Spam Update, CMA Choice Screens, AI Mode Study

Estimated reading time: 27 minutes

Google released its fourth spam update of the year on Thursday, and this one comes with a two-week rollout window after three that finished in days. It leads a busy week of search marketing news. The CMA proposed that every UK Android phone and Chrome install should ask people which search service they want, with AI assistants eligible for the list. Cloudflare dropped its plan to block Googlebot on AI-restricted sites. And a controlled experiment with 1,100 people found AI Mode cut clicks to other websites by 18.8 percentage points, with lower satisfaction to show for it.

Google's September Spam Update Could Take Two Weeks

Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update at 9:15am Pacific time on 24 September. It applies globally and in all languages, so UK sites are in scope from the first day.

The rollout window is the story here. March’s spam update finished in 19 hours and 30 minutes. June’s took two days and one hour; August’s took two days and 16 hours. For September the Search Status Dashboard says up to two weeks, and John Mueller confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable that the longer estimate was no typo (he expects it to take longer than some of the previous ones).

Google hasn’t said which policy or tactic the update targets. Barry Schwartz’s quick facts note that it doesn’t go after link spam specifically, and that the volatility trackers picked up on 23 and 24 September came before the announcement, so that movement shouldn’t be read as the update itself. Trackers had also flagged unconfirmed movement around 15 September.

For anyone still recovering from August, a two-week rollout makes attribution harder. A drop on day nine could come from the spam update itself or from a refresh, and plenty of people expect a core update before the year is out. Annotate 24 September in your reporting now, keep daily Search Console exports for any section that moves, and hold structural fixes until Google marks the rollout complete on its ranking release history page.

Search Console Starts Counting Camera and Image Searches

Search Console now reports on searches people make with pictures. A new multimodal search type filter, rolling out globally from 24 September, covers Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and the Chrome right-click “Search this image” option. The data appears in the Search results performance report and in the Generative AI features report, and Search Engine Watch found it currently starts from 10 September.

For any business selling something people photograph (furniture, fashion, homeware), this is the first view Google has given of camera-led demand. Until now a Lens search that landed on a product page looked like ordinary organic traffic, if it could be told apart at all. Export the filtered data after its first full month and compare its landing pages with your web-search top pages; the gap between the two lists shows where product photography is earning visits and where it isn’t.

Search Console Treats an AI Overview as One Block

Earlier this month John Mueller said the old one-to-ten ranking scale is hard to map onto results pages full of AI features. Dan Taylor of 10 Spurs has now worked through what that means inside Search Console, where every link in an AI Overview inherits the position of the AI Overview itself.

He calls it block flattening. A page cited fifth in an Overview at the top of the results reports as position one, so weak visibility can look like a top ranking. Average position already struggled as a mean taken across very different queries, and a block rule layered on top makes it less reliable again.

Taylor’s advice is to report organic visits and the revenue they produce, with impressions as context. We’d add one step. Split query reporting by whether an AI Overview appeared (several rank trackers can flag this), because a single average position across both groups hides two trends that are moving in opposite directions for most sites we look at.

Rank Trackers Lose Sight of Google Again

Third-party SEO data is getting thinner, and the /goto passthrough links Google confirmed in August are the latest cause. Search Engine Land counts three technical changes since January 2025, each of which made Google’s results harder to collect at scale:

January 2025, when Search began requiring JavaScript and several tools went dark
September 2025, when the num=100 parameter stopped working and up to 77% of sites lost keyword visibility in their tools
August 2026, when /goto redirects started hiding destination URLs behind a Google address

A fourth disruption followed this month. Sistrix’s status page on 16 September confirmed slower data collection, and Nozzle’s Derek Perkins told Search Engine Roundtable the volume of Google results he could retrieve had fallen by about 80%. Glenn Gabe compared one recovering site across tools; Ahrefs showed the recovery, Semrush showed it late and Sistrix hadn’t picked it up.

These figures describe what the tools can collect. They say nothing about anyone’s rankings. Before a third-party visibility chart goes into a client report this month, check each provider’s status page for the date of its last complete collection, and use Search Console for anything that has to be right. Sistrix also noted that days lost in an earlier August outage could not be updated afterwards, so a gap in a chart can be permanent.

