24 only after the spam update has finished.
• Check mid-August dips against the Search Console bug before changing anything.
• Filter AI Mode follow-ups out of your query analysis.
• Check in Cloudflare whether a rule against AI training also hits Googlebot.
• Check your JSON-LD for double-encoded special characters.
• If you run a shop in the EEA, plan for the loss of free product listings and rebalance your channels.