Google announced the September 2022 core update on Twitter and started the rollout the same day, September 12, 2022, around 11:26 am ET, saying it could take up to two weeks. It used all of them: Google's updates page recorded "The rollout was complete as of September 26, 2022", exactly 14 days. It was the second core update of 2022, arriving about four months after the May 2022 core update and just three days after the original helpful content update finished rolling out on September 9.
By the tracking tools' measure it landed softly. Volatility showed up quickly once the rollout began, but the consensus among data providers was that it was weaker than past Google core updates. One complication for anyone doing post-mortems: the September 2022 product reviews update ran September 20-26, entirely inside this core update's window, and both were recorded complete on the same day.
As a broad core update, it was a general reassessment of content quality: nothing specific to fix and no penalty to lift. If your site moved in the September 12-26 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.