AI Overviews Reach 39% of US Desktop Searches

Comscore’s Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report puts AI Overviews on 39.4% of US desktop Google searches in June, up from 25.8% in July 2025. Bing searches carrying Copilot Search rose from 11.8% to 17.3% over the same period. Total US desktop search volume grew anyway, to 77 billion searches in Q2 2026 against 71 billion two years earlier.

The citation data goes further. YouTube was the most-cited domain in AI answers across three of the four categories Comscore tracked, and appeared in 23% of retail searches among the top citations (Amazon followed at 14%, Reddit 12%, Wikipedia 11%). Comscore also separated being used as a source from being visibly cited. Tripadvisor informed 61% of the lodging answers it measured and was cited in 21%; Booking.com went from 33% to 9%.

Comscore measured how often the AI features appeared. It didn’t measure the clicks they sent, and this is US desktop panel data, so read it as direction for UK planning. A retail or finance brand without video content is absent from the source cited most often in three of the four categories.

Forcing People Into AI Mode Cut Their Clicks by 18.8 Points

This is the first controlled experiment on AI Mode I’ve seen, and the numbers are hard to dismiss. Researchers recruited 1,100 US Chrome users in March 2026 and watched three days of their normal searching. Each person was then assigned at random for seven days to ordinary Google, to Google with AI Overviews hidden and AI Mode blocked, or to Google with every search redirected into AI Mode.

In the AI Mode group, the share of searches leading to an external website fell by 18.8 percentage points. Clicks to news sites fell 12.5 points, Reddit 21.2 points and Wikipedia 9.9 points. The same group ran 0.92 fewer Google search sessions a day, and the share using another search engine rose by 11.2 points.

Users didn’t like it more, either. AI Mode participants reported lower satisfaction and usefulness and a weaker sense of control, and their trust in Google fell. Open-ended feedback split 34% negative against 29% positive, with complaints centred on reaching websites directly and seeing too few sources.

The limits need stating. Its sample skewed younger and more highly educated than the population, and politically to the left, and forcing every search into AI Mode is harsher than anything Google has announced. The no-AI group’s estimated 8.8-point rise in click-through also rests on a statistical adjustment, because Google changed the AI Overview markup mid-study and the blocker only hid about 51% of them. The Chartbeat figures in the next section point the same way.

Publishers' Google Search Traffic Fell 40% in a Year

Chartbeat’s 2026 Publisher Playbook reports a 40.2% year-on-year fall in Google Search referrals across its network between July 2025 and July 2026. The year before, the fall was 21.9%. Google Discover’s decline sharpened from 6.6% to 34.3%.

Google Search now supplies about 5% of the network’s pageviews, down from 9% in July 2024. AI referrals grew eightfold over two years and still amount to 0.01% of traffic, and Chartbeat says they declined across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini in 2026.

The growth sat elsewhere. Dark social (links shared in messages and private channels) rose from 7.1% to 11.3% of pageviews, and direct from 13.5% to 15.9%. Loyal readers held steady at about 15 billion monthly pageviews while new readers fell 14%.

Chartbeat’s clients skew towards news and media, so a UK B2B or ecommerce site shouldn’t read 40% as its own forecast. The pattern still transfers. Chartbeat says generic, easily summarised content is the most exposed, and the audiences publishers already owned (email, apps, returning visitors) are what held up.

A Court Filing Puts Numbers on the Copilot Click Loss

A summary-judgment brief unsealed on 17 September in The New York Times copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft quotes both companies discussing how AI answers substitute for publisher visits. It’s the plaintiffs’ filing and not a court finding, and both companies dispute its reading.

The quotes are sharp. OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, is cited describing publishers as facing an “existential threat” from products that were “largely substitutive”. Microsoft’s Brent Hecht is cited describing a “doom loop” that could harm both the models and the web.

