Spam update hits programmatic pages, and AI Overviews keep the clicks

Busy week. Google shipped its fourth spam update of the year on Wednesday and the first wave hit over the weekend, mostly on sites with templated, scaled pages. At the same time three separate data points said the same thing about AI Overviews: more links inside them, fewer clicks out of them. And the people who do this for a living mostly agreed that "GEO" is SEO with an extra layer of off-site proof, not a new job. Our own data below shows how much of shopping search is already behind an AI Overview.

1. The September spam update is aimed at scaled, templated pages

TL;DR Google's September 2026 spam update started rolling out Wednesday, will take about two weeks, and the first casualties look like programmatic and AI-generated page sets.

Why it matters This is the fourth spam update in 2026 after March, June and August, and the August one was described as powerful despite a two-day rollout. Glenn Gabe's read is that the frequency is a response to companies gaming AI search visibility, and he wonders aloud whether this one will reach the publishers selling "mentions", the brands buying them, and the brokers in between. A separate Google research paper describes a system called SAFE that catches content violating the spirit of the guidelines, dated before the August update, so this is a system, not a one-off.

What people are saying

• Lily Ray sees early signs the update is hitting highly templated, programmatic, probably AI-generated pages, like one page per phone area code, and found two scaled subfolders on a publicly traded brand's site that an AI content tool celebrates as a client.
• Barry Schwartz tracked the first wave landing Friday through Sunday, and John Mueller confirmed this rollout will take longer than previous spam updates.
• Glenn Gabe on SAFE, Google's new AI spam detector, and his daily Spam Update Notes.
• Cyrus Shepard, summarising the mood: "Spam Updates will continue decimating everybody's traffic until moral improves."

Do this Before you read your own charts, wait for the full rollout. Then audit any section of your site that was generated from a template at scale and ask whether each page would exist without SEO. If the answer is no, consolidate or noindex it this week rather than after the next update.

2. AI Overviews are adding links and still taking the click

TL;DR Google put more external links inside AI Overviews, but three independent sources this week show the click going to Google or nowhere.

Why it matters The argument that "more citations equals more traffic" took a hit. Search Console now distinguishes between AI Overview links that lead to a website and links that open AI Mode, and it counts them differently. Similarweb reclassified its "Gen AI" traffic into organic on September 1st, and the drop in the Gen AI line for top cited sources was 60 to 70 percent, which Aleyda Solis reads as AI Mode referrals being a small fraction of organic. A court filing quotes an OpenAI engineer saying users "won't click" links, backed by Microsoft data on lower click-through in Bing Chat than in search.

What people are saying

• Search Engine Journal on AI Overviews having more links, but not all of them reaching the web, and on the OpenAI engineer's "won't click" quote.
• Aleyda Solis on what the Similarweb reclassification reveals about AI Mode referrals, and her first "SERP Squeeze Monday": "basketball shoes" in the US got 69 percent more searches year over year and 34 percent fewer organic clicks.
• Lily Ray, quoting Paul Graham: web traffic to news sites is down about 28 percent in two years, and AI Overviews showing news inside the answer is "a total bloodbath". The r/SEO thread on Axios calling it the end of the news link economy is worth skimming for how readers explain their own behaviour.
• Google's response so far is money, not clicks: an AI contribution pilot pays invited publishers through Search Console, and citations in AI answers do not qualify.

Do this Pick your ten most valuable commercial queries and record search volume, clicks and whether an AI Overview shows, today. Repeat monthly. Without your own squeeze chart you cannot tell an algorithm hit from a SERP layout change.

3. Search Console got a multimodal filter before it got AI query data

TL;DR Google shipped a Search Console filter for image-based searches (Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads) on Thursday. It has no query data, and there is still no query or click reporting for AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Why it matters Measurement is now the bottleneck. The Generative AI report shows visibility and nothing else, so practitioners are layering their own commercial data on top. Meanwhile the links report went seven weeks without an update before refreshing over the weekend. The pattern: new dashboards arrive, actionable data does not.

