Google Algorithm Updates: Latest News and Full History

Google released the August 2026 spam update on August 18, 2026 at 16:27 UTC, its first confirmed ranking update since the June spam update completed on June 26. The Search Status Dashboard entry reads: "Released the August 2026 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take a few days to complete." Google's own announcement calls it "a normal spam update". As of August 19 the dashboard shows no completion time, so the rollout is still live and its length is not yet known.

Google told Search Engine Roundtable that the update targets sites violating some of its search spam policies, and confirmed two things it does not do: it does not target link spam, and it is unrelated to the site reputation abuse policy. Google declined to say what share of queries or searches the update affects. It also said it will run periodic refreshes of the spam update, and repeated its standing guidance that recovery from a spam demotion can take many months. This is the third spam update Google has announced in 2026.

If your rankings moved from August 18 onwards, treat it as a spam-policy question rather than a content-quality one: work through Google's spam policies and look for hacked or scraped content, doorway pages, expired-domain abuse and scaled content abuse before assuming a core-update-style problem. Our full page on this update carries the rollout timeline and will record the completion date when Google marks it done.

Google released the June 2026 spam update on June 24 and marked it complete on June 26, a 2-day, 1-hour rollout that continues the much faster spam deployments Google has shipped since March. Google described it as "a normal spam update" applying globally and to all languages, and confirmed it does not specifically target link spam or the site reputation abuse policy. Sites that were demoted should expect recovery, if earned, to take months rather than days.

The May 2026 core update, which began May 21, completed on June 2 after 11 days and 21 hours. Search Engine Roundtable called it "a big one, causing a lot of search ranking volatility", with tracker spikes around May 23, May 30 and the final 24 hours of the rollout. It was a standard broad core update, the second of 2026, with Google pointing to its usual guidance on core updates rather than any specific target.

The March 2026 core update began on March 27, three days after the March spam update completed, and finished on April 8 (12 days, 4 hours). During the rollout, Google's John Mueller addressed why volatility comes in waves: "We generally don't announce 'stages' of core updates... sometimes they have to work step-by-step, rather than all at one time", adding that there is no single "core update machine" being switched on.

Google's March 2026 spam update completed in 19 hours and 30 minutes, the fastest rollout of any update documented on the Search Status Dashboard since it launched. For comparison, the August 2025 spam update took over 26 days. The speed was widely read as evidence that Google's spam systems can now deploy globally in a single push rather than the multi-week rollouts of 2024 and 2025.

Google completed the February 2026 Discover core update on February 27 after roughly three weeks. It is the first core update scoped to Discover rather than Search: per Google, it was "released... for English language users in the US (will look to expand it to all countries and languages in the future)" and "is designed to improve the quality of Discover overall." As of early July 2026 Google has not announced an expansion beyond US English.

The December 2025 core update rolled out from December 11 to December 29 (18 days, 2 hours), closing a year with three core updates (March, June, December) and one spam update (August). Google flagged at release that the rollout "may take up to 3 weeks", and it nearly did.