The figure publishers will reach for is Microsoft’s own data comparing Bing Chat with Bing Web Search. According to the brief, click-through fell by 87% to 93% for New York Times domains, 83% to 91% for the Daily News plaintiffs and 51% to 94% for Ziff Davis domains. These are one side’s presentation of internal numbers in a US case, but they come from inside a search company, which makes them harder to wave away than any third-party estimate.

Google Starts Paying Some Publishers for AI Answers

Google is testing payments to publishers whose content shapes AI-generated answers. Digiday reported the payments on 14 September, and the AI contribution pilot runs inside Search Console. Invited publishers accept the programme terms there, see monthly earnings in a dedicated report and can leave from the same settings page.

Payment covers the generation stage only, when a page does real work in a response on any of Google’s three AI surfaces (AI Overviews, AI Mode, the Gemini app). Pages that are merely linked, or used to confirm a fact after the answer is written, don’t qualify. Google hasn’t said how it decides which contributions count or how it calculates a payout, and one executive in the pilot told Digiday early earnings were small next to ad revenue. Digiday reported that Google has approached at least dozens of publishers, with smaller publishers showing more interest than large ones.

Firecrawl announced a similar idea the same week, a self-service payment system for sites whose content AI agents use, backed by a $75 million funding round. Neither scheme replaces a lost click. A payment for being summarised and a visit from a reader are different assets, and only the visit builds an audience you can come back to.

The CMA Wants UK Android and Chrome Users to Choose Their Search Engine

This one is UK regulation, so it applies here in full. The Competition and Markets Authority has proposed measures requiring Google to offer a choice of search service when someone sets up an Android phone or opens Chrome for the first time, and to repeat the prompt every year.

It has three parts:

The choice screen would list search services, with AI assistants included where they meet technical and security criteria
Users would get a yearly prompt to confirm or change their default
Any search provider on the screen would have to attribute publisher content fairly, so people can reach the source

“This is about future-proofing the options available to people in the UK.”
Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive, Competition and Markets Authority

The CMA will make a final decision by 9 October. If it’s confirmed, the default search service on UK Android phones and in Chrome stops being automatic, and AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude gain a route onto those devices that they don’t have today. For UK brands, visibility in whichever assistants people pick becomes an acquisition question in its own right, and the attribution condition gives publishers some protection as that happens.

Free Shopping Listings Disappear Across the EEA

Google has removed free product listings and “popular products” carousels from search results in the European Economic Area as part of its Digital Markets Act compliance. Hugo Huijer reported drops of roughly 90% to 100% in organic product carousel visibility across Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands. Adriaan Dekker noted the space is going to comparison shopping services instead.

This continues the DMA changes we covered earlier this month, when Google called its reworked EU results the biggest quality drop in its history. Dekker points to the 460 million euro EU fine in July and a compliance deadline of 25 September, so expect more changes in the coming days.

Each report covers EEA countries only. The UK is outside the EEA and the DMA doesn’t apply here, so UK searchers should still see free listings and product carousels on google.co.uk unless Google changes them separately. UK retailers selling into EU markets carry the exposure. Organic product visibility in those countries has largely gone, and free listings can no longer carry EU product discovery on their own. Segment Merchant Center and Search Console data by country before reading any drop as a UK problem.

Cloudflare Changes Course and Leaves Googlebot Alone

Earlier this month we warned that from 15 September, Cloudflare would start blocking Googlebot on sites with AI training restrictions switched on. Cloudflare changed the plan before the date arrived, and I’m glad it did.

What shipped on 15 September is a setting called Disallow AI Training, available on every plan including the free one. Turning it on uses Cloudflare’s Bot Preference Sync to add two robots.txt rules that disallow Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended, the tokens Google and Apple use only for AI training. The three search crawlers stay allowed. Cloudflare now labels their operators “Accountable” because each has added a training opt-out or committed to one, and Google has promised URL-level reporting of what was made available for training “in the coming weeks”.

Bing is the exception to note. Bingbot won’t read the robots.txt rule until early 2027, so for now the only way to keep Bing from training on a page is a NOARCHIVE meta tag.