What people are saying

• Google's announcement of web multimodal Search performance reporting, and SEJ's note that it shows pages but no queries.
• Lily Ray: multimodal reporting before AI Overview query or click reporting. Ann Smarty, quoted by Ray: the recent dashboard upgrades are "neat, albeit unusable", data that offers no new action.
• Harry Clarkson-Bennett: The Generative AI report sucks, here is how to make it useful.
• Barry Schwartz: the links report finally updated after seven-plus weeks.

Do this Export the Generative AI report monthly and join it to revenue per landing page in a sheet. That one join turns a vanity number into a dependency map.

4. GEO is SEO plus off-site corroboration, and the pros are tired of pretending otherwise

TL;DR The week's most useful GEO content all said the same thing: keep the technical and quality basics, then build evidence about your brand on sites the models trust.

Why it matters Ahrefs' new guide opens by saying it is not a new discipline, because Google's AI features run on its core search systems. Aleyda Solis frames AI search as an off-site corroboration problem with an on-site quality floor. Lily Ray showed two sites that surged in ChatGPT citations and then lost them, both with zero Google visibility, which is what a corroboration gap looks like in the wild. The reddit crowd is blunter: "GEO is the same as 2012 SEO."

What people are saying

• Aleyda Solis updated her AI Search Optimization Framework and Checklist with a worksheet, and laid out the corroboration criteria with examples.
• Ahrefs: How to optimize for AI search, a guide for you and your AI agent.
• Lily Ray on two sites that surged, then dropped, in ChatGPT citations, and her honest note that she rarely reads a finding that changes strategy.
• r/LLMTraffic: How different is SEO vs GEO actually? Semrush on whether llms.txt is worth it, and Dan Petrovic on fan-out vectors, the retrieval tech that would remove text fan-outs from view entirely.

Do this List the five third-party pages an AI engine would land on when asked about your category. If your brand is not on them, that is the quarter's GEO plan.

By the numbers

From SeekWinners' US shopping-search sample, measured this week across roughly 5,800 category terms:

• AI Overviews show on 77 percent of Health and Beauty terms, 70 percent of Vehicles and Parts, 69 percent of Electronics and 50 percent of Apparel. Furniture is the outlier at 34 percent.
• Shopify stores earn between 7 and 20 percent of the citations in those answers. Best case is Apparel at 20 percent, worst is Vehicles and Parts at 7 percent.
• YouTube is the most cited host in every single category, for example 632 of 4,451 citations in Apparel and 656 of 2,609 in Home and Garden, ahead of Wikipedia and Amazon. Corroboration on video is not optional for product categories.

Worth a click

• Cyrus Shepard put all 103 ranking factors from the expert survey into one mega-graphic.
• Glenn Gabe on dirty XML sitemaps: canonical URLs only, accurate lastmod, especially at scale.
• Black hats are using public NotebookLM notebooks as parasite SEO because Google indexes them.
• Lily Ray on the "Claudification" of SEO audits: 30-page AI reports with red exclamation marks and no thinking.
• Google rolled out AI Mode monitoring to everyone, and plans to adopt the UCP draft spec for hotel booking in AI Mode.
• SEO salaries are not dead: Anthropic, Stripe and TikTok are paying $295K to $320K for SEO and GEO leads.
• Google Trends is showing Cheyenne, Wyoming as the top region for every query. Check before you cite it.
• OpenAI has quality raters too, and some of them cheated with AI.
• Semrush claims the average AI search visitor is worth 4.4x an organic one. Treat as vendor math, but the direction matches what we see.

From CiteCycle

Theme 3 is the reason CiteCycle exists: Search Console will not tell you which questions trigger an AI answer about your category or whether you were cited. CiteCycle asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews your customers' questions every week, records who gets mentioned and which pages get cited, and turns each gap into a page to fix or a site to get on. If you build the squeeze chart from theme 2, this is the other half.