August 2025 spam update: dates, what changed and what to do

What Google changed#

Google announced the August 2025 spam update on the Search Status Dashboard on 26 August 2025, saying it “applies globally and to all languages.” It did not publish a Search Central blog post naming a specific spam practice.

Google’s documentation explains that its automated spam detection runs constantly, and that a spam update is a notable improvement to how those systems work. It names SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system, which Google improves from time to time so it catches new types of spam.

When it rolled out#

The Google Search Status Dashboard logged the release on 26 August 2025 at 09:02 PDT with the note that “the rollout may take a few weeks to complete.” Google’s completion notice says the rollout was complete as of 22 September 2025, a total of 26 days and 15 hours. No other confirmed ranking update overlapped it.

What is known about its impact#

Google did not publish impact figures for this update. Its spam update documentation says only that sites violating its policies may rank lower or drop out of results entirely. Treat any percentage you see attributed to this update as a third-party estimate, and check its method.

What site owners should do#

Google’s guidance for spam updates is that sites which see a change “should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those.” In practice:

• Check the site against each policy on Google’s spam policies page, including cloaking, doorway abuse, expired domain abuse, link spam, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse and thin affiliation.
• Look in the Manual actions report in Search Console. A spam update is automated, but a manual action is reported there and needs its own fix.
• Fix violations rather than masking them. Google says a site may improve once its automated systems learn, over a period of months, that the site complies.
• If rankings came from spammy links, Google says the benefit those links generated is lost for good once its systems remove their effect.

How to check whether it affected you#

In Search Console, set the Performance report to a date range spanning August to October 2025 and compare clicks for the week before 26 August with the week starting 23 September, and check the Manual actions report for any notice. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists every confirmed update with its dates, so you can rule out other rollouts first.

Related updates#

• The December 2024 spam update was the spam update before it.
• The March 2026 spam update was the next one.