One side effect cuts the other way. SeenSure tested 1,046 websites on 14 and 16 September and found refusals of AI search crawlers fell sharply among the 746 on Cloudflare. OAI-SearchBot, which feeds ChatGPT search, went from being refused by 16.9% of those sites to 3.0%. If the pattern holds, many Cloudflare-hosted pages that refused ChatGPT search and Perplexity before 15 September are now open to both, which is good news for anyone chasing AI citations.

Google Switches On AI Checkout for US Shopify Stores

Search Engine Land reported on 22 September that Google is notifying eligible Shopify merchants that their products can now be bought directly inside AI Mode and the Gemini app, and Shopify says purchasing through these experiences is switched on by default for eligible stores. Checkout runs on the Universal Commerce Protocol, the open standard Google built with partners including Shopify, and products surface through Merchant Center.

The default is the detail to check. A merchant can find native checkout active without having chosen it, so anyone who cares where checkout happens, or about measurement gaps when an order never touches the website, should look at Sales channels and then Agentic settings in Shopify.

For now this is US only. Merchants must be based in the US and sell to US customers, so UK Shopify stores aren’t eligible yet. Google is extending the same protocol to hotel bookings inside AI Mode, where it says the hotel stays merchant of record and keeps the customer data (the lodging expansion was announced on 19 May). Search Engine Watch makes a fair point for any hotel group watching from the UK: judge that channel by whether it brings guests back, since a booking made inside Google still leaves Google as the place the next trip is planned.

AI Mode Starts Sending Shoppers Straight to the Retailer

Earlier this month we reported AI Mode filling a headphones product block entirely with ads, and the tests since then have gone the other way.

On 18 September Search Engine Watch saw AI Mode showing more organic product carousels for ecommerce queries. Three days later Brodie Clark spotted AI Mode sending users from its product grid directly to a retailer’s website, skipping the free listing panel that normally lays several stores side by side. SEW could reproduce it only for specific branded queries. A search for “New Balance shoes” went straight to the retailer from the text link, while generic searches such as “running shoes” still opened the comparison panel.

For the retailer that gets the click, a direct link is a clean win. For every other store that would have appeared in the comparison overlay it’s lost visibility, and branded queries are where that loss concentrates. If you stock other brands’ products, watch the share of your Shopping traffic that comes from brand-plus-product searches; it’s the segment this test touches first.

ChatGPT Ads Now Appear in 47% of Gaming Chats

The ChatGPT ads build-out we’ve followed since its US launch in February now has third-party measurement. Comscore’s Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report found sponsored ads in 47% of the ChatGPT conversations about video games and consoles it tracked on US PCs in June, up from 3% in March. Gaming sat between 3% and 4% until April, jumped to 18% in May and reached 47% in June.

Two other retail categories climbed more slowly. Toys and hobbies rose from 5% to 24%, and books, music and video from 9% to 22%.

The method has gaps. Comscore counted conversations rather than users or impressions, didn’t publish the conversation counts behind each month, and didn’t say whether ad-free plans are in the base. Treat 47% as a sign of where OpenAI’s inventory is concentrating first. Earlier this month SE Ranking’s own test produced clicks that didn’t turn into sign-ups, so a rising share of conversations with ads tells you about supply; judging demand still takes a test of your own with conversion tracking in place.

Smart Bidding Learning Gets a 50-Conversion Benchmark

Google has rewritten its guidance on Smart Bidding learning periods around volume. Calibration after a change can now take up to roughly 50 conversion events or three conversion cycles, where the old wording leaned on elapsed time and conversion cycles. Campaigns with enough historical data can learn faster.

A campaign can enter the Learning state when a bid strategy is created or reactivated, when its settings change, or when campaign composition changes in certain ways. Google treats 50 as an approximate upper benchmark and not a threshold every campaign must reach. For a lead-generation account producing ten conversions a week, though, that’s up to five weeks of calibration after a big change, which is a strong argument for batching bid strategy edits instead of making them one at a time.

Two related changes landed alongside. Google’s guidance on changing conversion goals now applies explicitly to Performance Max as well as Search and Shopping campaigns, and it notes that Performance Max can take longer to reach its goals when most traffic comes from outside Search and Shopping. Separately, Google Ads now lets advertisers use offline conversion uploads to fill gaps in tag-based conversion tracking, which should help accounts where cookie loss thins out the tag data Smart Bidding learns from.

