Google announced the August 2023 core update on August 22 and marked it complete on the Search Status Dashboard on September 7, 2023, after 16 days and 3 hours. It was the second core update of 2023 and the first in almost five months, following the March 2023 core update that completed on March 28.
Search Engine Land reported that early SEO industry chatter pointed to a fairly impactful update compared with previous core updates. As with every broad core update, it was a general reassessment of content quality rather than a targeted action: Google repeated its standing line that a negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages, and that there are no specific actions to take to recover.
If your site moved in the August 22 to September 7 window, audit the pages that lost visibility against the self-assessment questions in Google's core updates documentation and invest in overall helpfulness; meaningful recovery typically registers at a future core update. Our recovery guide covers the sequence.