Google ties more spam updates to a flood of new content

Google’s Search Relations team spent three days in Barcelona at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe, and the quality and spam talks have now been written up. The account here comes from John Campbell’s Day 3 recap at ROAST, and Search Engine Roundtable pulled out the spam lines. Neither is a Google transcript, so each claim below is attributed to the recap, not to Google’s own pages, unless we say otherwise.

Why are there more spam updates?#

Per the recap, Google’s message was that a high percentage of content is spam, and that is what the spam updates target. There have been more spam updates recently because there is so much more new content. The most recent one on our record is the September 2026 spam update.

The same section says the team is now using AI to help catch more of it. That matches Google’s own detecting spam page, which says its spam-fighting systems use machine learning and large language models to spot patterns that may look legitimate at first glance.

Is the 40 billion figure new?#

Gary Illyes closed the morning with one number: Google filters out 40 billion spam pages a day, per the recap. Search Engine Roundtable notes that this is not new. Google’s page words it as “Our systems find 40 billion spammy pages every day”, which is detection, not removal from the index.

Why do core updates split sites?#

Illyes gave three reasons Google keeps updating how it judges quality, as recapped:

• Content formats have expanded. Search moved from ten blue links to far more media, and each format needs its own way of judging quality.
• Content breadth has grown. There are many more pages and sites. Core updates target content at page level, not at domain level, which is why some pages on a site go up while others go down.
• Content issues are spam. Updates here improve how Google catches cloaking, doorway pages, scraped content, link spam and hacked content.

His warning, in the recap’s words, was that scaled content is now becoming more of a problem than link spam. Google’s scaled content abuse policy covers using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value for users.

How does Google define quality?#

Duy Nguyen, a Search Quality Analyst at Google, pointed the room to the public Search Quality Rater Guidelines. They define quality through effort, originality, talent or skill and accuracy. The point, per the recap, is the quality and not who wrote it: low quality content can be human or AI generated. His example of good was a shoe review with its own metrics, its own photos and detailed research. Our piece on the main content section of the helpful content guidance covers the same pillars.

What should you take from it?#

The recap author’s own advice, not Google’s, is to expect more spam updates and new spam thresholds, and to judge quality by effort, originality, skill and accuracy. For core updates and content strategy alike, that means original data, your own photos and real detail over rewritten commodity content. Google gave no dates for future spam updates in what the recap reports.