AI Max Reporting Joins Up the Query, the Ad and the Landing Page

Google is building a single report for AI Max for Search that ties the search term which triggered an ad to the creative assets shown and the landing page the user reached, in one view per interaction. Separately, AI Brief, which lets advertisers give AI Max written guidance about their business and audience, is expanding its closed beta to Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

The reporting change answers a familiar complaint about AI Max, which is that advertisers can’t see why a query met a particular ad and page. Seeing those pieces together for each interaction makes it possible to spot combinations that convert badly and get averaged away in aggregate performance figures. The language expansion matters for UK teams running campaigns in European markets from a UK base.

GA4 Can Now Allowlist Your Own Hostnames

Has your GA4 property suddenly decided Singapore is your biggest market? Search Engine Watch saw 365 of 419 active users reported in Singapore in one Realtime snapshot on 18 September, and a developer’s investigation found Singapore sessions up ninefold in a day, with 0% engagement and 0.5 seconds per session. One Shopify merchant reported 80,000 Singapore visitors in a single day.

Google’s fix arrived on 22 September. Hostname filters in Google Analytics now support Include as well as Exclude, so you can list the domains you trust and filter out events from anywhere else. Events with an empty hostname are blocked automatically by an Include filter. Measurement Protocol events are exempt, so data sent server-side won’t be dropped.

Set this up on every property this week. An allowlist won’t stop a bot that fires events carrying your real hostname, which some reports say the newer Singapore traffic does, so keep engagement rate by country as a second check.

Chrome Starts Measuring Ad Density, and Google's Search Docs Point to It

Chrome added four experimental ad metrics to its User Experience Report (CrUX), and Google has now linked them from the page experience section of its Search documentation. They cover ad count (visible ads in the viewport), ad density (the share of the viewport ads occupy) and ad weight, measured separately in CPU milliseconds and network bytes.

John Mueller told Search Engine Land the four metrics were included because they help evaluate a site, and added that not everything is a direct ranking factor. That’s the sensible reading. Page experience has been downgraded from ranking system to signal over the years, and nothing here says ad density feeds rankings. For publishers and affiliate sites carrying heavy ad loads, though, real-user data on how much of the screen ads take up is useful for its own sake, and it now sits in a public dataset any competitor can look up.

Local Knowledge Panels Get an AI Overview

On 18 September Search Engine Watch reported Google testing AI Overviews inside local business panels on mobile. Ben Fisher spotted it and Barry Schwartz reproduced it. The panel shows an AI Overview label over an AI-written description of the business, and tapping Show more opens an AI Mode-style conversation about the company.

Schwartz found outdated information in the summary of his own company, drawn from a page on his site that was also out of date. A correct Business Profile no longer guarantees a correct description, because Google is reading your website and other sources too. Search Engine Roundtable also spotted Business Profiles testing a feature that sets opening hours from a plain-text description, which puts more of the profile in the hands of Google’s interpretation. Audit the pages that describe each branch (services, location, opening hours) and correct anything stale before Google summarises it.

Conductor's Founder Hands Over After 20 Years

Seth Besmertnik is stepping down as CEO of Conductor after two decades, and chief product officer Wei Zheng takes over. Besmertnik stays on the board and remains a major shareholder.

He co-founded the company in 2006 as LinkExperts, renamed it Conductor in 2008, sold it to WeWork in 2018 and led an employee buyback in 2019 that gave more than 250 staff co-founder status. Acquisitions including ContentKing and Searchmetrics followed. Zheng led the build of Conductor AI and the data platform behind its AI visibility measurement, and the handover puts answer engine optimisation at the centre of one of the industry’s longest-running enterprise SEO platforms.

Strategic Direction: Where Search Marketing Is Heading

Google spent the week widening the gap between what it measures and what it lets anyone else measure. Search Console gained a multimodal filter and still flattens AI Overviews into one position. Rank trackers lost more of their view of the results, and the EU licensing programme we covered earlier this month hands competitors richer interaction data than publishers get. Measurement is consolidating inside Google’s own tools, which puts more weight each month on first-party data and clean analytics.

