The Googlash of Google News Edition

It's an interestingly Googlishic edition this week with several major announcements and updates. Google's September 2026 Spam Update is underway as of noon on Thursday Sept. 24. Expected to last two weeks, this is one of the longest Spam Updates in recent memory. In other huge news, Google announced a much faster, less resource-heavy way to produce higher-quality query fan-outs. The new framework is called Retrieve-for-Train Diffusion (R4T Diffusion Model). Roger Montti gives it full coverage in his September 24 SEJ article. 

Other Googley Goodness:

- Google is introducing numerous new analytic filters and tools including a multimodal search type filter in GSC and CrUX Ad Metrics 

- Major publishers see a nearly 40% year over year drop in Google search traffic in Q2-26 over Q2-25 (which itself saw a 21% decline from Q2-24)

- Google is launching a scale-model data-centre the size of a small refrigerator into space. Code named Project Suncatcher, the experimental satellite launches on October 1.

- Google's Gemini public NotebookLM Pages are being used to spam Google on an epic, albeit temporary scale. 

- AI Overviews are now appearing in an average of 39% of US desktop searches

- AI Overview links were increasingly pushing users to AI Mode and other Google URLs rather than to individual web pages,...

- ... until recently when links in AI Overviews to external pages increased by over 25%

- Google Merchant Center has auto-enabled native checkout for platforms that support the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Merchant Center has also updated requirements for Google Store Ratings

- Google Business Profiles is giving business-owners four days to reject user edits before those edits might be applied to their local listings. 

- Google confirms that <hreflang tags> do not need to be written in capital letters. The protocol is case insensitive though writing regional codes in uppercase (en-CA), for example, follows ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 convention. 

- Google Analytics is adding hostname allowlists to fight spam and better differentiate traffic sources

Other News

- Meta's Muse introduced itself to the world before anyone told the Zucksters their product sounds like a fiber-laxative made from psyllium husks. Designed to be a personal AI agent and soon to be running in wearable devices, Meta's Muse is made to constantly learn from users' online interactions by constantly running in the background. Muse has already partnered with Shoppify to make purchases for users at stores on the Shoppify platform. Amazon has banned Muse from its systems. Embarrassingly, 404Media learned that one of Muse's signature functions, the ability to make phone calls for users, actually uses live-humans in place of AI to make more complicated calls. 

- Discord is rolling out age-verification for users it suspects are under the age of 18. 

- LinkedIn is prompting users' colleagues to confirm their work histories and claims in order to weed out people who falsely claim to be employed.

- Bing is testing another expandable sitelinks interface

- and... An AI relationships chart has been compiled by Chris Green and published in Sept22's Search Engine Journal. It is reminiscent of the seminal Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationships Chart.

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