The commercial layer is moving into the answer. Since 22 September native checkout has run by default for eligible US Shopify stores, sponsored carousels now read like advice at the end of an informational answer, and hotel bookings are next in line. For UK businesses most of this is still arriving, which leaves time to decide where checkout should happen and how you’ll count orders that never reach your site.

Regulators are pulling in different directions. The CMA wants UK users choosing their search service every year, with AI assistants on the list and a duty to credit publishers. The EU’s DMA has already stripped free product listings from EEA results. And the AI Mode experiment, Chartbeat’s 40% fall and Microsoft’s own click data all point the same way for publishers. Owned audiences held up in Chartbeat’s data while search referrals fell, and that part of a strategy doesn’t depend on any platform’s next change.

Key Takeaways

The September spam update applies globally (UK included) and could take up to two weeks. Annotate 24 September in reporting and wait for Google to confirm completion before diagnosing a drop
Search Console’s new multimodal filter shows traffic from Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads. Compare its top landing pages with your web-search top pages to see where product imagery earns visits
Third-party rank trackers are collecting less of Google’s results. Check each provider’s status page before a visibility chart goes into a client report, and use Search Console for anything that must be right
The CMA’s proposed choice screens would cover UK Android phones and Chrome, with a final decision due by 9 October. Plan for AI assistants becoming a default search option for some UK users
Free product listings have disappeared across the EEA under the DMA, and the UK is outside the EEA. UK retailers selling into the EU should segment Merchant Center data by country before reading any fall as a UK problem
Cloudflare’s Disallow AI Training setting keeps Googlebot allowed. It blocks Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended only, and Bing won’t honour the rule until early 2027
Add a GA4 hostname Include filter on every property to keep Singapore bot traffic and other spam out of your reports

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the September spam update affecting UK sites?

Yes. Google says it applies globally and in all languages, and Google gives the rollout up to two weeks from 24 September. Movement on 23 September predates the announcement. Keep daily Search Console exports, and review Google’s spam policies if a section of your site drops.

What would the CMA’s choice screen mean for UK search marketing?

If the CMA confirms the proposal by 9 October, UK Android and Chrome users would pick a default search service at setup and again every year, with qualifying AI assistants on the list. Google would stop being the automatic default for those users. Visibility inside AI assistants would become part of reaching UK audiences, and any provider on the screen would have to credit the publishers whose content it uses.

Have free Google Shopping listings disappeared in the UK?

No reports say so. The removals were reported across the European Economic Area ahead of Google’s 25 September Digital Markets Act compliance deadline, and the DMA doesn’t apply to the UK, which sits outside the EEA. UK retailers selling into EU countries will see the drop in those markets, which is why reporting needs segmenting by country.

Should I switch on Cloudflare’s Disallow AI Training setting?

It carries far less risk than the block Cloudflare first planned, because the search crawlers stay allowed and your search listings are unaffected. The setting stops Google and Apple using your pages for AI training through their Extended tokens. It doesn’t take you out of AI answers, and Bing won’t read the rule until early 2027.

How reliable is third-party rank tracking right now?

Less reliable than usual. Sistrix confirmed slower collection on 16 September, and Nozzle reported retrieving about 80% fewer Google results. Some providers can’t fill in days they missed, so check a tool’s status page for its last complete collection date before using its charts, and rely on Search Console for figures that must be right.

Conclusions

Three dates belong in the calendar over the next fortnight. The spam update should finish by around 8 October if it runs its full two weeks. A decision from the CMA on choice screens is due by 9 October. And Google’s URL-level reporting of AI training use is promised within weeks, which should show which of your pages were made available for training.

Until then the practical work is measurement. Annotate the update start, add the GA4 hostname filter, check the new multimodal report and segment any EU-facing account by country.

Need help adapting your search strategy for the AI era? Contact the Anicca team for expert SEO and PPC guidance.

Table of Contents

Spam Updates and Search Console

AI Search and Publisher Traffic

Regulation and Access

Shopping and AI Mode

Paid Media

Analytics, Local and Industry

Wrap-Up